Self-Portrait of My Own Misery

We are all just products of the people who raise us. And they are products of those who raised them. Vanessa Zoltan knows that better than most. She is the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, and for her, nihilism and depression kind of run in the family.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.”
As a child, I was filled with dread. I would lay awake at sleepovers thinking about the fact that everyone I loved would one day die. And now, not surprisingly, I have children who are also like that!
Today’s guest, Vanessa, knows better than anyone what it means to be a sad and anxious kid.
Vanessa Zoltan: I was definitely depressed. I must have been depressed my whole life, but my earliest memories are age 5-ish. And I was anxious and felt like an outsider all of the time, especially at school. I distinctly remember the first time I ever got homework being like, “Oh, this is the beginning of the end.” Like, “I’m going to do this homework assignment, and then I’ll turn it in, and tomorrow I’ll get more homework.” Like, I had a real sense of futility at the age of 5. I was very excited for my birthday one year. I got a beautiful paper and colored pencils. And the first thing I drew was, like, a literal self-portrait of my own misery and then got so mad at myself. I was like, “It’s your birthday, and you got a great present. Like, why can’t you be happy?” Like I wrote, “Vanessa, birthday, age 7,” and drew it and could not draw myself smiling. It felt dishonest to draw myself smiling. And it felt very important to like, have an honest record. [laughs]
This sadness wasn’t just an internal thing that Little Vanessa kept to herself. It was something that the people in her life took note of, and a thing that they worried about.
Vanessa Zoltan: In the second grade there was like, severe concern about my emotional well-being. I think I was mostly experienced as annoying, right? I, like, wasn’t a happy, fun child. And so there was just a lot of people in my life who found me unpleasant and difficult to be around. What I do remember is I was just too sad to go to school one day in the second grade. And I remember overhearing my mom on the phone saying, “I don’t know what to do with her.” It scared me, right? That even my mom didn’t know what to do. That got me to go to school the next day. I was like, “Oh shoot. I’m a real burden on Mom.” Like, “I got to go to school.”
Vanessa wasn’t the only one in her family dealing with feelings of futility … and hopelessness … she was just the youngest person to be dealing with them. Throughout Vanessa’s childhood, religion played a strict and constant and, most importantly, complicated role in her life.
Vanessa Zoltan: I really was raised like, observantly Jewish, being told that the idea of God was ridiculous. My dad used to say, “If there’s a God, he hates us.” We were pretty observant Jews, but also atheist Jews. I went to a conservative synagogue, and we went to Hebrew school three days a week, about nine hours a week. So that was like, you know, on top of regular school. And then we went to Friday night services pretty frequently, and Shabbat dinner at my grandparents’ weekly, and then like, obviously all of the major holidays. I think it was a pretty peculiar Hebrew school insofar as it was obsessed with the Holocaust. On Yom HoShoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust, you’d go to temple and they would put a yellow star on you. We had a lot of survivors come and talk to us a lot. There was a real fear that they were going to die and we needed to hear all their stories. But like once, a survivor was trying to get us to understand what the deportation trains were like. And so he had my whole class, he like, drew with masking tape, a too small area, and had us all get into it and say, “OK, now some of you try to sit down so that you can sleep,” and, like, figure out the logistics of how some of us could take up more space. And my teacher just stood there and watched as this man totally, understandably was like, “I want you to understand, we did this for days. We went to the bathroom and slept and held our children in a space this small.” And I don’t even think I went home and told my parents. Right? Like that felt like a normal thing.
There’s a reason why this classroom visit felt so normal to Vanessa. When Vanessa’s dad said, “God hates us,” he didn’t just mean him, or Vanessa … he meant Jews in general. Because there was proof all around them: All four of Vanessa’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Vanessa Zoltan: My dad’s parents, we called them Papa David and Anyu. They actually got married before the war. So they were still newlyweds in what was then Hungary but is now Romania. And my grandfather, just a year into their marriage, got picked up to start working at the labor camps. And then he got arrested really early and got sent to work camps. So he was in work camps all six years of that time. And then my grandma, who we called Anyu, which just means “mom” in Hungarian. She is a Hungarian Jew. So she got picked up in 1944 and was with one of the last transports. And she was liberated from Auschwitz. She was in the camp when she got liberated. She lost all but one sister in the camp. All of her brothers and her parents died. She, like, watched her father in line go to the gas chamber.
Vanessa’s grandparents were all held prisoner in Auschwitz concentration camp at some point, and toward the end of the war, her Papa David was sent to another labor camp via death march.
Vanessa Zoltan: He survived, and at the displacement camp after the war, he was sort of like, taking his time at the displacement camp, because he was like, “I don’t really have anywhere to go.” And he also assumed that his wife, my grandmother, died, because my grandmother grew up really wealthy and he just, like, vaguely thought she was spoiled and, like, wouldn’t have good survival instincts. And so he was at the displacement camp and ran into someone from his hometown. And the woman asked how my grandma was doing, and my grandfather was like, “She didn’t make it.” And the neighbor was like, “I saw her a couple of days ago. She’s alive.” And my grandpa was like, “What?” And like, he had their wedding picture still in his pocket, and was like, “This Erzsi? This woman survived?” And the woman was like, “Yes, I know who she is. Yes, she’s alive.” And so he got on a train out of the displacement camp, and there was no room on the train. And so he tied himself with his belt to the outside of the train and was on the train for days in order to get to my grandmother.
Vanessa Zoltan: My mom’s family, her parents, we called them Mama and Pepa. And Pepa was one of seven kids, and his six sisters and parents all survived. They escaped to Leon in France and got fake Catholic passports. And Pepa kept joining the resistance and the Jewish underground. And he got arrested once. And then Pepa got arrested the second time and got picked up by the Gestapo and got sent to Auschwitz. My grandmother was from Slovakia, and her town got infiltrated really early. But she escaped to Hungary with a fake passport and worked as a housekeeper. But she got caught really early, in 1941, and so she spent four years in Auschwitz. And she met my grandpa there. So she was the munitions factory manager. I guess if you’re in Auschwitz long enough, you get promoted. And my grandpa worked in the munitions factory. The Nazis were having Jews build parts to kill Jews and the Allied forces. And so whenever Jews could, they would break the parts that they were working on, and my grandpa would often do that and my grandmother would overlook it. And that could obviously have gotten them both killed.
We’ve talked on this show many times before about generational trauma — about how awful things that happened to our parents, or to their parents, and to their parents can show up in future generations … genetically, physically, mentally, and sometimes in ways we don’t even expect. For Vanessa, the trauma of the Holocaust revealed itself in obvious ways, in the grandparents who lived through what for many of us was a history lesson or a reading unit on “The Diary of Anne Frank.” And it showed up in her mom and dad, too, born to parents who’d been stripped of their humanity, and their health, and the life they knew before the war. Each of them was a human museum to a huge, collective suffering — and also to their own.
Vanessa Zoltan: My mom’s mom, I think she showed it the most. She constantly grieved her parents and her brother, all of whom died in the camps. She had a picture of them by her bed, and it was the only pictures by her bed. She never let up on grieving them. My grandfather couldn’t hold on to anything. He just gave everything away, everything. Literally the shirt off his back sometimes. And I don’t know what else that could have been, except survivor’s guilt. Just … he worked hard to make as much money as possible and then couldn’t hold on to it. And I mean, he died in poverty. It was just like, “I don’t deserve any of this.” Somebody interviewed him once; he did really well one year with his company, and someone interviewed him that it must mean a lot to him to know that he had, like, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and had earned all of it himself. And my grandpa said, on the record, “No, it would have been just as nice if I had inherited it.” It was the same man who left his keys in the car and donated all his money away. I mean, the keys in the car was like a, “Fuck you, I dare you,” right? Like, I think he was constantly just confronting the world, like, “What are you going to do? You’re going to steal my car? Fine. I’ve survived Auschwitz.” There wasn’t a real attachment to money, right? Like it comes and it goes. And even if you acquire it all, the Nazis could take it from you tomorrow. So, like, who the fuck cares? And there was just a real fuck you attitude. But also, he didn’t want Judaism to die. And so he wanted to sort of support it. And I don’t think he was hedging. I think he didn’t know how else to understand the world. There was a little religious boy inside of him that he lost and he wanted other people to have it. When my grandmother died, when his wife of 60 years died, he went to temple twice a day every day. And we asked him why. And he was like, “Mama deserves it.” And he would sit there, Nora, twice a day, and he would read the L.A. Times until it was time for the mourners prayer. He’d get up and say the mourners prayer and then sit back down and read the L.A. Times. Like it was just “fuck you” the whole time, except for the two minutes that it meant something to him.
Grief and pain doesn’t always show up as sadness. We know this. Sometimes it shows up by reading a newspaper during a temple service. For Anyu, Vanessa’s paternal grandma, the trauma she endured during the Holocaust and in the years afterward manifested in a very different way. Vanessa Zoltan: And it was like just a ball of anger would arrive. You know, we dreaded her coming. And there was like, a real celebration when she left. The nicer you were to her, the meaner she was to you. And like as a kid, your only tool to, like, get someone to be nice to you is to be even nicer. But I mean, she loved us, right? Hugged us, and she bought me my first bed. She got me out of my crib, and into a bed and was very excited to do that. So yeah, she’s very proud of us. She just also is a deeply scared, unhappy person and like, we weren’t an exception to that, right? She wasn’t crueler to us than she was to everybody else. I brought her her coffee one morning, and she came downstairs and said, “I don’t know why Vanessa hates me so much,” and complained to my father that I was awful to her. And like, the immediate response was to the fact that I had brought her her coffee to the room she was staying in. And I just remember being, like, “What?!” And she just like, she got on a track and was obsessed with it. Like, she wouldn’t let it go. My father was like, “She loves you and treats you so kindly.” And my grandma was like, “No. She’s horrible to me, and I don’t know why she hates me. You must fill her head with horrible things about me.” And it was just a constant rant. Over the years, Vanessa bore witness to the way this trauma weaved and wended its way through her family tree — because of course the horrors of the Holocaust didn’t end after Vanessa’s grandparents were liberated from the camps. Vanessa Zoltan: The story around my dad’s birth is that my grandparents didn’t want to have babies, because they were like, “This world is bad.” And so they went to have an abortion. And the doctor said that he would not kill a Jewish baby. And so my dad was born, and I think that that’s probably a very strange story to be raised with. But my father was the, like, angel child. He was the first baby in my grandfather’s family who was born after the war. Grew up in communist Hungary until he was 8. And then my grandparents and my father escaped communism and moved to Israel. Because he was born in 1948 and went to school for most of his childhood in Israel, his grade was the first grade with a lot of kids in it. So his class had something like 300 kids in it, and so did the grades below him. But the grade above him had about half as many students, and the grade two grades above him essentially had no students. They all just died in the war. So like, there just weren’t any … there weren’t really any Jewish kids. We’ll be right back.
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The Holocaust showed up all throughout Vanessa’s childhood — in the stories that Vanessa’s family shared around the dinner table every night … and in the ways they went about their daily lives.
Vanessa Zoltan: If you are a survivor and have survivor’s guilt, despair and futility is almost like a moral imperative. You have to believe that good people die, and that it’s completely random that you survived and that you can’t interrupt the bad things that might happen to you, so to some extent, it doesn’t matter what you do. My parents definitely wanted me to believe that it was possible that the Nazis were going to march down the street in L.A. in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Like, we had two passports and, like, everything had to be ready for us to go. You know, there were the L.A. riots when I was in the fourth grade. And there was just such a militarization. Like I was, I was terrified of the police. I remember obviously not understanding in the fourth grade what the L.A. riots were actually about but being really scared that this was the Nazis coming.
The Holocaust even showed up in conversations about her dad’s ongoing illness.
Vanessa Zoltan: He was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 7, and he had two brain surgeries and radiation and has been disabled since I was 7. So he’s had, like, no peripheral vision since, you know, around the time I was 12. He was in his mid-40. And the tumor was pushing on his optic nerve. And the brain tumor started causing all sorts of really horrible symptoms about five years ago. And it’s not cancer, right? It’s not hereditary. Like, nobody can explain why this is happening. I was just like, “Nobody can figure this out because it has to be trauma- and stress-based.” And his attitude toward it is very Holocaust-based. You know, my mom will complain that my dad doesn’t want to get better. My dad has always been fatalistic. And so, you know, now that this thing has happened to him, he doesn’t have the spiritual resources to want to get better. He doesn’t have language around hope. He was just, like, baked in a traumatized woman’s womb, and then raised by a traumatized set of parents and then had to escape communism and then go live in an orphanage and he had a very traumatic childhood. And so, of course he has a brain tumor that nobody can account for and all these symptoms that nobody can quite diagnose. And of course, like he, he doesn’t want to get better because why?
For Vanessa, all of her grandparents’ experiences — and all of the trauma and toxic stress they went through and then passed on to her parents — have been like deposits into a cruel kind of bank account: interactions that added up over the years, that gained interest, that compounded without Vanessa even realizing it. And it came to a head when she was in high school.
Vanessa Zoltan: I was 15, and I was in another really bad depression. And I could not go to school. And my mom had let me stay home for a few days, because every day I would promise her that tomorrow I would go. But I just couldn’t. And my drama teacher, Miss Lyons, called me and was like, “You know, we’ve been missing you at school.” And I just started crying. And she said, “Vanessa, are you depressed?” And that word, I was like, “Yes, that is what I am.” So like that was the first time, like, it got named for me. And I was able to go back to school the next day. Like, there was something about it being named that really helped. It just made me feel so seen that Nora, I don’t think I skipped school anymore in high school. Like, that is how it made me feel.
That word makes sense to her! It takes away some of the mystery and allows Vanessa to give her despair and hopelessness some shape. When you can identify the Thing that’s hurting you, you can make a plan to start getting better. The next time you feel this way, you have a word for the Thing and steps you can take to try to make the Thing go away. And when she’s 23 and living with her best friend, Vanessa realizes that the Thing is back. It’s worse than ever. Vanessa Zoltan: I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, and I drove myself home to LA and, you know, my poor mom was like, working full-time. And, I just sort of threw myself on the mercy of my mother and I was like, “I need help.” And she drove me to a million doctors until we found one that I liked. And he looked at me and said, “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you’re boring. But the good news is that’s because you’re textbook,” and got me on medication. He handed me a pre-packaged, labeled pill pack. There was a package, like, a corporation thought I was boring. Right? Like I was like, “Capitalism even knows about me!” It was amazing. I felt so alone in my depression for so long that yeah, the idea that there was like, a labeled packet? I was like, “This is freaking amazing.”
Nora McInerny: Did you tell your family about this? Does your family know, like, “Oh, so now Vanessa’s on a prescription, she’s officially depressed everyone! She’s, she’s one of us.”
Vanessa Zoltan: My immediate family knew because I moved home to be with them because I was not functioning. There was some anxiety about going on meds. I work in sort of creative fields. And so there was obviously this like, completely false concern that a little bit of crazy is like, good for the work. So it did take me a couple of days to start the pill pack. And it was actually my best friend, Kim, who I called and was like, “I don’t know whether or not to go on these meds.” And she was like, “Oh, I know. You have to go on them because I’m tired of you being a bad friend. Like, you get depressed and you disappear. And so it’s actually not an option. You have to do it for me.” And I was just like, “Great! Kim says I have to.” And it was just the kindest, most merciful thing anybody has ever done for me in my life. Vanessa Zoltan: Freud wrote about the idea that melancholic people are better at predicting the future, but they are not healthy. And like, that was Freud’s observation. And I was like, “Yes! Depressed people are more accurate observers of the world.” Best case scenario, everyone you love will die. Everyone you love will suffer. That is best case scenario. And if that isn’t depressing, I don’t know what is. And so of course depressed people see the world more accurately. That being said, it’s not a healthy way to be in the world. Like, that’s not how you make the world better, right? You have to be separated from that idea. It’s a reasonable way to look at and experience the world. And it’s maybe even more reasonable when you are a descendant of Holocaust survivors. Best case scenario, everyone you love will suffer. It’s the way Vanessa has always seen how the adults in her life move through the world … and it’s not healthy. Just like her father telling her that, “God hates us,” or her grandmother saying, “Vanessa hates me,” to Vanessa, the fact that she has severe depression just makes sense.
And so does treating it. So she does, with medication and with therapy. Eventually, those two things weren’t enough anymore. She’d been working in education for 12 years and felt like she wasn’t moving the needle in terms of getting marginalized and underserved students the help they needed. She cared so deeply about the job she was doing, but the work wasn’t working. That helpless, hopeless feeling started creeping up again. That feeling of futility that has become so familiar to her. And she knew something has to give.
Vanessa Zoltan: I was like, “What are things that I will never want to avoid doing?” What is a job, A., that I can hide sometimes on the days that I am depressed and B., that I’ll just enjoy enough that I’ll never want to not do it. I had to be a little bit outside of traditional capitalist structures that demand you to be at a desk 9 to 5 every day, because my depression makes that sometimes impossible.
Vanessa was looking for something new. Something that played to her strengths and didn’t worsen her fatalism. The things she likes, that she’s good at, that she wants to do are reading … writing … and talking with people. So what kind of career would that be? What she landed on was: divinity school.
Divinity school, as an atheist Jew. Vanessa Zoltan: I went to divinity school and found mentors there who were willing to engage with me as an atheist and teach me just like ways that suit me and who I am to, you know, try to make meaning out of nothing and decide that meaning is arbitrarily decided upon. And that doesn’t mean that it’s less fruitful and less sustaining. You really start breaking down what religion is. And religions are texts that you base your life around. They are rituals. There are cultural components to them. Religions are things you gather around that are source texts, right? You will often hear people say, like, “I wanted to live my life in conversation with Christ,” or, “I live my life in conversation with Christ.” And I was like, “Oh, all of those things. It’s the Holocaust, not Judaism.” Right? Like the source text was the traumas of the Holocaust. We weren’t taught Jewish reasons to do or not do things. We were taught Holocaust reasons to do or not do things. Don’t stand in line. Show up to a party full, not hungry. You take care of your dogs, like, yes, it’s halacha that you, like, feed your animals before you feed yourselves. But also, the only thing that tried to kill the SS officers who came to arrest my grandparents was the dog. Right? Like the dog was loyal. Even our like, worshiping of our pets was based in the Holocaust. So, you know, just having that frame of: We think that religion is just this inherited thing that’s whole hog. And so having it broken down in it into its component parts, I was like, “Oh, it was all, it was just all the Holocaust.”
We’ll be right back.
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Vanessa is enrolled in a non-denominational divinity school, and she’s come to realize that Judaism wasn’t the religion she was raised on. The Holocaust was. And she just can’t keep that up as a faith system. As part of divinity school, Vanessa has to go through chaplaincy. And for a while she can just sit and listen to what people are going through. But at some point it doesn’t feel like enough. So she seeks guidance from her mentor, Stephanie.
Vanessa Zoltan: I said to her I wanted to do things that I knew wouldn’t hurt anyone. There’s a great story about Tolstoy who would like, write “War and Peace” or “Anna Karenina” and then be like, “That probably didn’t do any good in the world.” And so he would cobble shoes for his freed serfs, because he was like, “I know that giving people shoes is important.” And I was like, “I want to cobble shoes.” Right? And so I knew that sitting with dying people was important. And like, you don’t even have to talk. Like, good chaplains just sit there and listen. And so I was like, like, that can’t be bad. I’m not hurting anybody if I’m sitting with someone in a prison. But it felt like, yes, presence is a lot, but it didn’t feel like enough. It felt like I needed some sort of spiritual grounding to offer when I sat with people. And I tried, and I tried with Judaism. I started going to temple all the time. And like the Amidah, the like, central Jewish prayer, is about God’s goodness and benevolence. And I was like, “I can’t do it. Don’t believe in this shit at all. Nope. Sure lets the wrong people die.” And at the time, the Chibok girls were in the news a lot, with the Boko Haram. And I was like, “Well, God sure forgot about them!” And so I went to Stephanie one day and I was like, “I need you to teach me how to pray, so I can pray with people when I’m sitting with them. But I can’t do it with the Torah. Can you teach me how to pray with Jane Eyre? It’s my favorite book. And I feel like that can start right?” Like it felt like Couch to 5K of praying. I was like, “Let’s start with a book that’s easy for me to pray with.” And so we started Jane Eyre, and it’s eight years later and I haven’t moved on from Jane Eyre yet. I’m like, still on the couch. I’m like, not ready for the Torah yet.
For a lot of people, religion feels like a strict set of rules and doctrines. For something to be sacred, it has to have been anointed as sacred from some higher authority. What Vanessa’s mentor gives her is a gift: an expansion of what it means to pray, to treat words and ideas as sacred even if they’re … a novel many of us were assigned in 11th grade. But like, how do you do this? How do you treat your favorite novel or song or poem as a sacred text? Vanessa Zoltan: I mean, the most important part is that you have faith in the text. And by faith, I mean you believe that the more time you spend with the text, the more gifts it will give you. And even a book with a lot of bad shit in it, like Jane Eyre. Right? Like, Jane Eyre has a lot of really bad colonial slavery stuff in it. But the more time you spend with it, the more you figure out why that’s bad, and what’s healthy about, you know, Rochester and Jane’s relationship and what’s not. And any minute I spend with that book, I have more and more spiritual resources. We treat a text as sacred in order to treat our neighbor as sacred. And you realize that actually if a text is betraying you and you can still love it, that means you can still love your neighbor even if their tree is growing over your wall or they play their music too late. And then the other thing is that the more time you spend with the text, the ready-ier it is for you when you are in moments of despair. So if you’ve read a book a hundred times and you, you know, or eight times, let’s say, and you’ve underlined all of your favorite quotes, when you get a piece of bad news and you don’t know what to do with your body, you can just open it. And Past You will have taken care of Current You. You know, a sentence that you’ve underlined will speak to you, and you’ll be like, “Oh, my God, it’s like it was meant for me in this moment.” And so I just don’t think that those books have to be the Bible. Like, that’s what religion does. And it just like, doesn’t have to be the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran. It can be Harry Potter, it can be Jane Eyre. It can be, I would argue, your favorite romance novel. Right? Anything that’s complicated, anything that’s generative, anything that gets you better at loving can be sacred. And to me, as long as it gets you to interrupt when your neighbor is being arrested by the SS. Right? If it makes you 1 percent more likely to do that, then it’s doing the thing.
Vanessa prays to Jane Eyre. When there are things going on in her life that feel out of control, that make her feel those familiar feelings of despair and futility, she can open up that book and find a passage that illuminates some truth. A bit of wisdom that can help her in her current situation. One of the quotes she comes back to time and again is this one: Vanessa Zoltan: “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when the body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
When she opens Jane Eyre, she feels seen in a way that she didn’t with the Torah. If any text could be sacred — could offer you truth and guidance — what could that open up for you?
I’ve read some of my favorite sacred texts in past episodes, but I asked some of our TTFA Team members to do the same.
Megan Palmer: The sacred text that I chose is “I Want to Break Free” by Queen. I had a pretty hard time picking a sacred text, but I settled on this one because it’s been there for me throughout my entire life in a few different ways. I first remember being a kid and my mom would put her Queen Greatest Hits cassette tape on in our kitchen radio when she would do chores on Saturday mornings. And then in high school, I would listen to this song in the car when I got my incense, freshly independent. And then in college, I would listen to this song when I would walk between classes or get ready for parties. And then today, it’s my favorite karaoke song. This song reminds me of overcoming hardship, dealing with heartbreak, setting your soul free. And it just makes me feel resilient, and it reminds me of the power of boundless love for yourself and others.
“I want to break free. I want to break free.
I want to break free from your lies.
You’re so self-satisfied.
I don’t need you.
I’ve got to break free.
God knows, god knows, I want to break free. I’ve fallen in love.
I’ve fallen in love for the first time.
And this time, I know it’s for real.
I’ve fallen in love.
God knows, god knows, I’ve fallen in love.”
[AUDIO: “I Want to Break Free” by Queen: Strange but it’s true / I can’t get over the way you love me like you do / But I have to be sure / When I walk out that door / Oh how I want to be free, baby.”]
Jordan Turgeon: My sacred text is a song by the band Turin Brakes. It’s called “Save You.” It’s a song that I often relisten to, revisit on repeat when going through a difficult time. It’s one of those songs that’s perfect for when you’re driving home at night. Turn up the car stereo as much as you can handle and just let the sound surround you. “Tired eyes, maybe you’ve seen too much.
Tired heart, every end has a start.
If you find yourself in trouble, falling off the track.
Would you come back?
Time will save you.
You don’t need to save yourself.
[AUDIO: “Save You,” by Turin Brakes: “And if you need me now / You know I am here / For the deepest scars disappear.”]
Jordan Turgeon: Truly, the one line of this song that could just be a sacred text all on its own is that line: “Time will save you, you don’t need to save yourself.” For some reason, that is such a comforting message to me and just reinforces that everything’s going to be okay. It’s a beautiful song. Listen to it!
Jeyca Maldonado-Medina: My bit of sacred text comes from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book I read and found myself thinking a lot about, because it’s’ so bizarre but it says so much. And so I find that I go back to re-read it, and every time I do, I discover something new about what it’s saying about war and the passing of time and all sorts of things. The quote that I chose is: “But she did look back. And I love her for that. Because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
Everyone should have words that make them feel seen and cared for.
Vanessa Zoltan: So Isaac Bashevis Singer, also a Yiddish writer, he survived the war. He wrote all of his literature in Yiddish. And he was so fluent in English that he would translate his own work from Yiddish to English. He always had every first version of every story he wrote in Yiddish. And he gave his Nobel Prize speech in Yiddish. He said in his Nobel Prize speech that he writes in Yiddish because he was very religious, and he said when the Messiah comes and Jews rise from the dead, he wants all of the ghosts to have literature that was written in their language, and he doesn’t want them to think that we had forgotten about them. I think about my life a lot in those terms. I don’t want any of my theology to not include people who I worry would be forgotten. You know? And I mean, something that I talk about a lot is like, women in basements, right? Just like, the people who it’s easy to have, like, the church or traditional religion not remember. I want to make sure that we still tell stories that are ready to welcome them and make sure that- I don’t like to say any prayer, think any thought that doesn’t have the imagination and the potential to include even the people who I can’t imagine who are in despair. I think that that is what’s so wonderful about praying with secular texts in my work, because not all texts work for every person, right? Like the Torah no longer works for me, because it’s triggering in any number of ways. And I meet a lot of queer kids who grew up Christian and feel as though the, you know, the Bible is sort of tainted for them. And you know, I spend a lot of time with Harry Potter fans in my work. And for some people, Harry Potter still works. But for some, J.K. Rowling, with her transphobia, has ruined it for them. And so I think having an expansive idea of what a sacred text is means that no one gets left behind. Everybody has something that they love, something that they can treat is sacred. I’m Nora McInerny. This has been “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” Our team is Marcel Malekebu, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Jordan Turgeon and Megan Palmer. You can find me or the books- you can find me online; I don’t really think you need to, though, but I’ve written several books. You can find them wherever you buy books. Vanessa has her own podcast, which is really lovely, called “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.” And she has a book about this topic called, “Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice.” “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” is a production of APM Studios at American Public Media. Executive producer and editor Beth Pearlman. Executives in charge Lily Kim, Alex Shaffert, Joanne Griffith. All right, that’s it. I think.