A Homage to The Moth Radio Hour
collage by Zoe Gigis
Some people find comfort in television or movies, others in books. While all those forms of media do bring me great joy, podcasts and radio shows have claimed the number one spot in my heart. I have been listening to this one show called The Moth Radio Hour for at least six or seven years now, and I’ve yet to get tired of it.
When I was younger, I had trouble sleeping because I was dealing with a lot of negative thoughts and anxiety from a recent trauma. Going to sleep was hard because I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. One night, after struggling to fall asleep, I asked to borrow the radio that my mother would sometimes turn on during the day.
It was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. I didn’t know much about radio stations at the time--I only knew the hit music stations that we would play in the car. It took some time, but I eventually landed on talk shows and news broadcasts. I liked listening to people talk as I fell asleep because it was nice hearing voices that weren’t the ones inside my head. It was comforting.
Soon, the voice of talk show hosts of NPR and WBUR (Boston Public Radio) filled my bedroom and mind every night. Each night, I turned the radio on like clockwork and tuned into 89.7 or 90.9 FM. I began to learn the schedule and airing times of my favorite shows and began to actually feel excited about going to bed, not dreading it as I had before because I would have to face my thoughts.
One of the reasons why I became so attached to The Moth was because of the people and stories they featured on the show. I felt an immediate connection to them. I remember one in particular, a story titled “Déjà Vu (Again).” It was about this woman who got into a bad accident and suffered amnesia shortly after a breakup. She recalls how she wrote everything down, terrified of forgetting all the things she learned about herself and the people in her life.
She thought that the “bigger that pile [of notes] got, the more of a person [she] became,” but “it still wasn’t [her].” It was just information, filling an empty space.” Then one day, her emotions caught up to her and all the feelings of the breakup and the accident rushed back and she started crying. It was the first time she felt real since hitting her head.
After the breakup, she had wanted a fresh start. She had to literally lose herself in order to get herself back, but at the end of the day, nothing had really changed. After six months, her memories slowly started to come back, but this time they were comforting. She said, “If nothing changed, it meant I knew who I was. That I was a real person.”
I chose to highlight this story in particular because sometimes your memory deceives you. It makes your past out to be better or worse than it actually was, or your brain simply chooses not to remember. When I was going through this rough patch, I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to face what had happened to me. But in the end, I knew I had to.
Like the storyteller, I thought I had lost myself. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and it didn’t matter to me. I hadn’t felt real in months, every day just passed by me all the same. One day, that changed. I needed to cry and grieve and let it all out or else I felt like I was going to suffocate. So I allowed myself to remember, despite how scary it was, and I cried and cried until there was nothing left but me. Once that was over with, it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I hadn’t known what that saying meant until that moment.
I needed to realize that I was not what had happened to me. The memory of my trauma does not have to be a part of me if I don’t want it to be. If one day I suffered an accident or somehow lost my memory, that doesn’t make me any less me than if those memories had never left. On days when I don’t feel like a real person, I remember that I can still be the person that I was before anything ever happened, back when I felt alive. I just choose not to because I know now that there is so much more to life than living in the past.
This story, along with some of my other favorites, were compiled into a book collection titled All These Wonders, True Stories About Facing the Unknown. The words “facing the unknown” were so relevant to what I was going through at that time in my life, that I took it as a sign to not only hear these stories, but learn how to gain the strength from them to move on.
So much of my future and all the tomorrows that will come are unknown to me. I wasn’t sure if I would break down for seemingly no reason, or if a bad memory would revisit me in my dreams. I was unstable, like a ticking time bomb that kept being reset. I dreaded going to sleep, but some days I dreaded waking up more. At that age, I didn’t know how to navigate my complex feelings, I thought it was the end of my world.
As humans, we don’t realize just how much of our lives are reflections of one another. How much we have in common with complete and total strangers. The Moth has shown me the beauty and wonder of human connection and the collective struggle that everyone faces. No matter what you are going through, no matter how big or small, how seemingly insignificant or life-threatening, it all matters. It matters that you don’t feel alone and it matters that you don’t lose hope.