 Diana Barron. It was the summer of 2013. I had recently graduated from college and was still living in my college town with friends from school. I'd also just been through the worst breakup of my life, and I was seeking some external validation. So my friends recommended that I download the dating app, Tinder. And I did. One of the people I started talking to on there was this guy named John. John had just been passing through my town to go to a concert. Fish for anyone who knows the band. So we hadn't actually met in person, but we kept up a correspondence via phone and text all summer. By the end of the summer, John said that he was interested in meeting me in person and invited me to go to a music festival with him. I was pretty skeptical of this idea because it doesn't seem like the smartest thing to go on a four-day long trip with a guy you've never met before. But we had a phone call to discuss it, and John was pretty convincing. He was like, we've been talking all summer. You basically know me already. And this isn't any old Tinder first date. This is going to be a magical mystery, super awesome adventure music festival vacation Tinder first date. I considered it, and I was like, well, that is a lot of adjectives. And I figured this is either going to go really well or really badly. And as long as I'm not dead, I'm going to have a story. So spoiler alert, I got my story. Time rolls around for us to go to the festival. And the plan is John is going to drive down from Burlington, Vermont, where he lives, meet me in Saratoga Springs, where I live, and we'll get to the festival together. So I didn't want to see the squalor that was this college house, so I clean it from top to bottom. He gets there, crashes at my place, and we get on the road in the morning. It was only a one-hour drive to get from my town to the festival grounds. But in this one-hour car ride, John starts telling me all about his conspiracy theories, like how Atlantis is definitely real, and there's pictures on the internet to prove it. And how the main priority of the Obama administration is to cover up all the alien autopsies. I was trying to get my opinion in, but John just talked over me the entire car ride. I could not get a word in edgewise. So that's when I started playing this game, which I then continued on and off for the rest of the weekend, where I wouldn't speak and I would see how long it took for him to notice. He didn't. So we get to the festival, we set up our tent, and start wandering around. One of the first people we encounter is this guy with a cooler full of Jello shots that he's offering out. So I do a couple shots of the guy, and we're chatting. But I notice out of the corner of my eye that John is sulking off to my side. And once Jello shot guy leaves, John reprimands me. How could you take shots from that guy? You don't even know him. He's wasted. You have no idea what was in those. And I'm like, OK, first of all, I tasted them. They were not that alcoholic. Second of all, there's no way dude laced all these Jello shots he's just handing out for free. It's not cost effective. And third of all, he told me he had 40 shots, and I wonder he's wasted. So as if the conspiracy theories were not enough of a red flag, the big red flag here is that I've known this guy for less than 12 hours, and he's already getting super possessive and controlling of me. The most hypocritical part about that was that he seemed so concerned about what I was putting in my body, but he was not very discerning about what he put into his. Because immediately after that interaction, we're wandering around, and John is on a single-minded mission to find drugs. So he's just asking any stranger he sees what they've got, pretty much taking anything they've got. And so he finds five tabs of acid, and just does them immediately. And the rest of the weekend, he's drinking, smoking pot, doing molly, taking more acid, snorting ketamine, which I'd never seen anybody snort ketamine before, but it can act as a dissociative. So what that looked like for John was that he didn't seem aware of his surroundings. He's running into people. He's making all kinds of strange noises that he doesn't seem to realize are coming from him. And I was pretty sober this whole weekend, so it was getting really irritating to be around him. And he was tripping the whole weekend, so he wasn't really sleeping. He was getting increasingly wired. And I, on the other hand, was sleeping pretty well, which was great, because it gave me lots of energy to feel my active contempt for him. This pretty much proceeds for the next couple of days. I'm getting annoyed. He's doing drugs. It's tense, for sure. But I don't have time for all the little anecdotes, so I'm going to fast forward to the last night. We're listening to a band, and I feel some people behind me tap me on the shoulder, and then I hear them talking about me, but I thought maybe I was just being paranoid. So I pulled John aside for some reassurance and tell him what I was thinking. I was like, this is just in my head, right? I don't know them. And he goes, actually, they might know who you are, and it might be my fault. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he goes, well, the other morning, you were asleep in the tent, and I was feeling lonely and bored, so I got on the fish forum, and I posted to see if anybody was at this festival and wanted to meet up. Some guys started making fun of me for being on my phone while I'm at a festival, so I explained that my festival pet, Diana, was asleep. And I'm like, wait a second, you called me your festival pet and posted about me online? I felt so violated. Not only had this guy used my real name and posted about me without my consent on the internet, he'd also referred to me as if he owned me, and worst of all, he did it on a forum for a band that I hate. So luckily it's the last night. I've only got a few more hours to get through with this guy. So the last set of the whole festival is going to be one of my favorite DJs. So we get to this stage, and it's awesome. I have a great time dancing. I have a really fun time, and by the time we leave the stage, the sun is just starting to come up. In a couple, we get back to the tent, sleep for a couple hours, and John wakes me up in the morning and asks if I'll drive back home. I agree, because he hasn't been sleeping, probably not safe to drive. And in this one-hour car ride, he's passed out next to me. I'm reflecting on the weekend, and I'm feeling surprisingly good about it. It went awful, but I had a good time dancing. I got to hear one of my favorite DJs. I got some good rest, and most of all, I was so relieved that this four-day-long first date from hell was finally over. We get back to my place, get out of the car, and it's a really awkward goodbye. There had just been a lot of mutual disdain that I built up by this point. And I get in my house, which I will remind you, I left spotless, and it's trashed. There's stuff everywhere. My housemates are all spread out across the couches. And I'm like, what happened here? And they tell me that they had the most epic weekend. They're like, we had so much fun. We have so much to tell you about. But first, you've got to tell us. How was your weekend? Thanks. Dan Green. My junior year at high school, there was a stretch of us on the wrestling team, from 125 pounds to 160 pounds, who were really good. In fact, folks had even started to come out and see our home duels. Any night we had one of the stands, we were pretty full. This particular night, I had a tough match. I got turned on my back in the second period, and it took me about 30 seconds to fight off a pin before I could work my way out of it. It might not sound like a long time, but when you're trying not to get stuck, it's an eternity. I used a move called a dump truck. The idea is when you get turned on your back, you hit a high bridge, and your pressure into your opponent. When he pressures back, you switch direction, you grab his shoulder, or grab his head, you pull it to the mat, elevate the other arm, you walk around your own head, and you hip-heist. I got lucky. Yeah, that was supposed to be a little demonstration. I don't have a move. I got lucky. I got a good hold as I turned my opponent, and I was able to pick up a pin that night. As I'm jogging off the mat, I look up, and I see two of my teammates standing there giggling like they had just smoked a joint in the locker room. One of these guys was Brian. He was my practice partner. Despite getting a snot beat out of me almost every day of practice, my freshman year, I kept showing up. And Brian kept beating the snot out of me. It wasn't out of spite or anything. It's just a sport. You take your lumps, and you get better, or you have your fill, and you quit. I kept showing up long enough to start winning some matches, and that was because of Brian. We got tight in the way that only two kids that spend most their time together trying to kick each other's ass can be. I didn't start wrestling until high school, and Brian had started a lot younger than I did. And he taught me, just as much as my coach did, how to do this thing I thought I might be good at. And our friendship was forged through mat burn, and bruises, and sprains, and strained muscles, and torn ligaments, and dislocated joints. It was also forged through cutting 10 pounds a week in that god-awful pool room, huffing chlorine fumes at 90% humidity, running stairs, doing push-ups, jumping rope poolside until you were so far past the point of puking up the food you didn't even eat that day. In a hard day of practice, you got schooled. You picked yourself up, and you did it again. On a good day of practice, you did the school one. You smiled. You picked yourself up. You teemade up, and you did it again. And Brian and I went toe-to-toe every day of practice for three years. He'd be a state champ at 135 pounds, and I was a state champ at 145 pounds. So that gives you any idea how hard we went after it every single day. And we're talking thousands of hours on the mat. But it's also a lot of time in a bus, anticipating the trial ahead. It's a lot of time in a gym, waiting for your name to get called over a loudspeaker. It's a lot of time mat-side screaming for each other till we're hoarse. It's a lot of time. It's also a lot of quiet bus rides home. Quiet because you just left everything you had out there. Quiet because maybe you didn't do as well as you'd hoped. Quiet because maybe you didn't know what you were going to walk into when you got home. Maybe it's quiet because you're thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago. Brian and I didn't talk about that stuff a whole lot. We kind of worked it out in practice. I knew that his dad died when he was really little. He knew that my dad started beating on me when I was six. We didn't really know what to do with all that shit that was left over in our heads. And I think our answer was to get pissed off. When you're made to feel absolutely helpless before you can think, especially rationally about anything, there's a certain utility in it. When I was a kid, I often felt like I had two options. Lie down and die or you get pissed off and you fight back, even if it's going to kill you. When you get used to thinking that way, used to being that way in the world, it's awful hard to unlearn it. Now, there's other options. Don't get me wrong. You can accept it, but to this kid, that felt an awful lot like lying down and dying or you can run like hell. Wrestling for us wasn't just an acceptable way to channel this rage that we tucked away when we didn't feel like lying down and dying. It was necessary. We stepped out onto the mat against a willing opponent to see who was more skillful. And in that contest, all that emotional energy that we just didn't know what to do with, it got used up till it built again. And that's not to say we were always angry. I mean, we weren't bullying kids in school or getting in fights off the mat or anything. It's just to say that this gladiatorial activity allowed us a certain kind of release that we just couldn't get anywhere else. Now, unfortunately for us, we couldn't always find a match where we needed one. And in the off season, we both ran like hell. We both had substance use issues. My monkey was obvious. Everybody, including myself, knew that I should quit drinking before I even got out of high school. Brian's monkey was sneaky. I was lucky enough to realize that running like hell can be the same thing as lying down and dying. Brian wasn't. Or if he did realize that it didn't stop him. He was in rehab in Philly a couple summers ago and his sister told me that he was doing well too, but he checked himself out. He scored some morphine that was laced with fentanyl and he got high for the last time. Hit me hard and I had to fight back the way I do these days. I got on my bicycle and I pedaled like a maniac for 40 miles. I'm talking straight out, no pacing myself, just a flat out sprint until I had nothing left. I still remember him as that 17 year old kid sniggering at me as I came off the mat. He held out his hand to shave mine and as I grabbed it, he leaned in real close and he said, do you always free ball it under your singlet? I started to explain I'd forgotten my tidy whiteies and I realized why he was asking me and my hand went to my crotch where I felt a huge hole through which my testicles were hanging. And as I'm sitting there with my balls in my hand I remembered that high bridge I hit in front of the pack stands in my high school gym. And I wondered how many of those kids I had class with. I wondered how many of their parents, how many of my teachers saw me hanging brain. Brian was howling by this point, doubled over, laughing his ass off. I miss you buddy. Susan Terry, I had barely turned five years old when I entered the first grade. That meant for the rest of my whole school career everyone else was a whole lot older and a lot more socially adept. I was pretty awkward. It was fine until about the ninth grade. I had a circle of friends that I really loved. I still do. My mother, however, thought that it would be good for me to be associated with another group of girls who were older and more sophisticated. They were beautiful, they were talented, they were smart for the most part, and they were popular. In that group of girls was one that really stood out for me. Her name was Sylvie Pope. Sylvie was not your traditional beauty and she was not your petite little major red or cheerleader. She was a cheerleader, but she was tall and she was sturdily built. She was fearless, she was funny, and she was wildly popular. She was absolutely everything that I wanted to be except she was a bully and I was her target. Wherever we were and she would be in the same place she would pick up on one of my predictable, childish or awkward behaviors, nudge the other people around her, pointed out, whispered to them. They would all have a good laugh and go on. I really wanted her to like me, so I kept trying to make her like me. I kept getting close to her and doing things that would do it. It didn't matter what I did, it just made it worse. One day my mother had discovered that there was going to be a party for one of these girls who were in the in-crowd. Her name was Billy Ann. It was her birthday and they were gonna have a cookout and a sleepover. There had been about a dozen girls invited. I was not one of the girls. My mother knew Billy Ann's mother because they both taught at the same school. She made a phone call and arranged for me to be invited. I was mortified. She insisted that I go and on the day of the event she drove me there and dropped me off and as I started up the long driveway there I was trying to figure out how I possibly fit in with this group of 10th, 11th, and 12th grade girls. As I got about halfway up the driveway, I looked and it was Sylvie. There were these two big azalea bushes and she was poked out between the two of them. She said, come here. Went in and there was an opening and inside was like a little hobbit house. It was just all open in there. She says, hey, I got this stuff. She said, I have these chocolates and they're from Europe and they're incredible. You want one? Sure. She opened it up, held it out in her hand. I took one of the little rectangles, put it in. It wasn't great. I didn't know what the big deal was. Wasn't great, but it was Sylvie Pope that had given it to me. She said, do you like it? I went, mm, yeah. She said, well here, I've got plenty at home. Take this other one. So I took it. She said, don't tell anybody else. They'll be mad that they didn't get any. So with that, she stepped out from between the azalea bushes and I followed her and that was the last thing she said to me at that event. Later that evening, we're all kind of getting settled, finding the place where we're gonna sleep and as things settled down, the lights were down. I laid down. I heard Sylvie on the other side of the room saying to the girls by her, just be glad you're not sleeping next to Souterri. Well, that's peculiar. About an hour later with a churning stomach ache and cold sweats, I realized I better start making my way toward the bathroom. I got there in time, barely. It seems that everything I'd eaten for the last two days was looking for the nearest exit. After two more trips to the bathroom, it dawned on me that this precious Sylvie Pope European chocolate was the American product X-Lax. And she had given me two of them. They're guaranteed to make you go. The next morning I woke up early, got dressed. I was exhausted and I was humiliated. I went into the kitchen where Billy Ann's mother was and I thanked her for inviting me. I said, it's really nice of you to have that and thank you so much for having me come. I went back, I picked up my stuff, went back down the driveway. I didn't wait for my mother to pick me up. I walked the two miles home. I never told her. Seven years later, I had graduated from college and had come home for a short visit. Mother said, you know, I ran into Mrs. Pope the other day and she told me that Sylvie's home and she's gonna get married in two months. Isn't that nice? I said, yes ma'am, that certainly is nice. And she says, and I invited them for dinner on Friday night. It'll just be us four ladies. Won't that be wonderful? Yeah. And she said, and by the way, would you cook? So I cooked and it was a pretty nice dinner and things went well. The two mothers talked. Sylvie and I answered questions if we were called upon. We tried hard not to make eye contact. It was all right. Dinner finished. I cleared the table. I brought in some coffee and I went back and I got the dessert, gave it to the mothers, gave Sylvie hers, take mine and sat down. There was a lot of ooey and awy about how beautiful the dessert was. It was angel food cake and it had blue bunny ice cream on it. It was surrounded by Louisiana strawberries. It was absolutely beautiful. Over the top of the whole thing was a thick, dark, shiny chocolate. I looked at Sylvie who was now an ashen gray staring at the dessert and it sat there for a bit. And after a while, her mother realized she wasn't eating. She said, oh, for heaven's sake, Sylvie, you're gonna fit into that wedding dress. Just eat the dessert. It's not gonna hurt a thing. It's just a little dessert. Sylvie ate it. Later that night, I started wondering if people realize that when they bully, it can come back around and bite them on their ass. And I wondered if people who have been bullies, when they're lying there in the night, waiting for the retribution that they are sure will come. But doesn't. Because after all, it was only just a little dessert. Georgiana Birmingham. So my son Jamie called me from the driveway. He had busted his toe open, playing basketball with bare feet. And I went to him and like what happens when somebody love gets hurt, I felt it. And I told him, it hurts me when you get hurt. And we patched him up. And a little while later at dinner, I said he was still fretting and whinsing about his toe. And I said, I totally know what that feels like. I remember being a kid and stubbing my toe. And as I said that this memory just came back to me. And so I told my family over dinner. I was four years old and we were in San Diego and there was this really long walk. And my sandals didn't fit right and my toes were bleeding. And I kept asking my mom to carry me. And she did, but it was a really long walk and she couldn't carry me the whole way. So we arrived at this nunnery. And my brother and I laid in the grass and ate dandelion stems. And then we went inside for dinner. And there were these long rows of tables and lots and lots of nuns. And we were really excited for dinner. We were really hungry. And they served us liver. And it does not taste like chicken. And I felt like I could still remember the taste of chalk in my mouth. And even though I don't remember ever sleeping there, there was some feeling that I had that this trip was about finding a place to stay. And I knew in order to get more information, I needed to talk to my mom. And I knew that I needed to tread lightly because my mother has taken the power of positive thinking to a whole new level. So if there's an uncomfortable conversation to be had, she will say things like, I just don't want that kind of negativity in my life and refuse to speak about it. When I was in my mid-20s, I had a plan to move to London. And she called me the night before, which happened to be a week to the day after the September Lemith attacks and asked me not to go. She was scared for me. And I said all the things like, the security's tighter than ever at the airport and we're gonna be fine, mom. But she didn't speak to me for the first eight months that I was there. And it's not that she was angry at me, it's just that she couldn't hold that kind of stress. And around my birthday in May, I got a big envelope with all the greeting cards she might have given me if she had been able to. It was the first and last time I've ever gotten a St. Patrick's Day card. When I was pregnant with my second baby, I asked my mom if she would move to Vermont from Colorado to be with me and she did. My mom was cool like that. She'll do that sort of thing. She stayed for 10 years. She's a fabulous grandmother. But when she arrived, she would say things like, Georgie, I don't know what all this crying is about. You never cried. I'd be like, mom, you're saying when I was an infant, I didn't cry. She'd be like, I have no memory of you crying. Okay. So a few days after this memory comes back to me, I call her and I say, Chaney stubbed his toe. Reminded me of stubbing my toe. And this nunnery and this long walk. Do you remember this? She does. I say, did we stay there? And she says yes. And I say, how long did we stay? And she says about four months. And then she says, Georgiana, your uncle Will, that's her brother, brought you this llama coat from South America. And I used to do your hair and put you in that coat and you look just like a little movie star. And I think she might also have said something about how she still can't believe I didn't end up being a model. And so I say, well, thanks mom. And so we stay there for four months. How did you find out about the nunnery? She says, well, it wasn't a nunnery, Georgiana. There were nuns there. But we found out about it from the homeless shelter. And so I'm like, so we were homeless. And she's like, Georgiana, Uncle Will brought me this mohair coat. And while we were in San Diego, I had to give it away. And I swear to God, Phoebe from Friends wore it on the show. It was my coat on the show. And so I know enough not to push my luck. We have a little bit of a conversation about how it would be really cool if we could find that episode and watch it together. That would be fun. And so I think there are a couple of takeaways from this story. One is the idea that we hold memories in our bodies and they come out for better or for worse when we might least expect them. There's the thought that we hold narratives about ourselves that shape the way that we interact with the world. And the one that I would like to accentuate to highlight is the idea that if you're ever in San Diego, you should definitely check out the thrift shops.