Anchor Moments

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...

Episode 0: Why This Show MUST Exist Before the guests. Before the stories. This one is mine. This mini-episode is dropping on my birthday. I mention in this episode that there was a point where I genuinely did not know how many more I would have. I thought it was appropriate to start here. Full episodes drop every Wednesday starting April 29th. Before anyone sits across from me and tells me the re...

This is Part 2 of 2. Start with Part 1 if you haven't yet. When we left off, Tara had just made a decision. She picked up her phone, got on TikTok, and posted a video about her husband cheating on her. Millions of people watched what came next. In this episode: going viral without a plan, building a career from scratch with $500 and an in-home daycare, filing for divorce, dating after divorce, the...

This is Part 1 of 2. Tara's story didn't start last year. It started with a dad who chose alcohol over her, and a pattern she repeated in every relationship that followed - choosing people she could change, staying longer than she should have, and telling herself it wasn't that bad. In this episode, Tara walks through two marriages, infidelity, a partner's addiction she had no idea existed, the mo...

Every one of us have moments we can't stop being shaped by whether we want to be or not. Anchor Moments is a storytelling podcast about those experiences. Real people. Real stories. The moments that made us who we are, and who we're still becoming because of them. I believe it's impossible not to love someone once you know their story. New episodes drop April 25, 2026. Follow now so you don't miss...

This is Part 2 of my conversation with Grace from Grace Filled Mama. If you haven't listened to Part 1 yet, start there - you need that foundation before you come here. When we left off, Grace had just hit the lowest point of her Cinderella story. The dresses were gone. Her mom's words were still hanging in the air. In Part 2, we pick up right there - and we talk about what happened next. A suicid...

Grace from Grace Filled Mama grew up as the seventh child in a family carrying more pain than they knew what to do with. When her mom began losing the ability to walk around the time of Grace's birth, the family's grief landed squarely on the one person least able to carry it - a little girl who spent years believing she was the reason for everything hard in her family's life. In Part 1, Grace tak...

Taryn Thompson learned to make a sandwich when she was three years old, in case her mom passed out and wasn't there to feed her. That's where her story starts. What follows is thirty-something years of figuring out how to love yourself when the people who were supposed to show you how... couldn't. Taryn grew up with a mother deep in addiction and a father who was emotionally absent, and she spent...

Episode 3 - Teresa: I'm a Damn Good Mom The step work she put down a hundred times. The words she finally let herself mean. When you first meet Teresa, you get warmth. You get someone who will talk to absolutely anyone, who FaceTimes her sister every single morning, who moves her body every day because she knows what happens when she doesn't. What you don't see is the years she spent just survivin...

Episode 2 - Rohmel: Money is Just Paper The stories of what happened to us, and who we became because of it. When Rohmel was fourteen, his mother died of cancer three months after her diagnosis. A week after that, the family friends who'd taken them in said it was time to go. He and his father - a once-celebrated chef who had simply shut down - ended up on a street with the highest murder rate in...