Content note: this episode includes discussion of suicidal thoughts and a crisis hotline call. Travis White was twenty-three, newly engaged, and by his own description living the dream when his body started sending signals nobody had taught him to read. One ordinary night, studying for a web development class, he…
Months after his third child was born, Travis hit a breaking point. He called 988, and then his brother-in-law called too and told him plainly that he mattered. Travis talks about how much that one phone call changed. Content note: this clip mentions a crisis hotline call.
Angela was on a small boat in the middle of the ocean when the pandemic began. Every day she checked in with her family. Then she learned the virus had already reached them. The full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfranGk5cNw
Content note: the full episode includes discussion of sexual assault and an abusive relationship. This clip does not. Angela Harger Thompson left Panama on March 7, 2020, on a small sailboat headed for the Marquesas. Five people were on board, along with a dog. A week out, news of the…
Angela slowly came to see that her relationship was abusive, and she left. Then he claimed the documentary she filmed at sea was his. She talks about hiring attorneys and fighting for her footage until he finally backed down. That footage became Quarantine at Sea.
Angela talks about the devastation after the assault, the feeling of being completely alone with it, and the slow work of taking back control of her body and her choices. Content note: sexual assault.
Angela realized she'd been living in a place where she was waiting for someone else to say, okay, you're in. Out on the water, that changed. She talks about creating her own opportunities and doing the inviting herself.
Sixteen days with just two people on the boat, and a storm near the equator straight out of Castaway. The boat heeled over to forty-five degrees, and Angela looked out the galley windows and saw nothing but water. She talks about the dream she held onto in that moment.
After the assault, Angela decided to heal right there in Los Angeles. That meant therapy, yoga, and the first anxiety attacks of her life. When a rush of drink tickets hit, she'd step into the back, throw up into a napkin, wash her hands, and walk back out to make…
Angela went straight to the police after the assault and sat for six hours while detectives picked apart her story. One of them looked at the marks on her neck and called them hickeys. She explains why so many women never report, and after hearing this, I get it. Content…
Content note: this conversation includes discussion of sexual assault and an abusive relationship. Angela Harger Thompson moved to Los Angeles at 30 with a Honda Civic full of everything she owned and a dream she'd had since she was four. Two months in, a producer who promised to keep her…
Angela packed her Honda Civic and drove to Los Angeles at thirty with a big dream and no connections. Two months in, a producer who told her he'd keep her safe drugged and assaulted her. She talks about how it started, and how everything she came for went quiet while…
Content note: this episode includes discussion of sexual assault and an abusive relationship. Sometimes the yes that changes everything looks, at the time, like an escape. Angela Harger Thompson has been a storyteller since she was four, waving a feather duster in her sister's home movie. At 30, she packed…
It was Brittany's brother who decided to reconnect with their dad before his wedding, and that quietly pulled her back in too. By then her father was in the late stages of alcoholic cirrhosis, and he would know her one minute and not the next. She ended up seeing him…
There was never a moment where Brittany said she didn't want to talk to her dad again. She just stopped answering his calls, then moved to Virginia for grad school, and the distance made the silence permanent. It lasted almost fifteen years. She says estrangement was never really freedom, because…
Brittany says what she wanted from her dad was simple. She wanted him to sit with her and go back through what happened, and to hear him say he understood how hard it had been for her. Her 21 year old self couldn't understand why he wouldn't. She's not sure…
At 21, Brittany asked her dad to come to her therapist and talk through what the family had lived through. He said no. Looking back, she doesn't think he was able to. What he probably wanted was a pretty normal relationship, holidays and a call once a month and not…
When Brittany stopped answering her dad's calls, she knew she needed to. She also felt guilty all the time. He would remind her he'd paid for her first three years of college, and she started to wonder if his version of the story was the right one and she was…
Brittany says her only regret is that she didn't get a few more good phone calls with her dad. She felt it happening even before he died, telling herself, call him, you're going to regret this. She works at feeling sad about it now, and after fourteen years the guilt…
Near the end of her father's life, Brittany wanted to call him. She would walk around the house holding the phone and not be able to do it. She knew the fear belonged to her childhood and that he couldn't hurt her now. She understood all of it and still…
After her father died, Brittany realized the only conversation left between them was the one happening in her mind. You're still in a relationship with that person, she says, and now you're the one in full control of it. What surprised her was how present he felt afterward, and the…
I asked Brittany what she would say to the version of herself standing by her father's hospital bed. She said you get to tell the story. You get to not know things and still tell it, and you get to hold the good memories from when you were little right…
Brittany Perham wanted to call her father. She was still afraid. The full story: https://youtu.be/6pFGIVmKDEI
Content note: this story includes addiction, estrangement and the death of a parent. Brittany Perham stopped answering her father's calls in college. His drinking had become frightening, and she needed distance. The silence lasted almost fifteen years. In the last year of his life, she found herself back in a…
