Thirty, Flirty, and Falling: How Making an Audio Drama Saved My Life

December 31, 2019

My 30th year on earth was shaped by two forces. The first: A bad thing I did, a mistake I made that hurt people, myself included, and from which I’m still reeling. The second: A good thing I did, a story I lived and breathed and refashioned into an audio drama.

I have never fucked up as badly nor created anything as beautiful as I did this year.

One threatened to drown me, spiraling in the pain and mess of it all; the other kept lifting my head above the water and making me laugh and giving me something to love, something to fight for.

What is saving your life right now? It’s a question Barbara Brown Taylor asks in her book An Altar in the World. I’ve seen other bloggers answer this question, have answered it myself, but never before have I been so sure about what is killing me and what is saving me.

This year, what saved me was telling my story by telling someone else’s story, someone else who grew up evangelical, someone else who got depressed and drank too much, someone else who got hurt by people who claimed to speak for God and stopped seeing God altogether and felt so very, very alone.

Adventures in Odyssey: Moments Like These (written in 2008)

August 16, 2018

I would only have a few seconds with them, and those seconds had to matter, to mean something – if not to them, to me. After a lifetime of devoted fandom that has only increased as I’ve moved out of the target age range, and after months of anticipation, I looked forward to walking through the autograph line, but with a sort of trepidatious anxiety. How could I convey depth of feeling and gratitude in one handshake and a few words? Soon it would all be over, they would be greeting the next person, and I would have lost my chance to tell them how much they had impacted my life.

It was the 20th anniversary of Adventures in Odyssey that was fast approaching. This now-popular kids’ radio program had announced a “birthday bash” to commemorate this momentous occasion, the highlight of which would be a live show in Colorado Springs featuring a dozen of the actors.

Adventures in OdysseyPhoto by marc thiele on Flickr's creative commons — Adventures in Odyssey Photo by marc thiele on Flickr's creative commons

David Tennant and Saying Goodbye

June 19, 2018

Ten years ago, I thought it would mean everything to see my favorite voice actors on a stage from a distance and in an autograph line for a moment. But that didn’t mean everything. The greatest gift came when they gave their time in hotel lobbies and conference rooms, letting us witness their own reunions with each other, and inviting us into their lives.

And if you know my story with Adventures in Odyssey, you know how the gifts kept piling up: gifts of time, of words, of moments, of remembrance, with these very same voice actors, and with others who work with them, others who love them.

June 17, 2018, wasn’t August 16, 2008, but then again, it couldn’t be.

Photo by Skydive Switzerland — *Photo by* *Skydive Switzerland*

The Sun and the Sky: Finding Magic (part 4)

October 23, 2017

When I first watched my skydiving video, I couldn’t help but cringe a little. Even now, I find myself wishing for the removal of some frames and the addition of others.

The angles aren’t great, I stick my tongue out at one point, and I’m gaping and gesturing like a child. I’m embarrassed that I’m embarrassed, because isn’t it enough that I went skydiving and it was magical?

I want to control the way I look when I’m feeling a lot of emotion, or at least control how I look in the images meant to capture that emotion and carry it out into the world. I want to look open but not too open, happy yet composed, and please no awkward facial expressions or ugly crying or anything else untamed, unkempt, unhinged.

Of Magic and Memory

July 11, 2015

Six months ago, she hugged her family goodbye, and the page turned as they went upstairs and she stayed downstairs.

The night before, the first night, she lay on the blue-and-white rug looking up at the ceiling, knees pulled to her chest. She won’t remember most of her thoughts from those early days, but she’ll remember these:

There are so many memories waiting to happen in this little house, in this big city. I know there will be days when I’m lying on the floor looking at the ceiling and I won’t be able to stop laughing. Other days, that view will be blurry with tears. Now, though, everything’s a blank slate. Anything could happen!

Story as it's meant to be

November 27, 2013

Last night, I went to the cinema with my dad and sister to see the 50th-anniversary episode of the British television show Doctor Who.

I’d only seen about a dozen episodes in total, and was going mostly for my sister, who wore her Doctor Who T-shirt and carried her sonic screwdriver and cheered at all the right times.

Even as the homages and references and plot points jumped over my head and skated every which way around me, I couldn’t help but feel the momentousness of it all.

We all have stories and characters we love. We move in close to them, pressing in as we would around a fire, hands and faces turned toward the warmth.

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