Anchor Moments

I’ve been pregnant six times, and I have four living children. This one is about the other two, Spencer and Bailey. The first time, nobody believed something was wrong until I was bleeding through towels in a waiting room full of pregnant women. Almost twenty years later, a doctor on his very first day trusted a feeling over his textbook, and that’s the only reason I’m here. Amber sat across from...

Niky Hamilton used to be the fix-it version of herself - a physiotherapist and business leader who believed that if you pushed hard enough, nothing could really go wrong. Then in February 2014, she and her husband lost their son. She describes what came next as sitting at the bottom of the ocean, wondering if she'd ever find the surface to breathe again. What she found on the other side isn't a bo...

At seven, home sick from school and watching Perry Mason reruns, Jessica told her parents at dinner that she was going to be an attorney. She was not being cute. She spent the next fifteen years measuring every decision against that one, and she has been practicing law ever since. About a year later, her mother was on the phone. Jessica wanted her, and her mother pointed at the next room: sit ther...

Everything went fine. It's what a doctor says when the procedure worked - no complications, nothing they didn't expect. It's meant kindly, and almost every time it's said in a hospital it's the best news in the building. For some people there's a second half. Sabrina Fletcher was almost thirteen weeks pregnant with a baby she and her husband had lit a candle for the night she was conceived. A scan...

Yes, I have a favorite type of road. Doesn't everyone? A few years ago I was at a dinner with my closest friends, talking about something I genuinely love, and one of my best friends threw her head back and made a snoring noise at me. Everybody laughed. I laughed too. And then I stopped talking about anything that mattered to me, for years. This episode is my life in this body - what it actually c...

Mik was seventeen when a doctor finally explained why he could never keep up. A congenital heart defect. He was fit, he was trying, and he got tired faster than everyone around him, and now there was a reason. What he did with that reason is the story. He started asking what health actually is, and then followed the question for twenty years - out of New York City, onto a farm, into the soil, and...

Amy grew up in a house that ran on fear. Hellfire, rapture-any-minute, and a God who was mostly a punishment schedule. Being good meant being invisible. Wanting things was a sin - she circled the Sears catalog in her head, because circling with a pen got you in trouble. So she got good. Good at reading every room, good at being whoever the person in front of her needed her to be. Good enough to bu...

Austin Bridges treats anxiety, OCD, and trauma for a living. He spent the first twenty-seven years of his own life being told by doctors that he had it backwards - that he wasn't sick and anxious, he was anxious and therefore sick. Reacting to formula at three months old. Celiac at twenty-seven. Four more years for the nausea, and then a two-hour appointment with a doctor his mother found, who lis...

Mike Dyson will tell you the year that changed his life was 1993, and that everything before it was him trying to get through on his own. He was bullied for years as a kid, some of it for being adopted, and learned early to smile while holding fear underneath. In the Marine Corps, an officer humiliated him on the parade deck when he was twenty-two. His answer wasn't to fight back - it was to becom...

My dad drove my car out to Utah, dropped me off at college, and was dead by September. I was barely eighteen. This is what happened after, and what a man in authority said to me when I finally worked up the nerve to tell him about it. I have never said all of this out loud. I was raised that these experiences are sacred, which is a word that does a lot of work when what it's actually doing is keep...

Talia Smith was raised by her grandmother, called her every day on the drive home from work, and was holding her hand when she died. She spent ten years as her husband's full-time caregiver after he broke his neck. In April 2021 she got a urinary tract infection, asked good questions, took the antibiotic exactly as prescribed, and the next morning she put her foot on the floor and fell. Five month...

Ellen was nineteen years old and six weeks married when a Marine came to her door to tell her that her husband had been killed in Vietnam. She told him he was a murderer and that he didn't dare come inside. What happened after that is the part nobody prepared her for. Her family was embarrassed by her. Her friends wanted to go get a beer and she wanted to know what happens to us when we die. She t...

Dr. Emily Hill has been asking the same question since her twenties: why am I here? On paper, she already had the answer. A PhD in computer science, a professorship built perfectly around a growing family, work she was genuinely good at and genuinely loved. And still, a quiet pull kept telling her to leave it - with no plan, no safety net, and five kids counting on her. This is the story of what h...

This week it's just me. Last Wednesday of the month means I drop one of my own anchor moments, and this is the one I've hinted at for a long time and never actually told you: where my Live List really came from. It started at the lowest point of my life. I was seeing my therapist multiple times a week, seeing a psychiatrist for med management, and still struggling to get out of bed. I made peace w...

Mike Poliwoda's dad sat him down when he was young and told him to grow up and take responsibility. Mike did. He's been doing it ever since, and for a long time he resented every second of it. If you've ever performed a version of yourself so well that you lost the real one underneath, this one's for you. Find Mike: In February 2025 he won an International Impact Book Award for speculative fiction...

I didn't meet Jennifer through the podcast. I found her the way a lot of you probably will, scrolling on a hard day, underwater in my own life, when her content stopped me cold. It was the mornings. The getting-out-the-door. The meltdowns nobody films. It helped me before she was ever a guest. Jennifer is an autism parent coach raising a neurodivergent daughter, and neurodivergent herself. Somewhe...

Morgan was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at seven years old. Her sister was five. Her brother came a few years later, also with CF. The message she got - from every clinic appointment, every doctor, every parent - was: do your treatments, take your medications, do everything right, and you'll make it to the therapy that saves your life. She believed it completely. And she built an entire identity...

Morgan was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at seven years old. Her sister was five. Her brother came a few years later, also with CF. The message she got - from every clinic appointment, every doctor, every parent - was: do your treatments, take your medications, do everything right, and you'll make it to the therapy that saves your life. She believed it completely. And she built an entire identity...

This week it's just me. Last Wednesday of the month means I drop one of my own anchor moments, and this one is on the lighter side, because anchor moments can be good ones too. I'm telling you about my two first loves. The first was a weird off-brand troll doll named Norfin that I got one Christmas instead of the troll I actually asked for, and then loved so hard he went grey, matted, and bandaged...

Jean doesn't look like her story. She's little, she wears pink, she's got these curls, and then she opens her mouth and you realize this is a woman who has buried almost everyone she loved and come out the other side as someone new. In this episode, Jean takes us from a strict, loving childhood in Staten Island to a college pregnancy that got her kicked out of her family, to the slow and graceful...

In this episode, I talk with Khushnum - a therapist and mentor - about what happens when your worth gets wired to your performance before you're old enough to know it's happening. Khushnum grew up believing she was only as good as what she could produce. She became a high achiever, a fixer, the one who reads the room before she had the words for any of it. And even with all the training, all the m...

Trigger warning: grief and the death of a parent, a serious medical event (stroke), and ongoing healing from trauma. This episode is lighter than Parts 1 and 2, but please take care of yourself. Resources are below. This is Part 3 - the finale. If you haven't listened from the beginning, start with Part 1 first. This story is worth hearing in order. She left. She got out. Her son was in the seat n...

Trigger warning: emotional and financial abuse within a marriage, a false criminal accusation and arrest, suicidal ideation, and grief. This is Part 2 of a three-part series. At the end of Part 1, Maggie was alive. Angry about it. Not yet knowing what was still ahead. Part 2 is the long middle. And if you've ever lived through a long middle - the part where things are hard and slow and there's no...

Trigger warning: childhood physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault, pregnancy loss (including stillbirth), suicide attempt, and domestic violence. Resources are below. This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Maggie has a thousand stories and we're just scratching the surface here. Maggie grew up in a home ruled by fear. Her father was physically and emotionally abusive in ways that shaped ever...

The Quiet Keeper is who I've been. This episode is where she retires. No guest today. Just me answering the two questions that have come up more than anything else since we launched: why I say "who we are still becoming," and how we ended up homeless. Both answers are longer than I expected, messier than I wanted, and still not fully over. But you asked. A gentle heads-up: This episode includes me...