"How are we shaped by things left unsaid?" featuring Emma Young

This episode features Emma Young, one of Campfire’s Fellows. Emma Young provides her answer to the Season 22 question, "How are we shaped by things left unsaid?". A Fellow’s Campfire can best be described as TED without the data, The Moth but interactive, and a sermon but without the religion. You can learn more about Emma Young on the Campfire website, https://cmpfr.com/events/emma-young/.

The Campfire Fellows go through rigorous training and coaching provided by Campfire Faculty so they can share their wisdom through story for you. Our Fellows are the people next to you at stoplights or walking by on the street. These Fellows apply or are nominated by people like you, who know interesting and introspective people with some wisdom to share. The Fellows go through a unique process with our team to discover a wealth of wisdom inside themselves and then are trained on how to share the origin stories of their wisdom. 

This episode was originally performed in February 2019, produced by Andrew Warshauer, and recorded live at The Stage at KDHX.

Transcript

Steven Harowitz:   0:12
Hello, Internet. I'm Steven Harowitz, Executive Director of Campfire, and you are listening to Campfire at Home. It's our way of bringing the live experience to you, whether that be listening and reflecting by yourself or experiencing it with friends. Each Campfire invites listeners into life and how we live it. Before we get too deep into Campfire at Home. I want to share a few opportunities for you to get involved beyond our live show. We offer classes and workshops on public speaking, story construction and group facilitation to answer the big questions in your life or at work. If you or your organization are interested, you can visit cmpfr.com. That's c m p f r dot com. Each Campfire Season poses a life question that's explored by our Campfire Fellows together with our audiences. Let's go to The Stage at KDHX  to listen to Emma's answer to the Season question, how are we shaped by things left unsaid?

Emma Young:   1:07
The summer of 2011 was between my Junior and my Senior years of college, and I decided to stay on campus instead of going home so that I could research turtles, which is a very sexy and relatable thing to do. And I remember feeling this sense of potential as I went into this summer. I was really looking forward to kind of taking some time to myself. I just come off of a series of kind of short-term relationships. Entanglements, what have you. So yeah, like, the summer of me. That sounds good. And not very many people stayed on campus. This is in upstate New York, small college, not a lot of people around. So the first night of the summer, those of us who stayed had a dinner party together in one of the dorms just to kind of see who was there. And that is where I met James for the first time. He was very handsome. He had brown hair, this glorious beard. I love a beard. And, ah, this really quiet voice that was super pleasant to listen to. And I remember being surprised when I saw him because A) he was super handsome. But B) our campus was really small, so not, you know, meeting someone for the first time going into Senior year was sort of unexpected, and he was really pleasingly different from the last guy I had been involved with, Evan. Evan was slender and beautiful, kind of like an elf. But like the hot, Legolas kind, not like the Keebler cookie, live in a tree kind. I cannot emphasize that enough. Uh, James, on the other hand, was was athletic, you know, traditionally masculine, and, you know, I'm an adult now, so I am embarrassed to admit it, but I was 20 at the time, and I was super into it. Uh, you know, he looked like he could build me a house with his bare hands. It's fine. So, you know, I, I was struck by this moment when when I saw him for the first time, I had this just this feeling. Have you ever, raise your hand if you've met someone and you just could've knew right off that they might change your life in some way. Okay. Got some people. All right. So it's something that that we experience time and again in our lives perhaps. Uh, so that's what I'm gonna be talking to you guys about tonight. Somebody who I met that that changed my life and the way I view myself a lot. And in order to do that, I'm also going to be answering our Season question, which is how are we shaped by things left unsaid? When my fellow Fellow Courtney and I first got together to talk about the Season question and unsaid things came up as a commonality between us, my gut reaction was, oh, unsaid things, no, thank you. I'm not a big fan. They're the harbingers of, like, generally negative things, you know, and I do, I do admit that I'm not a big fan. Um, you know, I don't like the uncertainty that lingers in unsaid spaces, but over the course of Campfire and writing this story to share with you all, I've come to realize that it's actually quite a bit more nuanced than that. There is, ah, lot of positivity mixed up in the negativity. So that's kind of what I'm gonna be exploring with you guys tonight. So I'm at this party, dinner party, see James for the first time, and I feel this sense of potential if you will. And at the end of that night, I learned that he was actually gonna be my neighbor that summer. Not just, actually not just the summer, but in the semester to follow as well. And I remember feeling that sense of potential kind of increase, you know, sort of a warm sense of anxiety. So so much for a summer to myself, I guess. A few weeks later, the same kind of group of folks were at a party, and, uh, some asshole dropped a bottle on my foot and it cracked my toenail and there's blood everywhere. It was a whole thing. And uh, and James helped me hobble home, you know, again because he was my neighbor. So we walk home. It's pretty late, like 11, 12 and we get my toe patched up. And then instead of going to bed or whatever, you know going our respective ways, we decided to just kind of sit out on the pavement outside of our houses and just talk for a little while. And I remember so specifically, you know in summer when the sun heats up the pavement to like baking during the day, but that at night the pavement's like pleasantly warm? It's like that's nice, right? Yeah. So we're sitting out on this pavement, you know, hopefully not getting run over by cars and just talking and in that moment, we kissed for the first time, feeling a sense of potential increase, increase. And then almost immediately afterwards, we got into an argument about whether or not we should get involved together. And I'll never forget what he said to me in that first argument that we had. He said, "I'm not a good person. I'm not a good person." My reaction in that moment, at least internally, was, "Uh I'm James. I'm so dark and mysterious," because who the fuck says that stuff like that, right? We're not in a weird movie. It's just our weird lives. No one says stuff like that out loud, right? It's this thing that even if someone might internally think that about themselves, you're not gonna say it, right? It's an unsaid thing. And he chose to vocalize it in that moment, which is sort of strange, right? And it was really this this red flag moment, right? And I chose, being 20 years old and full of the hubris that youth brings, I chose to ignore that red flag and proceed without caution. So with that cliffhanger in place, I want to talk to you guys a little more about red flags. Uh, it's a little embarrassing for me to admit, you know, this moment of throwing caution to the wind and doing something that objectively seemed like a terrible idea. And I'm a little, you know, I'm a little ashamed, I guess of that moment. And I'm gonna talk a lot about subsequent moments to that moment that that are even worse and harder for me to talk about. Yeah, and and that's gonna be challenging for me. So what I would love to hear from you guys, if you're comfortable, is is if you have had a red flag moment in your life, and this can be something as insignificant as you know, ignoring the expiration date on some deli meat. I wouldn't recommend, or something very much more significant, like in a relationship or something else. And maybe the end result for you was indigestion from the deli meat or something much bigger, something catastrophic or even something wonderful, right? So if you would just take the next minute, and I will keep time with my phone that has a time device on it, uh, to just think of a red flag that you have experienced at some point in your life.  

Emma Young:   8:32
Thank you guys for sharing all that that stuff with me. You know it, it means a lot to know that we're all in the same boat together, that we've all experienced these moments of lapses of judgment as it were, big and small. Um, like I said, it's gonna, I'm gonna talk about some stuff that's a little hard for me to dig into, so it really means a lot to kind of know that we're all on the same page together. So after I ignored this red flag moment with James, he and I were on and off all summer, and he'd just gotten out of a serious relationship with his ex-girlfriend Mika. So I found it understandable that he wasn't ready to jump into something new right away. And James didn't tell me about Mika explicitly. But a mutual friend kind of let me know what was going on just to keep me in the loop. And you know, Mika, she went to our school, but she was gone for the summer, so she wasn't around. But she kind of felt like this weird presence,  nonetheless. She sent James a postcard that he put up on his wall and he had it upon his wall forever. And, uh, he found a women's, a woman's sock in his laundry that he thought was mine. But it wasn't. And I know that sounds concerning, but like I said, Mika was somewhere else. She was, like in Texas or something. So she wasn't around. And so it was more like a sign that his last relationship was recent. And I think too I was coming off of that last stage of girlhood in some ways that I was just like, whatever. Sick. Not a big deal. I'm not jealous. I'm like crazy datable. So so, you know, I kind of let those those moments slide and overall it was such a fun summer. I turned 21. Uh, I learned you should never drink wine out of a beer bong. Uh, it's a good lesson. I learned you that that researching turtles is really boring. This is a hill I'm willing to die on. Turtles are boring. I'm a bird girl. Birds are cool. They can mostly fly. Turtles, 0% flight. So I was late to my own 21st birthday party because I was in the woods in the dark, waiting for turtle 8156 to lay her eggs, and I'm still resentful. So, anyway, uh, yeah, and I also made some really good friends. The girl who made me drink wine out of a beer bong recently asked me to officiate her wedding actually, um, so that's really cool. I also went from being super chill whatever to being really in love with James. Um, you know, I thought I'd been in love before, and maybe I had, but this was kind of taking it to another level for me and it came out of nowhere. Like, I felt like I was hit by this this charming, sexy truck. And he had this charismatic quietness about him that, you know, I just found very appealing. I'm a really loud person, so it's very exotic. But even though, you know, my feelings for him were intensifying a lot, you know, James would fade in and out like this badly tuned radio. We would, you know, either spend like almost every moment together. We would hike and do all this cool stuff and get to know each other. And we had so much in common. Or he would just get weirdly angry or jealous at the drop of a hat. You know, I would, I would make a joke like, like joking about joining a band with my male friends, and he would get jealous and and I was so taken by surprise in those moments because my feelings for him were so intense, that couldn't, I was surprised that he didn't see how much I cared about him. You know, that he would feel jealousy in those moments, and it felt like this unspoken misunderstanding or miscommunication between us. But when the semester started, the first semester my Senior year, suddenly we were just together and and it felt so good and natural, like pieces falling into place. You know, he'd finally gotten out of his weird post-relationship funk and was ready to kind of dig into something with me. And then, just as suddenly, we weren't together anymore. And then we were, and then we weren't and so on and so forth so many times that I don't think I could even count for you. And I was so love struck that the uncertainty only made me try harder. I was so sure that we were close to a resolution, and like I said, we'd fade in and out. So he'd either be there with me all the time, talking to me constantly, or it would be like I didn't exist and he would shut me out entirely. And I grew quieter and I laughed less and I saw less of my friends because I was uncertain of the person that I needed to be to be the right person for him. And the uncertainty of what was unspoken between us made me feel so small. And I remember one argument. We had this quiet argument. They were always quiet. I don't remember what I had done in this moment. I think I went to his rugby match or something. It was these normal things that always caused these arguments and and he said that he thought I wanted him to fail in life, I guess, and I was at a total loss for words because I've been trying so hard to show him how much I cared about him. I went to all his rugby matches. I went to all the social things. I made sure he ate when he was busy. I was there for him whenever he needed someone to talk to and for him to witness that, to be there in those moments and to still take away from that that I wanted something bad for him was so incredibly hurtful to me that I didn't know what to say. And I felt worthless. And I felt angry at myself. And you know this, this unsaid, you know, space between us, this this this worthlessness that I felt I didn't know how to put words to it. And I never spoke up. I never said anything. I didn't know what to say. You can't shake someone and say, "Why are you like this?" Or maybe you can. But I didn't. In those moments, I was quiet, and in being quiet, I allowed myself to be shaped by these unsaid inadequacies. But when we were together, we would hike and cook, and he said I had hair like a Viking princess. I used to have longer hair, and he said that he might marry me someday, and it felt like a drug. I was so addicted to those highs that I would wait through the lows certain that things would get better. Sorry, I have a cold. And in one of the lowest lows that we went through, Mika was there, his ex-girlfriend. I heard her laugh behind a locked door in his apartment when I went to go pick up a book, and you might wonder how I knew it was her because we'd never met and we'd never spoken. But something about the intimacy that I heard in that laughter, I was sure that it couldn't be anyone else. And as I stood out in the hall outside that door and I stared at the paneling and heard that laughter, I think it was the loneliest that I've ever felt. But for once, I told him so in the only time I think I ever raised my voice to him. Later that day, standing in his kitchen, I said, in true millennial fashion, "Literally, what the fuck?" I didn't know what else to say. I didn't know what else to say. I was just exhausted, and I knew as we were fighting a small part of me knew his roommates would be able to hear us, and I was embarrassed by that because I'm a private person. But another part of me wanted them to hear, because I didn't understand how someone so popular and charismatic could treat me that way and get away with it. My friends noticed, of course, but I began to lie to them and omit information because I didn't want them to see the ludicrous ups and downs. Have you guys been feeling this back and forth? It's exhausting even to talk about and to remember, and I didn't want my friends to see how powerless I was. I was embarrassed, so I would omit information. And in doing that I made James into this unsaid presence, even in my relationship with my friends. But they, my friends, were so patient and kind and supportive not of my choices or my actions but of me that I truly will never forget it. And it was the one silver lining that I have from this time in my life, and suddenly we graduated from college. It was this big, momentous finish line, but I was just tired, and I don't think I had any long-term plans for my relationship with James, because I learned not to expect that. But one month turned into two, turned into three, and it suddenly seemed like maybe we had reached the stability that I have been craving for so long. And I got a job in Baltimore, which is where I'm from, and James got a job in Connecticut, where he's from, and so we did the long distance thing, which seems like that's what normal people do, right? And so I would go back and forth, and he'd go back and forth, and we meet in the middle sometimes. But the visits started getting fewer and farther between, and I was so unwilling to give up the stability that I had finally won that I asked James to move to Baltimore with me, and it seemed like the next logical step, and I didn't know how else to save this relationship that I had fought so hard for. But James wouldn't or couldn't move to Baltimore. So a few weeks later, I remember I was sitting on the soft bottle green couch in my perpetually dark living room in Baltimore, and I was on the phone with James and we broke up with this exhausting, anticlimactic finality. And for once I knew that it was real because I was actually ready, and I'll never forget that house. It's the quietest place I've ever lived. It had this oatmeal wall-to-wall carpeting that would just suck sound out of the air. And I remember when, when James and I were talking, this conversation was so quiet and so tired that I could almost see our conversation evaporating into thin air. And after we hung up the phone, I wrapped myself in a blanket on the couch and I didn't call anyone. I didn't even cry. I just laid there on that soft couch in the dark, quiet house, and I felt nothing. It had been two years, but it felt so much longer than that. And almost like I was waking up from some weird cult. I realized how unhealthy our relationship was, how co-dependent we were. I mean, even after we broke up this final time, we were still talking to each other, and I realized how bad that was. So I told James that we needed to take some time apart. It was the healthiest choice. I don't know what I thought his reaction would be, but he freaked out in this quiet way of his, always so quite. And he called me a lot of names. Um heartless, robot were some terms that were thrown around. That last conversation went so poorly that it didn't give me the closure that I needed, and I still had all these unanswered questions. You know, when I think of the end of my relationship with James, it's really the great unsaid in some ways because of those questions. I knew I would never get answers to them like, was I as selfish as I felt? Was I as cold-hearted as James said I was? Those questions became this unsaid burden that I carried around with me. And I think if you had asked me at that time in my life how I was shaped by unsaid things, I would have said or I would have told you about darkness and anger and grief if I'd said anything at all. It's not very easy for me to talk about my feelings, um, but I am getting better with practice. I started going to therapy in 2017, and it was very long overdue. And, uh, you know, I just want to take a moment to plug the concept of therapy. I'm a big fan. Uh, yes. Clap for therapy. I, I think that every human being alive should be in therapy pretty much at all times. Uh, being alive is a fucking nightmare interspersed with these moments of joy and absurdity and and a lot of cursing if you're me. But you know, if if you are mentally unhealthy in any way, therapy can be a literal lifesaver, right? And if you're not, if you're mentally very healthy, bully for you. But it's still spring cleaning for your brain. And you don't realize the weird thought patterns that you get into until you actually get to put some unsaid words into the said column with this impartial person to talk to you. So if you're thinking about it, if you're on the fence, I highly recommend you partake. So anyway, in 2017 I went to therapy and ah, I went because I was having stress management problems at school. Spoiler alert. That is still true. But, you know, even though that's why I went, in terms of my relationship to unsaid things or my relationship with James, it was this like Rosetta Stone moment for me. That's the glory of therapy. You can go for one reason to be like, "Well, I'm fucked up in a whole different way." Delightful. So when I walked into my first session, I didn't know what to expect. I saw strategically placed tissue boxes around, and I was like, uh, "Is there gonna be crying?" Not really my jam. I'm not a big fan of that. I don't want to do that. And and I sat down with the therapist, and, um luckily, I liked her right away. Her name was Laura. She wore Adventure Time leggings. Uh, and she said "right on" a lot. So I'd be like, telling her something she be like, "Right on." Yeah, I liked it very much. And so I sat down with her and I said, "Okay, I need help with stress management," and she said, "That's awesome. Well, that's not awesome, but I'm glad you're here. Uh, you know, we'll work on that over the next several sessions. Maybe. Maybe, you know, however long you need, but before we can kind of tackle those issues, we need to approach the problem holistically from the bottom up. So I need to know more about you before I can help you." And I was, like, "That makes sense." So she asked me about my my childhood, my upbringing, um, you know, kind of background stuff, just like in the movies. And "Tell me about your relationship with your mother." Okay. So I did and and we talked a lot about my family, and I wish I had more time to tell you some of the the anecdotes that I relayed to her cause my family's weird but great. Um, and after I told her all this stuff, you know, over the course of several sessions, I don't think this was a one day project, ah, she asked me if I heard had heard of love languages before. And this is where unsaid things really kind of take center stage. Who hear has heard of love languages? Raise your hand. That's a lot of people. Um, that's great. For those of you who haven't heard of it, uh, I hadn't, so I needed Laura to explain it to me. It's the concept that we give and receive love and experience love in five different categories. Does anyone know what any of the categories are? You can shout them out. Gifts, quality time, acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation. That's five. Yay. So well balanced. So she told me about these love languages and, you know, I want to stress this isn't like a perfect way to understand love. No one ascribes to any one of these categories, but it's just a way to take something abstract like love and make it a little more accessible. So she told me about love languages, and she pointed out that every fond memory I had shared with her my upbringing and loving and being loved was an act of service. So love for me was an unsaid thing. And once I could see it in my family, I could see it everywhere in my life. So, you know, for example, I don't say "I love you" very easily. Um, to my family, yes, of course. But well, maybe not, of course,  but I do. But to friends and other people in my life, there's a very high threshold of intimacy before I'm like good to go on that and much more likely to express it in a different way. If I have to verbalize it, I'll say something like "I value you" or "I appreciate you," um, or "You are strong and good." You laugh, but that's real, uh, you know, and it makes people sound like they're like a hearty French peasant or like an antique wooden boat or something. And it manifests in very amusing ways. I have this, this anecdote. I I'm having a heart-to-heart conversation with a friend outside my apartment a few years ago. It was, you know, it's late, was one of those late night car conversations, you know, and, uh after we finish and she was driving away, I felt this rush of affection towards her and I didn't know how to vocalize it. So as she driving away, it was this beautiful spring night. The windows were down in her car. I just went, "I care about you!" as she was driving away. So yeah, and and by and large, you know, my friends are super supportive. They get that love for me is picking them up from the airport or making dinner with them or for them or proof reading an email. You know, these these small things and that when I try to vocalize love, it's very awkward, and it sounds like again they're an antique wooden boat. You're very strong and sound and seaworthy. And so after exploring this concept with with Laura and seeing it all over my life in these various ways, we, eventually she and I got to the topic of James because therapy. Uh, and in terms of my relationship with James, love languages explained so much of kind of what was going on there. You know, I've felt in these moments that James and I miscommunicated or that he didn't understand how much I cared about him. And I think it's because he really needed me to actually say it with my mouth, that he needed spoken love or words of affirmation. And I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I wasn't providing that. I'm, I'm sarcastic and I'm flippant the vast majority of the time. But even when I'm being serious, I don't really do the mushy stuff super well, and I think this created kind of an unsaid inception, if you will, with James, because I didn't understand the words that he needed from me, and he, in turn, would create these sort of spaces between us where he would shut me out or he'd say these these hurtful things like that seemed out of the blue, like that he thought I wanted him to fail. And I remember these moments, like he asked me once if when he came home and had a crappy day if I could say, "That sucks, babe. I'm sorry," instead of trying to fix it, uh, you know, with a 10 point plan and charts and stuff. And I remember when he told me, he asked me that, I was kind of frustrated by that, because I was like, well, that's not gonna help anything if we wallow. Like, isn't it better to figure out what's making you unhappy and make it go away? So in in those times when he did reach out, you know, and kind of asked me for these things, I didn't get it. It went right over my head. I didn't understand the value of listening, and I just couldn't turn off my love by doing very well. And I'm sure that that was very difficult for James to deal with. And he was really the first person who ever challenged my approach to love, which had so long been this unsaid thing in my life, and I just want to emphasize that does not make this relationship healthy at all. At all. But it does make it make a lot more sense. And another benefit of the love language thing is that it helped me see that unsaid things are not this negative thing in my life. Love is unsaid and often has been this wonderful, beautiful, positive experience for me in my life. I'm very lucky for that. And it also made me realize that I wasn't this cold, heartless robot that James said I was, right? Not by a long shot. So, you know, love languages have really been helpful to me. And because of that, I kind of want to pass the buck onto you guys a little bit if I can. So what I would like to do now is to just pass out some little forms. We're probably gonna have to share again, guys. Sorry. We didn't really, glad you're all here, but we were pleasantly surprised. So share with a partner or a loved one. And what the sheet is that we're handing out, it's a list of the five love languages. So it's, it's not, like super intense or anything. There's a couple examples under each of the love languages to kinda I get your creative juices flowing. So what I'd love for you guys to do is take the next minute to just look at these sheets and the examples that are on there and see if love languages, if any pop out to you. If there's a primary love language for you, if that makes sense. So just think about if you had to pick one love language, which one is your one, right? So mine is acts of service, obviously. But if you guys have one, so just take one minute and I'll keep time. You can chat about it with a neighbor if you want.  

Emma Young:   33:20
All right, so I want to take this a step further because love languages are not visible usually, right, so we want to try to visualize them, and the way we're gonna do that is with party hats. We could not think of any other cost effective way to do this. So you're gonna get hats, and, uh, we we were again not expecting this many of you. So we may be a few hats short, so we're maybe you're gonna share or it's your day. All right, so what we're gonna do is give a hat for each love language, so everyone can kind of visually be like, "This is my thing." Um, So what we're gonna do is just go through these. You see that each love language, which has a number next to it. So mine is acts of service. So that's number two for me. So if you're in act of service person, number two. So what we're gonna do is go through them one by one and just have you guys raise your hand if you're a member of that group and we'll try to get you a hat. Does this make sense to everyone? Great.

Emma Young:   34:39
Okay, so this is the end of the exercise. Take a look around the room. See how love is distributed in the room. If you came alone tonight, I want to thank you very much for coming. And I also want you to see that there are other people in the room who have the same view of love, you know, kind of viewpoint that you do. And if you came with other people take a look at them and realize that you may or may not view love similarly to each other. So awesome. I do think that this, even though this was very silly, uh is a really interesting way to kind of articulate how for me love languages became so visible after I knew that they were there. And since learning that, I've tried to really expand my approach to love and realize my shortcomings as, you know, a friend and a partner. So I tried to verbalize a lot more people who I appreciate and when they do things that that I appreciate. So for my friends in my life, they're awesome. And generally speaking, that's pretty easy for me to say that verbally because my friends are fucking crush it. Um but I do still struggle with putting words to darker emotions like sadness and fear. And being vulnerable in that way is very difficult for me. And so I think you know, this Campfire is a great example of me trying to push my own boundaries. And I know that when I tell my therapist she's gonna be so excited. So yeah, excuse me. It also had this really added benefit of allowing me to push gratitude towards my relationship with James for the flawed and unhealthy thing it was and put it in a neat little box and move on for a little while anyway. I mean, that's kind of the nature of unsaid things, right? They are undefined, and they're full of surprises and uncertainties. And that's why I hate them. That's why at the beginning of this talk, I said I don't like unsaid things because of that uncertainty. So I know we've been talking a lot about my relationship with James and this back and forth and constant push and pull and unending nature of it. And there's a little more to the story. It's not quite over yet, even though I assured you that it was. About two and half years ago, I got a friend request on Facebook from Mika. Mmm. Yeah, yes, thank you guys for reacting that way. Yes, I got the friend request, and I looked at it and I kind of like, "Why the hell is she trying to contact me?" You know, we still to this point have never spoken to each other ever. We never. We'd seen each other in life, but we've never met officially. So I was like, "Why?" You know, why would she want to be in touch with me? And I joked to a friend, "She's either gonna stalk me or try to contact me." And I did accept her friend request, though in the end, because either way, I was too curious not to get this insight into this mystery person. And about two and half, two and half days later, and that's very specific, two days later, whatever. Later on in the week, it was two hours and 45 minutes to the day. Anyway, uh, I was sitting in the back seat of my friend Steph's Honda Fit as one's wont to do. And we're we're coming back from Salem, Illinois, which is, uh, this random little town in Illinois, and Steph's dad, his band plays there almost every summer. It's a brass band. It's very awesome. So we go to see them, and we were driving back, and it was pretty late at night. I think it was like 11 or 12. We went bowling after the concert, so and it was late, and the car had this really wonderful sleepy quality to it that cars have in the summertime. You know, or not even in the summer, just at night. We were on the smooth highway. It was late. The car was warm and very quiet. And the hum of the engine just made everything very peaceful. And we had this long day. So we're just in this nice environment and my phone lights up in the dark. When I looked at it, I remember, the light of the screen kind of, you know, hurt my eyes a little bit. And I saw that it was a message from Mika. So indeed, my my predictions had come true. Mika had indeed tried to contact me, and I looked at that message, and I just, my reaction was just,  "What fresh hell is this?" You know, just I didn't know if it was a Pandora's Box that I really wanted to open. But, you know, I think even with all the therapy and the progress that I'd been making, those those unanswered questions, those uncertainties and unspoken things between myself and James still sort of bounced around in my head from time to time. So I was too curious not to see what Mika wanted. So I open the message. She just wanted to talk about James, obviously. And she told me that they were back together and that things were actually getting pretty serious. And I don't think in that moment I was particularly surprised that they'd gotten back together. You know, I think throughout my relationship with James, Mika had been this weird presence that it kind of made sense that once I had cut James out of my life and extracted myself completely from his life that that they might get back together. So okay, took that in stride. She wanted to know why I had cut James out of my life. So I was very honest. You know, I told her how unhealthy our relationship was and that I was better off without him in my life and a better person, and that, you know, I did genuinely hope that the same was true for James. We made conversation for a few minutes on that topic, and I'm sure I was obnoxiously mature. Like, "Oh yes, of course, Mika. I'm over it entirely." And and she said something during that that conversation I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something about dating James in the past, and the math didn't add up. And that's what I call my M. Night Shyamalan moment. The call was coming from inside the house. James had been cheating on me for a long time, maybe even the whole time that we'd been together. And I remembered the postcard on the wall and the sock in the laundry and the laugh behind the locked door and 100 other moments that I didn't even have time to include in this story, and it suddenly seems so obvious. You know, I had thought of this space that James and I experienced in our relationship and these misunderstandings as as an unhealthy relationship, sure, but also due to love languages and a need for my own personal growth. But it hadn't been any of those things. It had just been space that he was saving for Mika, and I'm realizing all this and I'm talking to Mika in this car, and she says, "You probably hate me." But I found it easy to admit that I didn't, you know. I don't pretend to be an overly mature person or super forgiving. But I had done so much personal work to let go of that relationship and move on from it that I didn't have hate for Mika left inside my body. All I really felt was sadness for her, and that sounds so holier than thou as I say it, I realize that. But I saw myself in her shoes. Let me tell you a story about how this could have gone if James hadn't cheated on me or even if he had but he'd moved to Baltimore when I asked, or I hadn't been able to shut him out of my life entirely in that last conversation that we had. I could be in Mika's shoes. We might live, James and I, together in New York. We'd still be together. And you know, I have a lot of college friends that live in New York City, but I doubt I'd see them very often. I wouldn't be pursuing a career in science communication. I wouldn't be on this stage for sure, because James didn't like my loudness or my theatrics. I wouldn't have put myself first and moved to St. Louis for graduate school and I would be a smaller, quieter and a measurably different person. So thank fucking God that isn't what happened. Thank you. Talking to Mika for that first and last time, I wasn't miserable in New York City. I was sitting in the back seat of a friend's car, coming back from a delightfully weird big brass band concert in Fuck all, Illinois. And I was surrounded by people who made me feel strong and good like an antique wooden boat. And I get to stomp around on stages with Campfire and with the Story Collider and I get to shout about how much I love science and I get to research birds in Panama and all over the world. And I get to surround myself with people who make me feel larger than life and who support me and accept me for who I am but also push me to always be better. So would I do it all again if I could? Absolutely fucking not. I would not care to relive one minute of my relationship with James. That guy is a dick. Yeah, but in terms of how I've been shaped by unsaid things, whether it was in my relationship with James or my weird take on love, unsaid things have made me who I am, and that's made me a fuller, more three-dimensional person and a better friend and a better partner. And I'm extremely grateful for that. I do struggle to exercise or practice that gratitude. I didn't know how to end my story tonight because I don't feel like I can wrap up this experience for you all neatly with a bow. You know, you don't stop learning and growing and you don't win or graduate from therapy, which is too fucking bad, right? We don't get enough opportunities to celebrate the works in progress that our life, lives are. So instead of trying to give you some wisdom to take home with you that I don't feel that I truly have, I wanted you guys instead to celebrate with me to take a moment, to enjoy the moments of life that don't get parties. It's not a birthday. It's not a wedding. It's just being alive and trying your best. And you can take that or leave that. So with the party hats and the streamers for those who have them, thank you for being such a good sport. You guys have made this awesome banner of your fucked up shit, which is great. So that's like a party banner. You see the theme? It's a party now, and we also have champagne. Surprise champagne! We also have a nonalcoholic alternative if you don't drink, so get a champagne, and then I'm gonna give a toast. Leave those hats on though. Okay. Does everyone have a thing? Raise your hand very high if you do not have a thing. We all have things. That's great. All right, so a toast. Thank you all for being my own personal armada of little wooden boats. I don't have, like I said, any wisdom or profound thing to share with you to wrap this up. But I do want to wish for all of you that unsaid things can create the space that you need to flourish. Thank you. The end.

Steven Harowitz:   48:09
If you want, you can see the answers to this Season's question as written by audience members from each campfire by visiting our Facebook page at facebook.com/campfirestl. That c a m p f i r e s t l. A big thank you to the Campfire team, our photographers and videographers, and a special thanks to KDHX Community Media for being our partners on this journey. If you want to learn more about Campfire and the work we do, you can visit cmpfr.com. That's c m p f r dot com. And if you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts because it really helps. Until next time.