How Do You Grieve Someone Who Isn’t Dead with the Antlers

Today, Nora interviews Peter Silberman of the Antlers, a band whose album Hospice changed her life twice: first in 2010, after a horrible breakup, and then in 2011, when her husband was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Over a decade later, thanks to a little bit of fate and Peter’s cousin April, Nora and Peter talk about the album, what it means, grief, anger, and how art connects us all.

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

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Hi.

Hi there.

Hi. Hi.

Hey, Nora.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you. The thing about art is that it is going to mean something different to everyone.

Maybe you have read a book or a poem or watched a movie or listened to an album and loved it so much or hated it so much that you wanted to talk about it with somebody, only to find out that they feel the exact opposite of the way that you do.

Maybe you’ve revisited a song or an album or a poem or a TV show years later thinking one very specific thing about it, and then found out that your mind has changed, your perspective has changed, that this thing that meant something to you at one

point in time, turns out it actually means something else. Every year if you go on Instagram, you will see pictures of people doing patriotic things, dressed in patriotic outfits, posting just patriotic images set to the song Born in the USA by Bruce

Springsteen. They think it’s a patriotic song. They hear the words, born in the USA and they think, I was born in the USA. I think that’s a cool thing.

This song must be about how cool it is to have been born in the USA. It is a song about being proud of being born in the USA if you’re one of those people. I’m not judging you in this moment.

I have in the past. But some of those lyrics are hard to hear, but if you look them up, you’ll see it is about the reality of Vietnam veterans returning to America after that war. It is about the lived realities of being a working class American.

It is a song about class consciousness. It is not a patriotic song, baby.

I’m not judging you because this episode of this podcast is me realizing that I have my own version of posting myself wearing an American flag bikini set to born in the USA. Now picture this, it’s 2010. 27, unmarried in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I am sobbing to the album Hospice by the Antlers with some guy in the middle of the night. I’m very drunk. We’re in the courtyard of my apartment building.

I’ve been through a sad breakup and I am, you know, dealing with that and also just dealing with the fact that the reality is that I’m a 27 year old unmarried Midwestern woman and I will die alone.

I know that you can’t hear the eye roll, but the eye roll is there. A year later, it’s 2011, that’s how time works, and I am watching the man that I met, fell in love with, love more than anything, find out that he has stage four brain cancer.

And all of a sudden, this album that I listened to a year before, completely oblivious to my future is my life. It’s coming true. And now, over a decade later, this album means something completely different.

A few months ago, I made an episode with Will Anderson about music and grief, which we will link in the episode description. We talked about iconic grief albums because he wrote an iconic grief album about the death of his wife, Courtney.

Now, of course, I talked about and then posted on Instagram about Hospice, which is the first album by the Antlers, that album that I was sobbing to in 2010.

And I was not for one second talking about this or posting about it, thinking that I would wake up and see a comment from the Antlers. And then and then email Peter Silberman of the Antlers, who said, hey, why don’t we just talk on the podcast?

That is not something that I anticipated ever happening in my life, nor did I think that I would find out in the course of this conversation that this album that I listened to with the most literal ear for years.

This is a song that I revisit every year around Aaron’s death anniversary that I lay on this floor to and cry to once a year. A little treat for myself is not actually about a hospice worker falling in love with a cancer patient who dies.

I would not have believed you in 2010, especially because I was reading interviews around that time and reviews at that time. They all made it seem like it was a literal album about death and grief.

But what I’ve learned about grief and what I have espoused about grief in the years since 2010, 2011, is that grief needs a new tagline and it’s this. Grief more than just death.

Because we feel grief for all kinds of situations and experiences and people and relationships and they don’t have to happen in a hospice environment in order to count. We grieve imperfect people and imperfect relationships.

We grieve people who hurt us, people who are bad to us, total bastards sometimes. We’ve made a lot of episodes about that. The situation does not have to be the same for the feeling to fit.

So we’re going to get into all that in this conversation with Peter Silberman from the Antlers. But first and foremost, we have a specific person to thank for making this episode happen.

I want to shout out my cousin April, who pointed out that you and I think it was Will Anderson were talking about grief albums and you mentioned Hospice and she texted me and…

Oh!

Yeah, so I want to give April a shout out.

Shout out to cousin April. Peter, I’m a little bit starstruck, so thank you for meeting with me. And truly, your work is so beautiful.

I mean, Beyond Hospice, even though that’s what… I think that’s what brought everybody to you, right? That was a…

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

At least in those first days.

Yeah, that was definitely the breakout.

Yeah. So when I heard that for the first time, I was, you know, I didn’t think I was young, but I was young. I was like 27 and I was like, TikTok, baby, my life is over.

I grew up in the Midwest. So I was a 27 year old unmarried woman, which is, it was pretty much the worst thing my father could imagine for me. And I had not been through anything like actually hard in life yet, but I still was just like so sad.

I can recognize that now is like, that was depression, but it was a simpler time in 2010. People weren’t just saying the word, like to be depressed, you truly had to be putting your head in an oven like Sylvia Plath.

Like you just couldn’t be, you couldn’t be a woman with a job, you know, and middle class parents who had never wanted for anything in her life.

And I have this really clear memory, even though I was drinking a lot at that age, of sitting in the courtyard of my apartment and I just moved to Minneapolis from Brooklyn temporarily. I’d gone through a breakup and we lived on the same block.

And I was like, the only way to get away from you is to literally leave this city and move back in with my parents who then wanted to charge me rent. So I had to get an apartment.

I’m in this courtyard of an apartment building that nobody used in like downtown Minneapolis. It’s like the middle of the night. And I’m with this guy.

We’re like wasted and he puts like one of his like Apple like headphones in my ear. Very intimate. That’s a pretty intimate thing to do with somebody.

And we listened to your album and just like sat there quietly, like sobbing. And that’s where I was mentally.

And I had no idea that, you know, a year from then, I would be in a hospital room with a man that I was like so in love with while he was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. And that I would sort of like live a version of that album.

And I don’t know. I’m just wondering how many people have told you a story exactly like that.

You know, the interesting thing about people’s reaction to this record and the stories they’ve told me is that they’re all different. And, you know, no two are the same. And none of them have been the same as my experience either.

Like they’ve been, some have been kind of close, some have been wildly different.

But I think for most people that the record resonated with, it was because they went through something very painful, very difficult, all varying degrees of traumatic as well.

And I think maybe that what is in common among a lot of people is going through something like this and feeling alone in it or feeling isolated and maybe what the record speaks to.

And I think where it came from for me was going through an experience and feeling like, I can’t be the only person who’s gone through this or who’s feeling this way.

And it turns out that a lot of people have, and the details are different, the tone and the quality of the experiences are different, but there’s something in common.

Yeah, there’s this universal aspect to all suffering, I think, where there’s parts of it that have your specific fingerprint on them, and they’re yours alone.

And then there’s, I don’t know, something that is just so common to it, too, where you can meet a person who hasn’t had maybe your specific experience.

Maybe it wasn’t their husband, maybe it was their brother, maybe it was their cousin, maybe it was their best friend, whatever it is.

And like, you can recognize in them some kind of knowing that you only get from like having been there in a room like that.

What is the story behind the album for you?

Well, you know, it’s interesting when I first, when we first released the album, when I was first making it, and when I first was being asked questions about it, doing interviews on it and talking about it, I had made this choice that I didn’t want

to go into the details, the real-life details about it, partly because the album felt so, it felt really vulnerable and it felt like there were a lot of explicit details in it. And I felt like the only fair way for me to be expressing those details

would be to conceal where it actually came from. That was part of the reason I didn’t, I didn’t really talk about that aspect of it.

Another reason was that I was seeing how people were relating it to their own experiences, and those are experiences that were really different than mine.

And so I worried at the time that if I talked about what mine was, that it would diminish it for them because they’d say, oh, I thought he went through exactly the same thing that I did, and it was actually different.

But it’s been long enough now, it’s been almost 20 years since, the events that inspired this record, that I think my perspective on it has changed a lot.

You know, the short version of it is that the album was inspired by a relationship that I was in, in my late teens, going into my early 20s.

And this was a relationship that, you know, I think of it as being what kind of carried me out of, kind of out of childhood and into adulthood. And yeah, so we, me and this person, we met when we were both in college.

And it was one of those like young loves that becomes very intense very quickly. And, you know, just basically just out of high school, maybe like a year into college.

You don’t quite realize how the choices you make can really set you on a path and destabilize your whole life. And that was what happened for us.

You know, we were both going to different colleges on the East Coast, and we decided to leave our schools and move to the city together.

And it knocked both of our lives totally off course, and put us into this kind of pressure cooker of two 19-year-old kids who are suddenly on their own, really on their own, and not in the bubble of a small liberal arts college, but now in the big

city down in New York City, and living on their own in a small apartment. And this album is about the dysfunction of that relationship and the dynamic between us.

She was a person who is a person who went through a lot of really traumatic experiences in her childhood, including childhood illness and cancer. And that was a thread throughout our relationship.

I learned a lot about her experience without ever being able to relate to it on my end. Talk about someone who had never been through something really difficult. That was me.

And I was with someone who had been through the worst thing you could imagine as a child.

And I think being confronted with that instilled in me a kind of survivors’ guilt and a feeling that I really had no right to want anything or to complain about anything because there was just really nothing that could compare.

But I think I let that guide my behavior in the relationship to a damaging degree because I became a very passive person and maybe a subversive one, quietly subversive.

And I think maybe that throughout my younger life, being passive, being non-confrontational, it’s kind of the hallmark of the nice guy. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that your actions are virtuous.

It sort of means that you sort of avoid facing things head on, and that creates a lot of other problems. But so this relationship is, or sorry, this, the album is tracing the dynamic of that relationship.

And what to me at the time felt very frustrating and very like I was in a very submissive role of trying to please somebody and trying to placate somebody that just had some serious issues to contend with.

And ultimately, it’s about the way that that did not work out and the way that I lost myself in that process by digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole until it completely imploded. And then I was left trying to sort it out.

And this album was me trying to understand what happened, trying to sort it out, but only within, you know, I started writing it within a month or two of the relationship ending. And so, trying to get perspective on what had happened.

Yeah, that’s so, it’s almost like an autopsy of sorts of a relationship. And to me, it makes sense to start writing it that soon. I think people talk a lot about perspective as though the only perspective that is worth having is a distant one.

Like, oh, you can look back, you know, 20 years almost later and say, okay, well, you know, we were both very young. You know, we were like, we did our best. We tried, and we each had something to work through.

But that’s not the same as like being in it. You know, like, this is a perspective.

It’s not always the clearest one, but that’s what it’s like to be in it, is to have like all this, all these experiences still swirling around you that you’re trying to sort and make sense of. And I don’t know, I relate to that.

I wrote, I started writing my first book a month after my husband died, right? It’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a chaotic book. It doesn’t, it’s not the book that I would write now.

I can’t, I literally can’t do the math. Eleven years later, you know, but like, you know, but it’s, it’s where I was at that point.

Yeah, that’s an important thing to capture. And I think that was what I ended up doing with Hospice as well, is there’s a, all of the perspectives at different points in time are valid, but they’re just very different from each other.

You know, the perspec, what I’m telling you about this, this relationship now is very different than what I would have been saying back then and what I would have been saying back then.

And what’s told through the album is a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, a lot of desperation and confusion. And I think it’s, I’m grateful that I, I happened to be in therapy at that time and had some language to understand some of this stuff.

Wow, you are an East Coaster. Okay, that’s, okay.

Yeah, I consider myself really lucky. And I think that was what helped me see what was going on in the relationship at all, was having a very like no nonsense Manhattan therapist.

It was, you know, pointing out to me that, that if I wanted things to be different, that I needed to assert myself and not even in big ways, but just not be afraid to speak my mind. And that, you know, the chips will fall where they may.

At that time, you know, and I think maybe this is typical of serious relationships when you’re younger and when your lives have become really intertwined like ours, where you feel like it becomes, it can become really codependent.

And the idea that not working out after you have committed so deeply feels like it’s not an option. And that’s where I was at.

And it’s when I speak about digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole, it kind of it didn’t feel like there was any alternative.

It helped to have a therapist’s perspective, of being able to point out to me that if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, and it’ll be difficult, and it’ll be a big mess and really painful, but it’s not going to be the end of your life.

But I think that, you know, I’m grateful that I had some of that perspective in there.

And I think that’s a big part of what helped me write the album was being able to recognize what was dysfunctional, what was codependent, what was unfair, and what was unfixable.

But there was a lot of anger in there, too, because it wasn’t just about that sort of intellectual understanding or emotional intelligence.

It was also a really cathartic writing experience, where I came out of that experience having lost myself, having lost a lot of friends to this very isolating relationship and trying to find my way back to them and making amends.

And the inherent loneliness in that, and the loneliness of being 21 and feeling much older than everyone your age because of having gone through something rather intense that seems unrelatable.

The record ultimately came from wanting to relate and wanting to find a way to relate, but having no idea whether that would happen or not.

Okay, so when you’re writing songs, when you’re writing an album, how quickly do you know what you’re making?

Because this album specifically just has such a, it has such a tight theme. It’s actually kind of hard for me to believe that you were 21.

And could, I don’t know, just access your feelings that deeply and put together such a story in a distinct set of songs. It’s a lot of discipline.

Thank you. I think that I have a bit of a strange way of writing songs in that I tend to think in albums and then sort of work backwards from that.

I don’t know that the metaphor of the hospice worker and the patient, I don’t know if that arrived right away. You know, the last song in the album, Epilogue, was the first song I wrote.

And that one kind of informed everything that comes earlier in the record. But it was very much just an expression of that post-breakup isolation and sadness and the feeling of being haunted by somebody.

And I think the imagery, the hospital imagery, you know, a lot of that was just pulled from our relationship and the amount of time that was spent either talking about her childhood experiences or health scares where she ended up in the hospital when

I was with her. And so I think that theme and the imagery just felt like a natural starting place. As far as where the overall allegory and the metaphor came from, I remember, so my mom is a writer and an editor.

And so my entire life, she’s been just passing books along to me that she thought would be interesting to me or useful to me at different times in my life.

And I don’t remember if this was before or after the concept came together, but I remember she gave me this book. It’s a classic collection of writings about death. It’s called How We Die.

And I remember it used to always be on our bookshelf growing up, and I always laughed, and I would just be like, oh, this is so morbid to just have this on display front and center.

But I remember reading a chapter about hospice and hospice workers, and I felt like there’s something in common here about being a care worker who is in a position of needing to accept the end, and thinking about how difficult that must be, and

wouldn’t that be an interesting story about this? Or maybe that’s like an apt metaphor for not being able to appreciate, or not being able to accept the futility of something, that there is a patient that it’s not about saving them, and what that

journey is like towards acceptance. And then the rest of the songs grew out of that, and I think part of it was trying to stay thematically consistent, and trying to find a through line through the narrative that would make sense as a progression of

this relationship up until its ending, while touching on the major points in that relationship and recognizing that some of them were gonna have really nothing to do with the metaphor itself, or they might fit in thematically, but it wasn’t, it

You know, the first time I heard it, I had just been, you know, what I considered like pretty heartbroken and I was just so lonely, you know, and then I listened to it through different ears when, you know, when the person that I loved like went

through cancer and went through hospice and died and I don’t cry every time, sorry. through cancer and went through hospice and died and I don’t cry every time, sorry.

But there’s something that you mentioned too, which is like the hospice worker has to like lead the patient to acceptance too, or that’s like one of their roles.

And in every breakup too, there’s one person who knows it before the other, you know, like there’s one person who like has to be like, like has to lead the person to the other side or like leave them there.

And so, I just think you did such a beautiful job with that. And something that I think people struggle with too is where to put their heartbreak that isn’t death.

Like where to put or how to identify the grief that is not somebody dying, you know, that is not like a dead person, but is, you know, an experience, a love, a person who still exists out in the world.

And the grief over that life that you had and the life that you thought you would have as well. And I have always tried to not prioritize or not create like a hierarchy that’s like, well, mine’s sadder.

Or, you know, it’s like, well, it’s sadder if they die. It’s sadder if they die. Because like, I think there’s just so many ways to truly feel the depths of grief and your, like, heartbreak is one of them, you know?

And especially when it sounds like this one was, you know, complicated by all of these other factors, by, you know, childhood trauma and medical trauma and, you know, that intoxicating factor of just being young and yet feeling so old and so wise.

You know, I, at 19, you know, like, at 19, I also, like, was in love, and I would have moved anywhere, right? Like, we were, like, when I was 19, I was in love, and I was like, we are getting married, and these are our children’s names.

And, you know, and I can’t wait, I can’t wait to, like, you know, be with you forever.

And we moved in together in, like, a studio in Queens when we were fresh out of college and, like, you know, just, like, the reality of, like, you know, playing house in a dorm room is different than, like, paying rent and killing cockroaches.

And it’s a lot less glamorous. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Because for years, I had a lot of insecurity about what I was putting out there, especially when people would talk to me about having lost a loved one to illness, to death, to…

And you’re like, fuck, yeah.

And I’m like, I’m like, this is a breakup album.

I don’t have the right to be putting it in these terms. I think, you know, I was really young. And so it’s relationships feel of that magnitude.

And at that age, especially when they get so serious so fast. But, you know, throughout making the record, my goal was never to try and evoke pity for me. It was really me saying, does anybody, like I said before, does anybody else feel this way?

I didn’t expect that the reaction would be from people of such a wide variety of experiences. But there is something in common in grief of all kinds. And it’s complicated, I think.

It’s with all kinds of loss. I think it’s rare that it’s purely a feeling of sadness. Sometimes it weighs more heavily in that direction, but relationships are complicated, friendships are complicated, love is complicated.

And you can, in feeling loss about a person, you can also feel anger about unfinished business with them or frustration with the way they were.

You know, this is kind of being haunted by somebody, is what you remember about them and the way that they impacted your life, that stays with you. And that can be a really beautiful thing, but it can also be a scary thing.

And it can be difficult to live with once they’re gone.

Was it scary to have the album be received the way that it was?

Because when you’re making something like that, I think like some of the best things I’ve ever made are like, well, I’m making this for me. And if somebody else likes it, that’s great. I hope they do.

But like, it’s always the things that I least expect that do well, you know? And then I have this feeling of like, being naked in front of people, where I’m like, oh, I didn’t mean, I didn’t think anyone would actually see that.

You know, like I didn’t want, I don’t know about that. Like, I don’t know, I just would be, I’m wondering how that feels to have that be, you know, pitchfork reviewed and praised.

And then just, you know, like a real indie darling moment at that height of when you could be an indie darling in a way that I don’t think kids can be now.

Some can, very few, I think. Yeah, it was terrifying. I really, at that, before the album, before making the album, before releasing the album, we really had no audience to speak of.

And I had really wanted to, you know, make it, but it really did not seem like it was going to happen. And then I started making this album, and I thought, well, if this doesn’t reach people, I really don’t know what will.

And it’s also like it’s an embarrassing album. It’s so personal.

It was very out of step with other music at the time that was coming out, especially in New York City, which was kind of, you know, known for a lot of, like, cool, detached, cool detached, fun music. And this was very much not that.

It did not portray me in a flattering light. You know, it was full of weakness and my flaws and shortcomings and, you know, it was an emotional bloodletting and it’s a very emasculating record in a lot of ways.

And so I was very, I was afraid for people to hear it. But I also had this feeling like they weren’t going to anyway, because nothing had really gained any traction that I had released up until that point.

And so when it did, it was extremely validating. And the most exciting experiences of my life happened during that time where suddenly this thing really started to catch on.

And my dream of becoming a professional musician and having a career started to become a reality.

But it was also really embarrassing to have all this laid out there, and to have people tell me who I was, and tell me what this experience was, and to boil it down to, in a lot of cases, a really inaccurate version of it.

You know, to paint me as a sad, depressed person, to get many of the details wrong just by assumption. You know, there was a lot of people who believed that this was a record I made about my girlfriend dying.

And I tried to correct them sometimes, and I tried to explain that this was a metaphor. And sometimes I would do that, and sometimes I would just say, all right, you just say whatever you’re going to say about it.

But I don’t need to be fact checking every step along the way.

But overall, the experience was very strange and surreal for me to be kind of airing my dirty laundry and that of someone I had been with, and then standing up in front of hundreds and then thousands of people and wailing about these things.

I think after a little while, I had to almost dissociate from it and not be thinking about it while I was doing it because it was just too strange and too vulnerable.

I was able to channel something about the experience, the raw emotionality of it without thinking about what it was actually about.

Especially as this continued and I started touring a lot, and my life just drastically changed, and it became harder to inhabit that old life, where I was very unhappy and very isolated and alone feeling.

It was suddenly things were great and I didn’t want to go back there. Even if that was what was making all of this possible, it was, after a while, it was a version of me that I did not want to be stuck with. I wanted to move on.

And that’s, I think, even just natural for a breakup, is this album was a way for me to work through some really difficult things and to reclaim myself and understand where I had lost my sense of self and that was really valuable and it also allowed

me the chance to let all of this off. But after a while, I really wanted to move on. I didn’t want to be stuck in this anymore. I didn’t want to be reliving this whole experience every night.

How weird that you write this thing to process it and move through it, and then it blows up in such a way that you’re forced back into it too.

Yeah.

I won’t complain about it. It’s really allowed me to have a career in music and continues to.

I’m so grateful for it and I think the positive impact that it’s had on the people who needed to hear something like this outweighs anything, after the fact that has been difficult for me.

But yeah, in honesty, it was during that time in the year or two or three that followed it, there was a bit of some kind of irony to the whole endeavor.

That in going through this experience, writing about it, sharing it, then being able to make my dream come true through this, the price paid was you have to stay here, though. You have to keep returning to it.

And that’s changed over time, over the years, I think.

There are different periods of reflection and perspective that I think when you’re coming out of some kind of grief, the way you feel about it after a year is very different than how you feel about it after five years, and how you feel about it after

ten years. I think there’s something about the like, the like two to five year period that is sort of a murky one. You’re sort of between worlds at that point. You’re between stages.

You’re not in the thick of it anymore, but it hasn’t been long enough to have distance from it.

Yeah. It’s like it’s barely a scab. Like it wants to be a scab.

It’s still a little gooey. It’s gross. You know, you’re like, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t touch it.

But here I am doing exactly that.

Oh, yeah, I do now.

But when I think about writing this at that age, going through that relationship at that age, and then everything that followed, I didn’t feel young at the time when it was happening, but I look back now, you know, I’m on the verge of 40 now, and I

look back on it now, and I can’t believe that I was, that that was happening at that time. But, you know, a lot of what the album is about is, is kind of plummeting yourself into a more serious stage of life before you’re ready for it, and entering

into these really serious life situations when you’re basically just a kid and how they age you really fast. And they also tell you how young you are when you, you see yourself kind of fail to rise to the occasion.

And I think that was a lot of what I was grappling with on the record was, was how I was not ready for this. And I, I, I was not enough of an adult to know how to handle all sorts of these situations in a mature way.

And, you know, as much as the album has a kind of a more mature perspective than maybe your typical 21-year-old, it’s also, it possesses a lot of angst and a lot of scorched earth kind of mentality because I was mad.

And I, I, you know, I felt at the time that this, I wanted, I wanted to be vindicated. And, and, you know, being in a relationship where you felt manipulated and where you, you felt mistreated, I, you know, it was a lashing out ultimately.

That’s not all that’s in there, but there was, there was that that couldn’t be controlled or couldn’t be done in a, a measured like diplomatic way. I think that’s part of what gives the album its power is that it is, is raw like that.

I think so for sure. And I mean, people also are so averse to I think like the experience of anger, but also the expression of somebody else’s. It’s kind of considered, you know, like that’s like a bad emotion.

That’s just not something you should feel like you should be more gracious or you should, but it’s such a necessary part of life and of grief and of processing and of healing.

And, you know, if it doesn’t come out, it boils inside of you and it will leak out in like a less healthy way. So, you know, I think rage out on an album. And, you know, I doubt you ever did that in person, okay?

I’ve spent 43 minutes and 27 seconds with you.

I can’t see you really popping off in person, but I would, you know, like my, I would say like anger was like probably the easiest thing for me to access when I was heartbroken or when I was like grieving Erin, you know?

Like I was like, I have to like reach for that first because everything else just feels like it just too soft. Like that’s just like too soft of a place to go for me. And so I can get angry a lot faster than I can like truly like express my sadness.

I mean, I think it’s a really crucial emotion to learn to work with.

And I have a long way to go with that, you know? I’ve always had difficulty expressing it in a healthy way. And I think for people like me, it tends to go inward.

And you direct that anger towards yourself through, you know, very kind of punishing self-talk. Or through being passive aggressive, or kind of living with a dissatisfaction about something and never speaking up for what you need in your life.

But I think it has to go somewhere. And so if you can find a way to express it and not bury it, not bottle it, then I think that’s ultimately healthy as long as you can do it without, ideally without hurting other people.

Coming up on 17 years, a Sunset album came out and you made it with it, or you started recording within, or started writing it within a month of the breakup.

And so you have all this space now, this perspective now that you didn’t when you were recording it, when you were living in it. How has that perspective changed?

Like what have you learned from this album and from like sitting with it for this long and performing it for this long and absorbing other people’s reactions to it for this long?

Well, I mean, the first major lesson I learned was that, not exactly that you need to be careful about what you publish, because I think part of what works about the album is that it sort of sounds as if like, you know, consequences be damned, I need

to say this. But I think what I did not understand is that, as much as it can seem these days, like futile to be putting something out there and for anybody to hear it and recognize it and internalize it, it is always a possibility.

And so you need to make peace with that, peace with whatever you say may get around. And so you need to stand behind what you’re saying and be prepared for that, I guess. That was not something I was really prepared for.

I was not prepared for it to get as big as it did. And for them, for me to be talking about it this many years later. Even in my wildest dreams of it being successful, it never was what happened there.

I think my ceiling was a lot lower than I realized it was. But, you know, that’s just in terms of publishing vulnerable work.

I think it’s been interesting to revisit these songs as we prepare for tours and play them, because some of them feel like there is a lasting message in them for me.

And then others feel just more about letting off steam or letting off frustration and feel like almost like villainizing of someone that I don’t have those same, I don’t hold anger towards this person anymore.

And so to be continuing to sing songs that are expressing that frustration, it requires me to redefine them for myself, think about what they mean to me now.

You know, because there’s, to me, there’s no point in going out there and saying, hey, let me tell you about this, this mean person that I was with when I was 19.

Yeah.

I really feel like if I’m going to be bringing a song, if I’m going to be continuing to tell these stories, there needs to be a purpose that is like relevant to me now.

That usually requires looking for the meaning in it that isn’t specific to my situation and some of these songs, it has to do with ultimately standing up for yourself and not letting a stronger-willed person tell you how to be, and who to be, and who

you can talk to. And that’s, I think, an important life lesson.

I think being able to share the long-lasting effects and experience of trauma about how these things stay with you, and time is a really magical healer in a lot of ways, whereas I’ve been amazed by how my feelings about difficult things that have

happened in the past, I’ve been amazed how they can become less vivid, and diminished, and sometimes even disappear with time. But there are some things that stay with you forever.

And they’re not with you constantly, but they reappear, and you are brought back to them. And I think, and it’s those experiences that make you feel like time is relative, and some things are always going to be present with you.

Sometimes that’s really worthwhile because it can help keep you from falling into the same traps with, I don’t know, if you’ve ever found yourself in kind of like a parallel relationship to one that you had in the past, where it’s actually kind of

the same thing, but it’s a different person, and it takes a while to see it. For that reason, I think, you know, this album has been, for lots of reasons, but for this, for that reason, especially, it has been important for me to have as a kind of a

cautionary tale in the rare instances where I can think about it as if I’m not me, but be able to think of it as if it’s coming from somebody else who’s saying, keep your wits about you. This type of behavior is not acceptable from a partner, whether

it’s in love or in friendship or in business, to recognize warning signs. And then ultimately the album is a snapshot of who I was at this time. And I’ve changed a lot. I’ve grown a lot since then, but I’m still that person.

And I, like anyone, I have blind spots and I need to have reminders of who I am and what has affected me in a bad way in the past and where I’ve lost myself in the past without seeing it.

Oh, I have almost no pattern recognition. I’m like, what? Fool me once?

Not hard. Fool me twice. Okay.

It’s been, fool me through. I’m like, are you serious? Six or seven time I start to see something’s amiss, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It’s shocking to me. Shocking to me. And like how cool to have, you know, like that, that, you know, snapshot of like who you were, to like look back on.

It’s like, you know, I have all these journals, but it’s like, you got to open them. You got to open them if you’re going to, if you’re going to really like learn to like see something.

But wait, I was going to say, I had a thought, I had a thought, Peter, and it was like such a good one, but you know, I think the, I think the hardest thing about relationships and that’s friendships, that’s, you know, romantic relationships, and we

only learn on each other. So it’s like, it’s two crash test dummies that are unfortunately also real people, just like banging into each other and being like, did we do that right? I don’t know.

And just sort of like tumbling through space and we learn a little bit from watching our, we learn a lot from watching our parents, right? But I didn’t see my parents date.

My parents had been married for, I don’t know, a long time before I came along. They already had two kids. I was the third one.

So I saw two people who had been in a pretty sustaining love, interact with each other in the confines of a marriage. I didn’t see anybody meet, date, fall in love, like form a relationship.

So I was, what was normal to me was what was in R&B videos on like, this is all I watched after school, the real world, Cosmopolitan magazine, and like my peers who were just as dumb as I was. And that’s all. And so you don’t know.

And when you’re in something like that, especially at 19, but guess what? It can happen at any age and it does, you’re just like, is this right? Are we doing this right?

And you only know what you know and we just don’t know anything. And it’s really hard to watch.

I totally agree. I think the crash test dummies is a great image, is a really accurate analogy, I think.

I think at any age, but like speaking from my experience when I was younger, I think it’s so much easier to take your cues from what you’ve seen around you and a lot of that is cultural conditioning and movies, TVs and songs and much easier and more

likely to do that than to actually listen to yourself. For me, I was very much a romantic and I thought it was so exciting.

Like in the Simon and Garfunkel song, America, like to me, that was just like the most romantic thing, is like just two people on a bus, you know, with like an untold future ahead of them. And those were the kinds of ideas that had no basis.

You know, I think romance and young love are beautiful things and you shouldn’t be thinking so practically at that age, but maybe some amount of that is good to avoid getting in over your head in a way that that can really hurt you, can really hurt

somebody else. You know, I remember coming out of the relationship, I very much felt like she did this to me, and here’s how I did not stand up to her. In the years since, I have really come to recognize my own role in this differently.

I think recognizing that those things can be true and also having been an avoidant person might bring out certain qualities in another person that forces them to react to you. And it’s not as simple as there being a good guy and a bad guy.

It’s about a dynamic. It’s about an exchange of behaviors that get reactions out of each other.

And so to be able to find compassion for someone that really hurt me when I was younger, and to recognize the ways that I hurt her, has been the work of the last couple of decades. It’s not the central work of my life, but it’s been in there.

It’s something that occasionally I need to work through. Or sometimes it pops up in the midst of other conflicts in life. And you say, oh, is this what I did a long time ago?

I think what was such a complicating factor for me at that age was I was really good at concealing what was going on from everybody. And everybody knew something was wrong, but I would say that most of my friends jumped ship.

And that speaks to the age that we were. I don’t know if it happened today. You know, we’re all, I like to think we’re all older and wiser and that we wouldn’t abandon each other, but they did.

They were in college and they couldn’t ever reach me without feeling like this other person was standing right by the phone telling me what to say or how to react. And they, you know, they were not equipped to know how to intervene.

And so they just left. And as far as my family, they did not abandon me, but they also had an incredibly hard time reaching me. I was made less and less available.

And that led to us being kind of ensconced in our ensconced. I like that word, but I don’t know if it’s right.

I think it’s right. I applaud you for saying it, because sometimes I’ll also say a word that I’m like, I’ve only ever typed in. I’m like, is that right?

Like, is this the word that I think it is?

Let’s just go with ensconced.

In our own little world, and it’s a closed unit, and no one else is allowed in. And I think people generally didn’t know how to help me.

And I wasn’t asking for help, and I was very good at kind of only letting them see what I wanted them to see, but they could tell that something wasn’t right.

And I think that was how I ultimately ended up in therapy, was that they suggested that I start therapy, and they got me the number of somebody. It was so much harder to find a therapist back then.

Yeah.

There was just like one therapist, basically. There’s not, but it wasn’t as… Well, it wasn’t as like societally accepted in the same way, and not as widespread.

But anyway, you know, that was, I think part of it was that it felt like this very delicate, tenuous situation where I was just trying to keep the peace and not rock the boat.

And also I didn’t want people to know what was going on because this was ultimately, you know, having your parents and your family, your friends know that this person that you’re bringing to dinner every once in a while is making you miserable, it

poisons the well and what you’re wanting more than anything, especially when the dynamic is tense with this person already. It’s like you don’t want them to have to pretend that they don’t know all of these things.

Therapy was so helpful because it was the first time I felt like I could talk to somebody and it was not going to have some social effect on the dynamic.

I think one of the most beautiful things about therapy is it’s this safe space, it’s this demilitarized zone in your life where you can talk about whatever you need to talk about, and it’s not going to somehow get back to the people that it affects.

But if I was a parent to a younger person going through this, you can’t control whether they end up in these types of relationships, and I think they can be really formative in a positive way as a cautionary tale, as a lesson in what not to do, and

to learn those lessons early on, I think, can be good. It makes you more, you know, have a little more kind of relational intelligence or emotional intelligence in your future relationships, assuming they don’t destroy you in the process.

But, you know, if anyone had, I don’t know, maybe I was looking for someone to tell me that I was not allowed to be in this relationship, but I don’t think at that time, you know, I think we probably would have like run away together, you know, to

like the West Coast or something like that, if there had been that kind of laying down the law. My parents were not the type to, they weren’t disciplinarians to begin with, so that was never going to happen.

But I think, I think letting people you, people you love when you see that they’re in any kind of relationship or situation that is making them unhappy or that is isolating them, to make them feel like you are a person they can talk to about it,

without imposing your will on it too much, but just being a compassionate mirror to them. I think, I don’t know, you can’t underestimate the power of delusion and of blind spots, but I do think the best chance you have sometimes is that when you

hear, when someone hears themselves vocalizing all of their problems, it becomes harder to live with them and harder to let them lie. Not all the time, but I think it is sometimes very effective.

What helps you come back to yourself besides just this album and therapy? Like, what is the process of getting out of this relationship and back into a life that is yours?

I think what was part of what was therapeutic about the album and what allowed me to create some distance between me and the experiences themselves was turning it into a fictional story.

Because then, I think that allowed me to compartmentalize it as this experience that I wrote. I mean, I think ultimately, that’s what this is, it’s my version of it. It’s my version of what happened.

It allowed me to put it in a box and assign it a purpose, which is to tell other people about the experience and hopefully to relate to them, or warn them, or help them heal from their own experience.

For me, it meant that it lives in the recordings, it lives on the stage, and when I’m not there, when I’m not in either of those contexts with it, I’m not in it anymore.

The flip side of that is that I lived with that version for so long that I had to at some point remind myself that that was not the entirety of the experience.

It was sort of a selective memory about one version of that relationship, one version of that entire story. And there’s a lot more to it. It didn’t all belong on that album.

The rest of it’s for me. But it becomes harder to remember the things you don’t repeat to yourself. And not too long ago, I accidentally discovered a whole trove of photos from that time.

And I had like a DSLR, and I’d taken thousands and thousands of pictures during this year and a half of this relationship. And it showed the mundane moments.

It showed the things that you would never really write about that would never, that aren’t relevant to the point of the story.

But they paint a more complete picture for me and remind me of the part of it that has not been relegated to a kind of distilled story. And there was something kind of healing about that.

Because what I mostly carried with me was the pain and the trauma of it and the dysfunction and everything negative about it. And there was something grounding about seeing everything else.

Seeing, you know, us taking photos of each other in our apartment, of us like on a trip to Montauk, like things that are personal and that are for my memory, for her memory, if she remembers them.

And so, and that’s a place that I don’t really dwell at all, because it’s been so long ago. There’ll be things that like remind me of that time every once in a while.

Or you know, when my wife and I are just talking about when we were younger, just relating experiences of our older relationships or just like what my life was like when I first moved to the city those first couple of years.

But I think the album ultimately served as a way to to kind of put everything in its, everything that I needed to deal with and process about that relationship. It put it all in this box.

And then periodically it’s a box that I open up and share with other people. But the rest of the time it kind of sits in the closet. And I’ve kind of reached a point where that works for me.

I think the process of also repeating the stories by singing them, by performing them over and over and over and over and over again, that in itself was therapeutic in a really kind of insane way of just like, you tell a story so many times that it

loses a certain visceral quality for you, and that can help it not feel so triggering. And make it easier to talk about, too, when you’re not having to work through an entire somatic experience as you’re going through it.

And I just wonder what it’s like, then, to you’ve had an experience, and most of your peers has not, like, how do you date?

How do you find love? You know, how do you even like open yourself up to that experience again when your first one was so difficult?

I mean, I was, I would not consider myself like a good partner throughout the rest of my 20s after this.

Because though I thought I was dealing with this head on, there’s this whole other aspect of it to, you know, in the fallout of it, which is, okay, well, how are you to the next people you date? What are you carrying with you from this relationship?

What kind of overcorrection are you doing that, you know, I think I was a nightmare to be with for anyone that I was with after then. And I really, you know, I really regret that.

And it was coinciding with me suddenly being hot shit and touring all over the place and having these wild experiences and just my life totally changing and being in a spotlight, having not processed certain aspects of this experience.

And also being, I think, pretty commitment phobic afterwards. Cause we, you know, that relationship got so serious and to the point where we were engaged as well.

And it just, I thought I saw the rest of my life unfolding in a way that I was terrified by. And then upon getting out of it, I was very afraid to, to what felt like locking myself in again.

And that’s not a good starting place for most relationships. But a place that is maybe natural in your mid twenties, early mid twenties.

More natural than engagement and cohabitation at 19, I gotta say.

Yeah, at least in this day and age. Yeah, we were talking about just feeling so much older. I remember I had taken a break from school during this time.

And I was working. And like I said, I suddenly felt like I was much older than I was. And then I remember going back to school, like starting up college again at a different school and just looking around at all these people my age.

And I just remember thinking like, oh, you’re babies, you don’t know anything. And really, who knows? You never know what people have been through, and people present so differently.

It is an unfair generalization for me to make at the time, but I really felt that way. And it made it hard to relate to people my age for a while.

But moving on from that, I think in my 20s, it was a mixture of being wary of commitment, being very insecure, over-correcting from having been kind of meek and passive when I was younger, and not realizing when I was sometimes falling into the same

traps, or trying to kind of, or maybe drawn to similar types of people. And it wasn’t until I met my wife, which was about 10 years ago, that that all really changed, because she is just someone who is so different than anyone I’ve ever been with,

and just an incredibly kind and thoughtful listener, and extremely emotionally intelligent. And I remember feeling like I wanted to be different toward her than I had been with people in the past. I didn’t have some acts to grind.

I wasn’t overcompensating for some insecurity from my past, or making up for lost time, or anything like that.

I just, I felt for the first time, I was like, oh, I think I see what love is supposed to be like, and how you’re supposed to feel with that person that’s right for you.

And what that really comes down to is, this is just a person I want to be around all the time, and not to an unhealthy degree, like it maybe was when I was younger, of like this obsession with each other, but just loving being around each other and

wanting to build a life together. And when there’s issues, talking about them, and when, you know, and that there’s also gonna be times where like, I act in a way that I’m, where I’m very frustrated with myself, or I’m very, I got, you know, having a

reaction that is maybe rooted in something from the past, but that maybe I’m able to see it, and maybe she knows where it’s coming from. And I think I knew that from the very beginning of our relationship, that this was just entirely different.

And the entire time since then, it has felt different. And I could go on and on about that, but I think it’s really…

But like your 19-year-old self would never believe you, you know? You’d be like, no, no. Like I was in, you know, Zelda, F.

Scott Fitzgerald. I was like, no, if you’re not ready to put me in a mental institution and steal my work as your own, you obviously don’t love me, you know? Like I just, I was like, love’s insane.

You have to be, like, it’s supposed to feel like a rollercoaster where you’re not properly strapped in at all times. Like you should be in fight or flight, preferably both at once.

Yeah, I think being drawn to that kind of intensity and that drama, it’s, I think ultimately that’s really about something else.

And it’s just almost like coincidence that it gets assigned to romantic relationships when you’re younger and sometimes when you’re older.

But when you realize that that’s not what makes it meaningful, then it made me feel, I was like, oh, I haven’t really been in a loving relationship before.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s a totally different animal.

Yeah.

I feel just really comfortable.

Yeah.

I don’t wonder if you care about me.

Yeah.

I mean, there’s always insecurity, but I don’t think it’s running the show, hopefully.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s really wild. It’s really wild.

It’s really wild how mundane it is, honestly. And I don’t think my younger self would have understood that either. You know, where I’m like, it’s just really…

And that’s like kind of, that’s to me, like what makes it beautiful and wonderful. I’m like, oh yeah, I couldn’t really explain it to you. It’s just, yeah, it’s just like we’re alive together and everything just feels better.

Like if you’re around, I want to be around you, but not in that clawing sort of like frantic way. It’s just like, oh yeah, like it would be, this show would be even better if you were sitting on the couch next to me, eating a bowl of reheated pasta.

That would be, that’s the only thing that could make this better.

That’s the dream really. And I think that it’s hard to understand that when you’re younger. But you know, something that I’ve come to feel like is that love is partly a function of time.

And it’s why I sometimes, like kind of not bristle exactly, but like I sometimes am skeptical when a friend or someone tells me, tells me like, I just met, I just met this person and I’m in love with her.

And I say like, well, first of all, I think it’s not love if it’s not mutual, or if you don’t know that it’s mutual.

Because part of it is this, this symbiotic thing, but it’s also, there is this function of time where you can, you know, from my, in my experience, it was like I felt like I was going to love this person.

And then as you get to know each other and as you spend time together, it all, it deepens this connection.

And then this kind of cosmic thing, I think happens for me anyway, where it’s this feeling of like, I’ve always known you and I always will know you and I can kind of see you at all moments in time.

I can see when you were a little kid, I can see when you’re, when you’re older and I see you now, I see a few years ago.

And it’s this really like, it’s like the, like an interstellar, when he’s behind the bookcase and he’s seeing everything, all time, all at once.

But like you say, it’s also, there’s like an unremarkable quality to it, like a mundane quality to it, where it’s like, it’s Wednesday night. And it’s, that’s kind of the most important thing. Life is mostly those moments.

It’s mostly, it’s mostly weekdays.

And if you can just feel like that kind of affection for somebody when nothing is going on and when there’s no drama and when there’s no conflict or when it doesn’t, when you’re not in the throes of like a high stakes situation of some sort, then

Yeah.

I love what you said about like, you see them through all moments in time. I’ve also said that and I’m like, no, you don’t understand. Like I love like seventh grade you, you know?

Like I love that little door.

Like, and I have like pictures of both my husbands, like when they’re in middle school, like on my shelf, because I’m just like, oh, like I would go back in time to like meet you, but I also don’t have to because I know that guy, you know, like, it’s

And you see all those versions come out of every person too.

You see them.

Yeah.

You see they do things and you’re like, oh, I bet you did this when you were five. And then I know there’s tons of things that I do where my wife will be like, oh, I see you doing this when you’re 80. You know, and it’s a really wonderful thing.

And I’m so grateful because I really feel like based on those early experiences, things could have just turned out so differently. And there’s also the aspect to life where every failure leads you towards some unanticipated path.

And sometimes that leads you to a success or leads you to something really beautiful in your life. But the way to it couldn’t have happened without something else crashing and burning in a way that is unbearable while it’s happening.

But then you look back and you see, like, you know, I guess it comes down to whether you believe in fate or not.

And it’s kind of an open question, but you tend to, you look back at the path and you say, like, gosh, this thing that felt so wrong to be failing at that time or this experience that was so hard to get through, I now see that it was leading me here.

Yeah. Yeah. There’s no, I think about this all the time, and like there’s no version of the person who’s sitting here, like either of these people without everything that happened before, too.

And, you know, for me, it’s, I think people are like kind of a little bit perplexed, like, wow, you’re so like, people love to be like, you’re so lucky, like Matthew fell in love with you.

And I’m like, I’m not like a fucking bridge troll that he found, like, you know, like, you love to say that. I’m like, wow, like, which, by the way, if he were a widow, like people would not be saying that to him.

People would not be like, wow, you’re so lucky, Nora loved you. They would be like, everyone wants a sad boy. Come on, get a grip.

Like, and if I died, he would, I think he would probably be married within like two weeks, not even because he wants to, but because he’s a very gentle man and some woman would be like, you’re mine now. Because I’ve willed him to somebody in my will.

But I’d say like, blah, blah, blah. But like, there’s, I don’t know, like the version of me that like Matthew loves, like only exists because of what happened with Aaron.

And the version of you that your wife loves, like only exists because of all these other things. And that’s such a strange thing to like think about sometimes, but also brings me a lot of peace too.

Especially when I know my life will like fall apart again. Like, I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know.

I lost the plot, but I think you know what I mean.

No, totally. It’s like, what you hope is that you can carry that trust forward into your life, and whenever things are not going how you want them to, or encountering something really hard, you say, you sort of have to have faith.

This is all leading me where I’m supposed to go, but I’m just not gonna get to see that just yet.

I’m not gonna get to see that while it’s happening, but I mean, I guess that’s what faith ultimately is in a lot of regards, it’s like, this is God’s plan.

And I don’t know that you need to believe in God or be a religious person to be able to see how things connect and how a successful life is not one that’s just successes. It’s usually littered with failures and littered with difficulty.

And sometimes those set you up to arrive at where you’re meant to be with a little more perspective.

And I feel like that, for my experiences when I was younger, that it gave me a kind of healthy respect for the importance of a healthy communication in a relationship.

And every time that I lose sight of that, it pops up somewhere else in my life and I have to relearn it.

And I think, like you said this earlier, like if you don’t learn that lesson the first time around, like you’re going to have to keep relearning it until you really get it.

What connected me to this album is still what connects me to this album. And it is that universal experience of grief. The first time this album was important to me, I was grieving that breakup.

I was grieving a life that I really thought I wanted. The second time, I was grieving a life that I thought I was going to get with my husband. I got a life with him, a short one.

I got a short one. I had a short amount of time with him, but I did not get what I had really, really, really wanted to have with him, which was a full lifetime together.

And talking with Peter about this album made me realize, one, he was so young creating something so profound that I actually kind of feel sick over it.

Like just what a baby, what a baby going through that much pain, but to be able to articulate it and create something so beautiful out of it, wowee.

And two, he was writing about something that I did not understand when I listened, because I was looking for other answers in that album.

And I think it’s so human to want to reach out and grab something, anything, that feels like it could be for you or could help you make sense of all the things that we’re feeling when we are grieving, whether that’s a relationship ending or a person

dying or versions of ourselves that we have to leave behind, lives that we thought we would have, lives that we wanted. So more than anything, I hope that you take away from this episode that your grief is valid and your grief counts, your experience

counts, you are never alone in what you are feeling, and this too shall pass. Thank you to Peter, and again, shout out to cousin April for bringing us together. I’m Nora McInerny, this is Thanks For Asking, and thank you for being here.

We literally couldn’t do it without you, and I wouldn’t want to. It would be very odd of me to be making a podcast that only I listen to. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t do it, but I’m saying it would be strange behavior.

This is an independent podcast, the world has changed so much, and the podcasting world has too, and I’m really proud that we’ve been here for 10 years, and we have been doing it our way for almost four? It’s all time is kind of meaningless to me.

So thank you for being here, for rating, reviewing, sharing it with a friend. You can always call us, call us with topics, call us with comments, questions, concerns. That number is 612-568-4441.

If you haven’t yet, go follow us over on YouTube. Grace puts out episodes over there. We put out clips over there.

We have a link to the Substack. We send out ad free episodes for paid subscribers, but I also do all of my new writing over there. And it’s just kind of like a hub for everything.

This episode was as always produced by Marcel Malekebu. Our opening theme music is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson, whose albums are also linked in the episode description. But this music that you are hearing is by my young son, Q.

Speaking of Substack, we always end by thanking our supporting producers. These are people who have signed up to support us at not an annual level, not a monthly level, but just like a third level.

You name your price over the annual subscription fee and then you get your name in the comments. And that is literally the only benefit other than just my eternal goodwill.

But big, big thanks to Augie Brooks, Joy Heising, No Name, I love that for you, Nancy Duff, Jenny Medeine, Kathleen Langerman, Jordan Jones, Ben, Jess, Tom Stockburger, Beth Derry, Sarah Garifo, Jennifer McDagle in all caps, Kathy Sigman, Sarah

David, Mary Beth Barry, and my high school gym teacher, Sheila, Crystal, Kaylee Sakai, Virginia Labossi, Lizzie DeVries, Rachel Walton, David Binkley, Lisa Piven, Michelle Toms, Nicole Petey, Renee Kepke, Melody Swinford, Stacey Wilson, Car Pan,

Caroline Moss, Michelle Oh, Andra Brzezinski, Amanda, Stacey Demoro, Jess Blackwell, Abby Arose, Crystal Mann, Bonnie Robinson, Lauren Hanna, Jacqueline Ryder, Patrick Irvine, Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, Kathy Hamm, Erin John, Penny Pesta, Madd,

Christina, Emily Ferriso, Elizabeth Berkley, Kiara, Monica, Alice, Alissa, Alyssa Robeson, Faye Barron, Kaylee, Kate Byerjohn, Jessica Reed, Courtney McCown, Jeremy Essen, Jen, Lindsay Lund, Jessica Letexier, Stephanie Johnson, Alexis Lane, Robin

Roulard, Jill McDonald, Dave Gilmore, my best friend from college. Did I already say Caroline Moss? I did, yep, sorry, I forgot to say she was my best friend, but I think everybody knows that by now. Elia Phillies-Milan, LGS, All Caps, Chelsea,

Cyrnik, Kelly Conrad, Jen Grimlin and Micah.