821: Embrace the Suck

Ira Glass

Kendra and her husband and their two kids moved back to Boston, and it wasn't going great for her. She's a teacher but hadn't found a teaching job yet, so she did odd jobs-- a little thing at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. She worked as an usher for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which-- can I say-- these are like the kind of Boston-specific jobs you would give a character who moved to Boston in a bad movie.

Ira Glass

[LAUGHS]

Ira Glass

She was actually pretty depressed, just dragging herself through the motions of living, not looking forward to anything. And it wouldn't go away. She couldn't shake it.

Ira Glass

So she's four months into this new downer of a life, and she gets off work. And it's April, one of the first bright, sunny days after a long, dark winter. And she's excited to take her dog Schuyler to Wollaston Beach near her house on this pretty day. Wollaston's good for a dog, she says, because she's big and kind of a maniac.

Ira Glass

As she struggled to yank her feet up, she realized the mud and sand and water formed a kind of seal around her boot, holding it down, making it too heavy to lift. And so scary, right? She thought to herself, am I about to break a bone, pulling my leg out? Am I trapped? Am I just going to keep sinking?

Ira Glass

Quicksand, she thought. I'm in quicksand-- in Massachusetts. And I thought this was interesting. Apparently, when you find yourself sinking in quicksand, not on a tropical island or a jungle, not when you're poking around some ancient ruins, raiding the lost tombs of dead pharaohs in an old movie, but when it happens just like a 10-minute drive from your own house on a beach in Quincy, Massachusetts, nine minutes from one Dunkin' Donuts and eight minutes from another, the thought that inevitably goes through your head in that situation is, seriously?

Ira Glass

OK, so here she was, first up to our ankles, then her knees, now up to her thighs, and still sinking. Her cell phone was in the car. The beach was deserted, except for her dog, who was romping around happily like a goddamn idiot. No one to save her or help out.

And then this thing happened. Kendra says she's somebody who usually has a hard time expressing it when she's angry. She's somebody who cries rather than yells. But now, this wave of pure rage shot through her-- rage and outrage just erupting.

Ira Glass

And with that burst of Hulk-like fury, she moves into action. She's like, quicksand? No problem. I will embrace the ridiculous awfulness of the situation, and I will make something happen right now. And she starts squirming around this way and that.

Ira Glass

She wiggled her way out onto solid ground. At that point, she says, she's completely covered in sand-- wet sand in her hair, all over her clothes. She collects her dog, climbs in her car, drives home, cleans up. A week or two passes, and then one morning, she wakes up and realizes she feels OK.

Ira Glass

Kendra thinks it has something to do with the anger she tapped into when she was stuck in the sand. As somebody who can't always express her anger, she thinks letting herself get so furious for once, it flipped something in her. That's the moment she was able to embrace just how bad things had gotten and fight her way out.

Today on our program, we have other stories of people put in difficult, sometimes impossible situations, and the only way out is to put their arms around the badness and feel it for what it is and then figure out some moves to wrestle the problem to the ground. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Haley Mary Pass. It is the most magical week in American politics right now. Yes, it is. I'm speaking to you right now during the eight days between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.

The way it works-- the results in Iowa will reset the political scores and possibilities, redeal all the cards. And so this week that we are in right now can be an enchanted eight days where underdogs tell themselves that anything is possible, anything can happen, no matter how unlikely it is to, in fact, happen. And to witness this in person, one of our producers, Zoe Chace, went to New Hampshire this week to hang out with two people, two old friends who've chosen to embrace hope in the face of long and difficult odds.

They know very well that Donald Trump will probably be the Republican nominee for president. And they are not happy about it. These guys are Democrats. But they are embracing the likelihood of Donald Trump's rise with a giant bear hug, and they are trying to do something about it.

And they are making a last stand to try to stop him this very week. And basically, what they're trying to do is they're trying to convince New Hampshire voters to get real about their options in this historic moment and vote not for who they actually want to be president, but vote for the only person these guys believe can stop Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee. And that person is Nikki Haley.

That's right. These two Democrats are stumping day and night to elect a woman who stands for so many things they personally hate. Zoe caught up with them one day before this enchanted week began-- that is a day before the Iowa caucus.

Zoe Chace

These guys aren't even from New Hampshire. They're policy wonks from out of state, outside agitators. One's from DC, and the other's from New York. They both work for do-goodery, international-interest-type places they prefer not to name on the radio. Robert Schwartz has been living in New Hampshire for three months.

He took a leave from his job, left his family, moved up here with his good friend Kenny-- Ken Scheffler, friends from college. I met up with them at a brewery in Keene, New Hampshire. And they're here this particular afternoon because a politician is on stage-- someone running in the Democratic primary, which is happening, even though Joe Biden decided to skip New Hampshire this year.

The guy on stage, Congressman Dean Phillips, is making a random run for the presidency. But Robert and Ken are not paying attention to Dean Phillips. They're here for the 40 or 50 voters in the room. Robert is sort of irrepressible, says all his thoughts as he has them kind of thing, and starts whispering to me as soon as I get there.

Zoe Chace

The way it works in New Hampshire, independent voters can vote in either primary-- Democrat or Republican. And there's a ton of people like that, something like 40% of the electorate. And this year, with Joe Biden skipping New Hampshire, Robert and Ken's mission is more plausible.

All these people who probably would have voted for Biden are free agents. Robert and Ken are here to pick off some of those people-- Democratic-leaning independent voters who might be willing to vote for Nikki Haley as a way to stop Trump.

Zoe Chace

As soon as the event ends, Robert walks up to a random voter he doesn't know anything about, who's someone all bundled up in a blue parka, to see if he can convince her to cast a vote against everything she just heard on stage and throw in with the Republican primary instead. He has a very slow roll-up.

Zoe Chace

Boom. He's found his target-- independent voter, leans to the left. You'd think he'd make his pitch. But he's learned this kind of voter doesn't like it when you open with a hard sell on Nikki Haley, because they don't like Nikki Haley, and he doesn't like Haley either. But he has to sell her on Haley, so it's kind of a weird conversation-- a lot of gymnastics.

Zoe Chace

That's a very long hunter circling around some prey to kill. And you're not sure if he took a shot or not, but he thinks this is the best way to talk about Nikki Haley. He has this cautious approach, partially because of this thing people keep saying around here all the time. New Hampshire voters have to make up their own minds. Don't pressure me.

So it can be hard to tell how he's actually doing with this crowd, even though this woman says the most important thing to her is to stop Trump.

Zoe Chace

And with that, the voter has to go. We move on. This strategy-- getting people to hate-vote for Nikki Haley-- there's a word some people use for this kind of thing, a technical term in politics for sneaking around and doing dirty tricks inside the other party's election. Here's Ken.

This whole quest of Robert and Ken's began one night last summer. They met up in DC and got onto the subject of how they think Trump is an existential threat to democracy, and can we get off the road to autocracy.

And Ken was like, you know, you have done stuff in the past to help other countries in this situation. Maybe we should actually do something.

Zoe Chace

Robert told him that was ridiculous. And here's the sort of person Ken is.

Zoe Chace

So anyway, after they got this idea for defeating Trump, they went out and raised money. And they say they raised $20,000 on their own, and then they got this big chunk of $650,000 from donors who wish to remain anonymous. And that's real money. That could have an impact on a small but mighty election like this one.

With that money, they bought targeted voter lists of undeclared left-leaning voters that they regularly message and send mailers out to-- mailers and messages that Ken has gotten focus-grouped and tested with professionals. They got a lucky break when Nikki Haley started to poll within 10 points of Donald Trump in New Hampshire. And so right at this moment, going into the Iowa caucus, their hope is she'd come in second in Iowa, that would give her the momentum to win New Hampshire outright, beat Trump, which would make her credible in South Carolina, and beyond that. They even hired two people in South Carolina, in case they have a shot there.

Zoe Chace

Robert is really emotionally invested in this idea-- that maybe they, these two college friends, could actually do something to stop Donald Trump. He's intense about his work always, gets overly invested, it seems. At his day job, he was waking up having panic attacks about that work on top of this work. I was like, is this work helping?

Zoe Chace

Robert's not alone, of course. They're not the only anti-Trump group trying to sway undeclared voters. And they're not big players, but they're real players. Still, they can go from sophisticated to bumbling very quickly, like when we found ourselves screeching around Manchester in a car on a way to an MLK Day celebration, late.

As usual, they were glomming on to someone else's event, hoping to meet people who know more people who might carry their message out to other New Hampshirans. They volunteered to bring the coffee and the drinks. Their friend, Moises, was supposed to do it, but he's stuck at UPS printing up flyers with a QR code. The event has already started. Robert's freaking out.

Zoe Chace

Robert thinks of himself as responsible. And when he's not seen that way, it kills him.

Zoe Chace

When they get there, Robert jumps out with three boxes of coffee, two huge bags of creamers. He's running around in the cold. Can't even find the door.

Zoe Chace

Once they're in, it's apologies and taping their QR code flyers onto Dunkin' Donuts boxes. And Robert works the line of people, tabling for various social justice-y causes, mostly white activists. New Hampshire is mostly white. Ken and Robert are white.

And I get to witness just how tired people are of this kind of pitch. This is the third anybody-but-Trump election. You know what I mean? He talks with Deb Opramolla, who's Black.

Zoe Chace

I saw this move a few times from Robert, talking about people's vote like it was a commodity, like it was just a piece of currency that you could spend at this store or that store, and you just needed to squeeze the most value out of it that you could. That's a hard sell in New Hampshire. And he doesn't always seem so tuned in to how people might be thinking about their vote as theirs-- something between a personal statement and a moral obligation.

Zoe Chace

Well, there's one person who will tell you what they're doing-- or what they're not doing.

The Iowa caucuses were that night, Monday. We watched early returns in a bar. Again, Robert was really rooting for Nikki Haley to come in second after Trump, turn the primaries into a two-person race. That's not what happened.

She came in third, just behind DeSantis and well behind Trump. It's a huge setback, and Robert's upset. Things feel like they're starting to slip away, and he spends the rest of the night scrolling and angrily tweeting.

The next day, they have to regroup. The text messages they'd been planning to send to the 80,000 voters they're targeting were built around Nikki Haley doing better in Iowa. Now, they have to reframe things to make Iowa seem less important.

Ken suggests a stock photo of a guy scratching his head with the words, "Does anyone actually know what a caucus is? New Hampshire picks presidents." Robert points out that he's butchering a famous New Hampshire saying, and they're both so stressed out, here's how that conversation goes down.

Zoe Chace

Robert wins out. They go with the famous line and a photo of a cornfield that Robert insisted is provocative. He told Ken--

Zoe Chace

I met my last voters in New Hampshire later that day. Robert brought me to meet this couple in a lovely house on a snowy street in Manchester. He wanted to run the cornfield text messages by George Bruno, former Democratic Party chair.

George had volunteered to be a public champion of Robert's cause, and Robert had managed to convince this august New Hampshiran to publicly change his party registration from Democrat to Undeclared. Only problem was, George still hadn't decided if he'll actually do the thing Robert was asking-- vote for Nikki Haley.

Zoe Chace

I found this to be an ominous tale for Robert's quixotic mission, if George Bruno, this advocate for Robert's cause, couldn't even commit to doing the thing-- crossing parties, voting to save America in the Republican primary. But then, Robert turned to George's wife, Rona, who'd been in the kitchen while we'd been talking-- offering tea and reading The New York Times. She'd changed her party registration to undeclared, too.

Robert asked her what she was thinking. She said she'd never vote for someone who didn't believe in reproductive rights. Robert said, even though Trump killed off Roe versus Wade? She said, well, that's a good point, actually.

Zoe Chace

You know, I think she might really do it. When I left New Hampshire, it was halfway through America's magical eight-day period between Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primaries. Robert seemed to swing from happily cherrypicking polls that told him what he wanted to hear to despair and real fear that they had no chance and Trump couldn't be stopped by anyone.

He told me he woke up crying on Thursday morning. This might all be over in a few days, he said-- the Alamo. Their project was a long shot from the start. They did their best. And now, since Trump's overwhelming win in Iowa, it'd gotten way long shottier. So was it worth it?

Zoe Chace

So that's Roberts anxiety. Here's Ken's.

Zoe Chace

There are 343,192 undeclared voters in New Hampshire. Robert and Ken had just a few more days left to catch some of them, tell them to vote against everything they care about, and hold back, for just a little longer, what appears to be the inevitable course of history.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is a producer on our show. Coming up, a baby gets in trouble with the law. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show-- "Embrace The Suck." Apparently, that phrase started in the military and then moved into more general use, meaning you should just own how bad it is. Put your arms around it. Hold it close to you. That is the only way you're going to get through it.

Today, we have stories of people doing exactly that. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Dream Police. It's hard getting a baby to go to sleep. Everybody knows that. And different parents get through it different ways.

Not long ago, one of our producers, Ike Sriskandarajah and his wife Emma were struggling with this with their son Leroy. At 1 and 1/2 years old, Leroy could say a few words, and he was actually able to hold an umbrella and crudely pull off a few of Gene Kelly's moves from Singing in the Rain while it played. I've seen video of this. He wasn't great, but he was amazing for somebody under 2 feet tall wearing a diaper.

Though I have to say, for all that accomplishment, Leroy was still not on a proper sleep schedule-- until his parents embraced the awfulness of the situation they were in and invented something. Here's Ike.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Leroy is the loudest guy I know. I'm pretty soft-spoken, so he didn't get that from me. One thing he did get-- we both really prefer to be awake. But Leroy takes it a little too far.

When he was about one, I tried to put him down for a nap in his crib. He had bags under his eyes, his eyelids were heavy, and his head was doing that thing where it falls and snaps back. Then I saw him slap himself in the face to stay awake, like a long-haul trucker, fresh out of 5 Hour Energy.

And it's not just that he would fight sleep. When he did go to sleep, sometimes he'd wake up in absolute terror. But he needs to go to sleep. We all must. And we tried everything.

At five months, we tried sleep training. It didn't take. At one year, his soon-to-be daycare provider suggested the cry-it-out method, which, depending on what type of parent you are, is either the most efficient way to sleep train or the most barbaric. When they cry, it's your job not to comfort them. Don't go in, even if it sounds really bad, which it did.

We were a few weeks into this hellish ritual until one summer day. Leroy was looking sleepy, and it was time to attempt the 1:00 PM nap. I carried him to his room, drew the curtains, turned down the lullabies, gave him a fresh diaper, lowered him into his crib-- "Love you, Leroy, see you after your nap"-- and closed the door.

The crying started immediately, and I turned on a timer. For the next 40 minutes, Emma and I were clenched and approaching the upper threshold of our tolerance when she asked, "Can I pick him up?" "Yes, please." She went into his room, and then I heard our doorbell.

I went to answer. And on the other side were two NYPD officers, a man and a woman. The woman asked, "Is that your baby crying?" "Yes." "We're responding to a child endangerment call."

My mind was slowly grasping what was happening. Leroy, the loudest guy I know, had been screaming so much that a neighbor called the cops on us. They thought we were abusing Leroy. "We need to do a child welfare check," they said.

I know these checks can turn into investigations. If you're poor, it can escalate fast. And even if you're not, it can be terrifying. Does Leroy have a scratch or a bruise right now? Are there piles of laundry lying around?

My adrenaline is pumping. And the voice in my head is telling me to say, fuck you, slam the door, and run with Leroy out the back. But don't listen to that voice. We don't have a back door.

I steadied myself. "You really don't need to do that. My wife, she's feeding him right now. He's busy." The male officer countered. "Either we go into his room or you bring him to us. We won't leave until we complete a visual inspection."

"OK." I went to Leroy's room and told Emma, "The cops are here. They need to see Leroy." "But I'm breastfeeding." "I told them that." She brought Leroy to the door.

The woman officer asked, "Are you making all that noise?" Leroy was calm in Emma's arms. Emma said, "Sleep training. It's hard." The woman officer nodded. She gave him a little half baby wave and in a sweet voice said, "OK, you need to go to sleep."

Before they went, I asked, "Hey, just out of curiosity, can you tell me which neighbor called you guys?" "No." "Oh, OK. That makes sense." I started to hate all the neighbors who lived within earshot and didn't make eye contact.

Our sleep-training experiment was over. We were back to laying on the floor next to his crib and trying to tiptoe out of his room when the coast was clear. Often, it was not.

One night, Leroy passed the point of no return, crying whether I was there or not. And I got scared that the neighbor might call the cops again. Then I heard a police siren going past our apartment, and I thought, I can work with this.

"Did you hear that?" Leroy stopped crying and listened. "The policeman. He's driving by to check if you're going to sleep, and you're crying so loud, he can hear you."

Leroy asked, "What will he do?" Now, there are moments in life that feel like they define what kind of parent you are. Would I be the kind of morally bankrupt parent that scares my child to sleep?

I looked sweet Leroy in his big, beautiful, brown eyes and told him, "If the cops come back, they will take us away in different cars." He curled up under his blanket and closed his eyes tight. I left the room, shut the door behind me, held my breath, and waited.

Silence. Incredible. It worked. And? Oh, god, what have I done? I reported the news to Emma. "Oh, no," she said. "He must be so scared."

"Do you think I should go tell him they aren't coming?" "I don't know." "OK. Well, let's never talk about this again." The next night, Leroy asked about the policeman. "Is he coming back?"

I said, "Yes." And Leroy went to sleep. "Emma, I did it again." "Please don't tell me that." "Do you want me to stop?" "I don't know."

I said, "Well, now, you're complicit." This became our new routine. Warm bath, cold milk. Emma would virtuosically perform all the voices in a stack of books. Then I would take Leroy to bed and threaten state violence. And we'd all go to sleep.

After a while, it stopped working. He got wise that the police weren't actually coming to our apartment every night, and he started crying again when I would leave. Now, I think it was Shakespeare who once wrote-- and I'm paraphrasing here-- when you find yourself halfway in a river of blood, either way you go, you've got to go through half a river of blood.

So I forged ahead. One night when Leroy was crying, I closed the door behind me, took a deep breath, and banged on his bedroom door.

[BANGING]

"It's the police. Go to sleep." Just cancel me now. And yeah, it worked. We were living in an imaginary police state for what I'm sure child psychologists would agree was too long. Then one night, Leroy asked me a question I didn't see coming.

"Will the policeman take my nightmares away?" Take his nightmares away? Not him? Somehow, in Leroy's cool, weird mind, he figured out that if the policeman was so scary, he could also scare whatever was haunting his dreams.

I was stunned. "Of course," I said. "He will take your nightmares. He'll put them in the back of his squad car and take them to jail." Leroy had taken his fear and morphed it into something that could protect him.

I tried to teach Leroy how to sleep and pass along a healthy fear of the police. He learned neither. Leroy's three now. Our bedtime routine is less violent. I lay down next to him in his big-kid bed until he's asleep. The plan is to do this until he turns 18.

Ira Glass

Ike Sriskandarajah is a producer on our show, currently on parental leave with a new baby who sleeps and wakes at will on his own schedule.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Notes On Cycling. So we end today's show with one last story about things coming apart and somebody who just accepts it and, in fact, embraces it. This comes from Boen Wang, who made this story as a student for a podcasting class he was taking. He recorded his voice tracks into his iPhone.

I have to say, I really loved Boen's work whenever I have heard it, because I feel like he is inventing a way to make radio stories that just have their own sort of feeling and sound. Anyway, here he is.

Boen Wang

Don't worry. There's no point.

[WINDOW OPENING]

In the summer of 2015, I bought a bike from a guy on Craigslist. The bike was $40, so it was shitty. So it suited me.

I met the guy outside his house. A woman, who was possibly his wife, hung around and made occasional interjections, which he seemed experienced in ignoring. I asked if I could try the bike before I bought it.

"Let's see the money first," he said. His words were kind of slurred, and his balance was kind of wobbly. His possible wife told him to cut me a break, which he ignored.

"I just don't want you getting any ideas," he said. So I gave him my backpack as a sort of security deposit, rode in a circle, got off, gave him the money, got my backpack, and rode away. It was downhill from there.

[WINDOW CLOSING]

Like video games and birding and heroin, people who are into cycling are really into cycling. As for me, I wasn't into anything. I was living in State College, Pennsylvania, and attending Penn State. I lived off campus, so on weekdays, I rode to school, and on weekends, I rode around aimlessly.

I was changing my major from engineering to English. But I still remembered that total mechanical energy is equal to the sum of kinetic and potential energy. Now that I had no use for this information, I realized that it's actually quite useful that you have to take into account how fast you're going as well as how much faster you can go.

[WIND BLOWING]

The church I went to held monthly volunteer projects, usually at places far from campus. I never went before, because I didn't know anyone who would give me a ride. But now that I had a bike, I signed up.

One month, we painted a guy's house. His name was Tony, and he sat at the kitchen table and chain smoked as we painted the walls. During a break, I chatted with him. He told me he had bronchitis, and I avoided pointing out the obvious.

The next month, I cleaned out a dead woman's house. She had died of cancer. One of the volunteers there, Brian, said she lived alone and didn't have many friends. Her kids didn't call, so she would call Brian at midnight, and she wouldn't stop talking till 4:00 in the morning.

He didn't seem too torn up about her death. Brian told me he did IT for Penn State. He went to school here in the '80s and stuck around for a few decades. He was her only friend, if you could call him that.

[RECORD NEEDLE]

[DIRTY BEACHES, "LORD KNOWS BEST"]

There's a video game called Gone Home, where you wander around your family's empty house. It's dark and thundering outside, and you go from room to room, turning on the lights and looking at different objects-- notes on the fridge, your sister's old journal, your mother's weekly salon receipt. The stuff is scattered about seemingly at random, but it's actually arranged in such a way so that a story emerges about the people who live there-- how your parents met and married and had kids and then drifted apart, how your dad may have been molested as a child, how your sister fell in love and ran away.

[MUSIC CUTS]

The women's house had no story, because life is not a story. Life is boxes filled with yellowed magazines, empty printers, broken CRTs, stereo sets, couches, mattresses, chairs, sheets, lamps, a mountain of material with no throughline. We started with the home office. It overlooked a dumpster in the driveway, so we threw stuff out the window.

[WINDOW OPENING]

A girl from Germany helped me defenestrate.

[CRASH]

She was a high schooler who, through some sort of exchange program, interned at the church.

[CRASH]

I asked her what sort of responsibilities a church intern had. And she either didn't understand the question or chose to ignore it, and I didn't press the issue.

[CRASH]

The hard part was the furniture. Brian and I tackled the heavy stuff-- the drawers and dressers and cabinets.

The dumpster was overflowing, so we had to break down the furniture before lifting it up and tipping it in. I felt a childlike satisfaction, turning the detritus of the stranger's life into ever-smaller bits of torn wood and popped nails. Towards the end of the day, Brian and I moved two redwood bookshelves onto the lawn. We'd thrown out the books beforehand. He brought hammers.

Boen Wang

Impact.

[CICADAS]

(SUBJECT) TEXT-TO-SPEECH, BOEN WANG: Repeat steps one through four until complete. Ignore the church intern looking at you.

Boen Wang

At the end of the summer, I lost my best friend. "Lost" isn't the right word to use, as it implies passivity on my part. "Broke up" is closer, except that seems to only apply to romantic relationships. "Pushed away my best friend," "rejected her"-- something like that.

I spent the summer biking to her apartment downtown. I told her about the chain smoker and the dead woman and the weird scent of loneliness in their houses. We cooked dinner, played board games, watched movies. We did the things we always did, except now I didn't want to do them.

I told her that I didn't like spending time with her, that I didn't like her, that I didn't want to be her friend, that it wasn't her fault but mine, that I didn't understand it either, that I continued doing the things I did because I didn't know what else to do, and that, therefore, I should stop, and therefore we should stop being friends. It struck me even then as a pretty shitty explanation.

Most of this came out in a conversation we had walking back to the house I was living at. My bike, going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, as I felt it twist in my chest, like I was hiding a terrible secret, except when I revealed it, my heart twisted tighter. A few days later, she sent me a 988-word Facebook message, an excerpt of which read--

Boen Wang

I sent her a two-word response. "OK. Sure." Before the school year started, I saw her one more time. She told me that I didn't mean what I was doing, that self-loathing was warping my thinking, that pushing her away seemed like the right thing to do now but wouldn't solve anything.

In retrospect, it was my last chance.

[STOPWATCH STARTING]

She folded a piece of paper into a five-pointed star. She'd been in a church retreat the previous weekend and told me an illustration she heard about queer youths who come out in the church.

When they start out, they have their family, friends, classmates, acquaintances, and the church. She pointed to a star's point for each category. When they come out in a conservative Christian setting, they usually lose their family first, she said, ripping off a piece of the star.

She went through every category, tearing the star apart piece by piece, until all that was left was a jagged pentagon.

[STOPWATCH STOPPING]

I don't remember if I said anything. I left and didn't see her for a year.

[RECORD NEEDLE]

Let me tell you the point.

[FRANCOISE HARDY, "VOILA"]

These days, the brakes on my bike don't work, so I scrape my foot against the ground to stop. When I lie in bed, I think of near misses I've had, cruising down a long hill and almost hurtling into traffic, pressing back with both feet in a desperate attempt to stop. This keeps me up at night, among other things.

The sole of my shoe is worn down, the rubber layers scraped away, and there's a smooth, gray surface beneath the hard, black sole. One of these days, I'll get the brakes fixed. But for now, I use my foot. Eventually, I stop.

Ira Glass

Boen Wang-- he's a writer and audio producer in Pittsburgh. The other voice you heard during the story was Grace Gilbert. To hear more of Boen's work, visit his website, boen.cool. That's B-O-E-N, dot cool.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and Ike Sriskandarajah. Laura Starecheski was the editor. People who put together today's show include Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Kyla Jones, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. This is our last show with our fellow, James Bennett the Second.

He is off to a job as one of the hosts of a podcast and radio show at GBH Boston called The Culture Show. We all wish him the best. Special thanks today to Isaac Arnsdorf, James Pindell, Michael Graham, Katherine Dunn, and David Barbeau.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He's the king of boggle. There is none higher.

But he hates that little hourglass thingy. When the time starts running out, he always says--

Ira Glass

Did I mention how many points he got for "quagmire"? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.