S3: I’ve Made a Huge Mistake

This is an episode from the new season of TTFA Anthologies, go to ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ and ⁠Spotify⁠ to listen to the full season(and past seasons)!

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Eva Hagberg is young, ambitious and about to get her Big Break — a byline in the New York Times! And then, she publishes an error. A big factual error. In the New York freaking Times! Cue the breakdown.  

If you’ve ever laid in bed replaying your missteps, this episode is for you. 

Originally published 12/5/2016

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

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A quick warning that this episode contains some strong language.

How are you?

I mean, I’m alive. I think I’ll say that. Like I’m alive and I feel I feel so fully alive.

And that’s that’s like all that I ever wanted all of those years when I was like rolling around on a futon and like trying to go to Gawker parties and like do the most drugs and like become famous in the New York Times, right?

I just wanted to know that I existed and I just wanted to be like, yes, I know that I’m here.

Hi, I’m Nora McInerny and this is Terrible, Thanks For Asking. That’s the name of the show, just to be clear. It’s a show where we talk about how you really are, which might be fine, but might not be.

So it’s 2007. Britney Spears is knee-deep in her famous year-long meltdown, you know, the one with the head shaving and the umbrella hitting. We weren’t yet getting all of our news from Twitter.

Facebook was still mainly a place to connect with your college friends and try to impress them with photos of your new life, not a place where your parents and extended family could stalk you.

iPhones were new, so most of us were staring at flip phones when we didn’t know what to do with our hands. You could not swipe any direction on a Motorola Razr. As I recall, Lindsay Lohan spent a whole 84 minutes in jail and it was a big deal.

But not as big of a deal as Paris Hilton, who was like our most controversial celebrity at the time. It was a simpler time.

And in New York City, Eva Hagberg was a 24-year-old rising star in the architectural critique world, a world I didn’t even know existed, living her best life.

You know, I thought that I was the only person who had ever moved to New York in her 20s and become a writer and done a lot of drugs and gotten drunk and had like crazy romantic escapades. Like I was really like, Oh my God.

Look at me.

Look at me. I’m amazing. It was really, really, really fun, like 99% of the time.

I wrote all day and then every night I went out for something. And I just met a lot of editors and publicists and architects and designers. And everybody was like making the culture that we consumed.

And it was, I mean, I remember like getting my first byline. And I just was like, I went to Barnes & Noble and I opened this magazine. And I was like, my name is in a magazine.

Holy shit. And kept talking about how I wanted to buy 50 copies and like, you know, paper my bathroom with my name. And I slept on a single size futon with my friend on the floor.

And we just thought this was like completely normal. We would share one bagel with extra butter per day as our meal. I had a part-time editorial assistant internship job at a publishing house and we would get free coffee.

So I was like, how much free food can I get and free alcohol can I get and free coffee can I get?

So like so much free alcohol.

Oh my God. And it didn’t count if it was free. That was my logic.

Plus, like sometimes I was like, well, for dinner, I’ll have like two cigarettes and then like three free drinks, like whatever cheese is there.

Yes.

But then I’ll walk home, exercise.

Right.

It was kind of like whatever could keep me going. Like, yeah, a cigarette totally counted as a meal because it would kind of ramp me up and give me a little energy.

I was not an interesting person in New York. I felt interesting. I had no interest.

I didn’t read, I didn’t exercise. I didn’t do anything.

I had no hobbies. I remember going to a party and somebody was like, so what do you like to do? And I was like, I make fun of architects on the Internet.

Like, I had no personal interest. Oh, yeah. I didn’t read a book for years.

No.

So tell me about Party Eva.

Okay. Party Eva actually had her own nickname, which was Fleva. And people would know when like Eva had gone away to hide and Fleva was there.

So Party Eva always had drugs. Party Eva was always up for whatever. Party Eva was always kind of bullying all the dudes to do more drugs with her and be like, you’re a fucking pussy, like do more lines.

And they were like, Eva, it’s a Wednesday. We need to go to work in the morning. And I was like, I would just yell.

I would like drag people into the corner with me at parties and like talk really intensely about my childhood.

I mean, I had this like mix of really wanting to be seen and being terrified of being seen, which I think I still hold, but it was very, very heightened with chemical assistance. And I also Party Eva forgot a lot of what happened.

And like, I would spend a bunch of hours at somebody’s house and then be really convinced that somebody had been there. Somebody else had been there and then find out that like that person had not been there. Facts were very elusive.

And I mean, I thought I was having fun. I don’t remember laughing, you know, for years. I mean, I remember laughing after I got sober and being like, Oh, I haven’t laughed in like six years.

But I was also like, I mean, this is sort of painful to admit, but I was like kind of a hanger on. Like I was very much like the too drunk person in the corner, kind of pulling everybody aside who like knew everybody. But like I wasn’t in the group.

So that was part of Eva.

And then daytime Eva has this really specific and very precise job.

Yeah, which is to write and think about the built environment. Daytime Eva never missed a deadline. Did not understand people who missed deadlines.

Like I would see people who were like, I’m struggling to write this thing. And I was like, just do it. Just write it.

Like I remember this boyfriend and I, we were having some conflict and he was like, I can’t work when we have conflict. And I was like, get your fucking shit together. Like it’s work.

Like you have a deadline, meet it. I believed that I was really good at writing. I found it scary to like anything.

It was really comfortable for me to be like, oh, that architect is like full of post-structuralist garbage, you know, versus like, I really like this architect. And I was really, really, really ambitious. I loved when people recognized my name.

And then I would immediately be terrified that they recognized my name. You know, I said, meet somebody at a party. They said, oh, I know your byline.

And I’d be like, oh my God, thank you. Oh my God, what does that mean?

Pretty much every woman I know who spent her early 20s in New York, including myself, has a story kind of like this. New York is just magical and weird.

It’s like this place where you can somehow be a total disaster and a professional success at the same time, like a grown up Hannah Montana, where half of you is an adult with a job and you’re getting promotions and the other half of you has puked in

your trash can at work. Best of both worlds. So, Eva and Fleva are doing that Hannah Montana thing and just like the popular TV show, it is for the most part working or it appears to be working.

Fleva only comes out at night and during the day, Eva is really, really good at keeping it together. She’s so together, she gets her first New York Times byline at age 22 and then she starts writing more for them. And more, and more.

And I’d written a couple of features, but everything was in house and home.

And then a publicist pitched me a feature on this photographer, Dave Anderson, who was doing a series of portraits in Viter, Texas. And I was like, this is my break out of the house and home section.

Eva took the assignment and the publicist, who Eva had known for years, helped shape the pitch for the piece. What they came up with was to write a story about the controversy surrounding Dave Anderson.

Dave had spent years photographing life in Viter, Texas. Viter is a small town, just an hour and a half east of Houston, about 20 miles from the Louisiana border.

It has a population of about 11,000, and is primarily a bedroom community for the oil refining companies nearby Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas.

So, the photographer developed what he referred to as an affection for this town.

It was an affection that some saw as problematic because…

So it was kind of known as this incredibly racist town, incredibly difficult place.

Viter is known for its history as a Ku Klux Klan town. If you do a quick Google search for Viter, Texas, some of the first things that pop up are KKK, racism, other uplifting topics.

For years, the town was considered a sundown town, where it was made clear that black people were not welcome within city limits after dark.

In 1993, when the federal government brought some black families to live in public housing as an effort at integration, there’s a straight up march by the KKK right through town, and the families moved out within a few months.

And the photographer at the center of the pitch, Dave Anderson, had been shooting images of the people and places in Viter.

And he kept saying that, you know, this town has been really categorized as this really terrible thing, and he went and found the beauty. So the title of his book was called Rough Beauty. That’s basically as much as I knew before going in to report.

And he had an opening he was going to do in Houston, and a couple people on the internet had said that they were going to go protest the opening. So that was kind of like the hook for the story.

Eva had never been on an assignment before, and definitely not on an assignment for the New York Times. This was different from writing trend pieces or making fun of architects on the internet.

But this was really reporting and she took it really seriously. But she was also, as her story, hoping for a crazy protest to cover. But she also liked the photos.

Once she arrived, she got along well with Dave, the photographer.

Who was my subject, which I was very excited about. I kept referring to him as my subject because I’d never had a subject before.

And I remember we went out for like a snack before the opening, and he tried to pay, and I was like, no, that’s unethical. You know, like, I was really kind of into this high stakes, ethical stuff of not accepting a bottle of water from my subject.

So Eva and Dave go to the opening. But this was not the kind of opening Eva was used to attending in New York. There were no hors d’oeuvres, no clipboards, no crowds.

The gallery was in a strip mall. And there were about 25 people there. And none of them were there to protest.

I was starting to get a little nervous about the story.

And I was starting to think, okay, I’m going to need to change my approach from here’s like the crazy scene of a protest because the story is not unfolding the way that I pitched it.

But yeah, I was sort of like, I’m glad that we’re going to Viter, right? Like I’m glad that we’re going to go and see what’s up and see what I can see.

And the next morning, Eva and Dave get in the car and they go to Viter. Eva’s hoping that the people in places that were the subject of these photos will hold a key to where her story should go.

But I remember being in the car and we like sort of get into the outskirts of Viter and we drive past the Dairy Queen and I see all these old white people in the Dairy Queen and I remember looking at these people and being like, are they racist?

Are all these nice looking white people hanging out at the Dairy Queen, having coffee at the Dairy Queen at 4 p.m. or 11 a.m. like super racist?

And like, what does it even look like? And what does that mean? And like at that time, any kind of conversation about race was so far away from anything that I thought about or wrote about.

So I had this mix of emotions and one of them was like, I’m finally going to have my big break. And then the other one was starting to realize that I might have bit enough more than I can chew. But I need to achieve.

I need to do a good job. I need to never let anybody know that I’m scared or even worse, don’t know the answer to something. So I am like full speed ahead.

Like I got this. It’s like I took that little moment and I just like, I remember just like putting this like emotional shell around me and being like, I’m just going to do my job.

Do you think that was easier to do because you still had like Eva and Fleva together?

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I was so used to being like, oh, now I turn off my feelings.

Like I was really practiced at like doing things that I would then make myself forget. You know, like I would be like erase, erase, erase, erase, and just like put it in a box for later.

I mean, I’m sure that I did that with these sort of thoughts and insecurities and worries that were starting to bubble up.

So, because at this point, the story was changing from art and protest into…

It was changing into like, what does it mean to photograph a place of such conceptual violence and racism and make art out of it? And what does it mean for the photographer to have a responsibility?

And then also I was starting to think, what does it mean for my responsibility as a writer? Like, am I complicit with a photographer?

I sort of started realizing like, I am using the way that this town has been portrayed as a way of also furthering my own interests in my own career. Like, that was sort of starting to like, it shut the back of my consciousness.

What did you feel like your options were at that point while you’re driving into Viter? And you know that the gallery story is just not much.

I did not conceive of any other option. I felt this incredible professional responsibility as a representative of the New York Times to just be like, this is the story, this is where it is taking us.

Anytime I felt that insecurity, I would sort of remind myself that I was really smart, or remind myself that I’d been given this assignment. So I was having this internal war with myself, right?

So we’re driving around and I’m like, okay, you can do this. No, I can’t. No, you can’t.

No. And also I felt like I couldn’t, because he was my subject, I was like, I need to be totally neutral to him, right? I can’t be like…

You can be bouncing this off of him.

I feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to do this. I’m 25.

Right, right.

I like that.

I’m a baby. I’m an adult baby. I can’t do this.

Right, right.

No, I was 24, because I got…

Oh, man, you’re real. That’s an actual baby. That’s an infant human.

I know.

Eva felt out of her comfort zone and above her pay grade because she was.

Eva grew up moderately wealthy. She lived in nice houses. She went to private school.

She went to Princeton. She was not used to seeing the kind of poverty that David photographed, let alone driving up to it and knocking on its door.

But Dave was, and he took her to meet one of the residents of Viter that he had spent time photographing.

And he and the photographer were like super friendly. And I was like, okay, wait, this is all like not what I thought. Like he was like, it’s great to see you.

Like come on in. And there was a bunch of kids running around and they were all like watching TV and eating ramen and doing homework and like there was a dog. And I remember just feeling so out of place.

And again, feeling this kind of split of like, okay, I feel so out of place. I feel so uncomfortable. And then being like, why do I feel so uncomfortable?

Like, I remember myself just like kind of standing there. And everybody else is like very active and engaged with each other. And I’m just like, I’m fine.

Everybody just don’t look at me. While also being nervous about even being a reporter and what they were going to think.

And like, it was kind of this encapsulation of, I mean, it’s like that moment in that house with that family was like every social anxiety I’d ever had in my entire life, plus every fear I’d ever had as a 20 something running around New York.

It’s like it all funneled into this moment where I had to also be really professional and distance and detached and also like not say something that I would regret. I mean, I just, it was, I just remember being like, I really want to leave.

And I remember just thinking, okay, this like I’m just going to look and I’m going to go home and I’m going to call a bunch of academics and ask them to tell me about photography and it’s going to be a piece about photography and what photography

means. And I can just kind of stay out of this like really, really complicated murky world of like racism and economic injustice and privilege and like all that stuff.

So Eva and Dave packed up and headed out of Viter.

When they got back to Houston, Eva’s flight was canceled. So she made the best of the situation and the extra night to herself and decided to go catch up with a friend who was also in town.

So I called a cab, which in the old days you had to do. And I remember getting in the cab with this driver, and he was like, what are you doing in Houston? And I said, oh, I’m here, I’m writing about Vita.

And he was like, oh, yeah, I don’t drive out that way. And I was like, reporting, reporting. I was like, tell me more.

And I don’t think that I took notes. I think I was like, I will remember this. I have since learned to always take notes.

So we sort of start talking and he’s like, yeah, Vita is really fucked up. Like, and here’s, here’s where it’s like the moment that I cannot, that I know is like a black hole. He had told me that James Byrd Jr.

had been killed in Vita. So this like famous hate crime. He was like, but people don’t know that or people don’t talk about that or like, but people think that the story is different.

People think the story is different because it is different.

James Byrd Jr. was a 49 year old black man who was dragged to death by three white men in 1998. His murder is a famous hate crime.

A hate crime that happened in Jasper, Texas, 60 miles from Vita. But at that moment, in the back of the cab, Eva thought she was on to something.

So then I was like, oh my god, I’m on to like the scoop of the century. You know, this hate crime that people think happened somewhere else actually happened in Vita. And this is really dramatic.

And I didn’t get his name or his number or like anything. I was just like, this sounds like great reporting to me. It’s like a conversation that I vaguely remember.

Eva knew that some people in Vita were uncomfortable with the idea that a New York City photographer had documented their lives and potentially could profit from it.

So that’s how she focused the article. She flew back to New York and got started. She researched who owns images, the photographer or the subject, and who gets to benefit from them.

She avoided addressing the parts that made her uncomfortable, the parts she was panicking about during that visit to Vita, and she felt confident about her work and the piece she turned in.

I felt really good about my interpretations. I felt really like I had just done an actually really good job, and I was being really, really smart.

I was kind of like, ooh, I’m going to like kind of blow people’s minds, not with my own observations, but with like all this like cool theoretical academic stuff that I’m kind of like tying together and making digestible.

And I was like, this is good.

And that scoop that Eva was so excited about from the cab driver, the one she didn’t take notes about, that the murder of James Byrd Jr., a famously horrifying hate crime, happened in Vita and not in Jasper, Texas, like everyone thinks.

That became the lead. So that was like Vita, a town where James Byrd Jr. was killed.

Like I think that’s literally like the second sentence of the story or something. I don’t think that they asked me to send my notes. I don’t think there was any fact checking.

They were like, okay, we got it. Like we’ll be in touch if we have any questions.

If you have questions, they’re going to have to wait because this is the part where we take a little break. And when we come back, the article and the mistake are published in the New York Times. So we’re back.

We’re back in 2007. And in 2007, pieces for the Sunday New York Times, where Eva’s story about Dave was going to be printed, hit the internet late Friday night.

So, the night that it came out online, I went out to dinner with my uncle and my boyfriend at the time, and we had like two bottles of wine, and I was just like hammered per usual.

And we got home and I had a voicemail from the photographer, and he was like, hey, I read the story. I felt that it was really fair. It was really fair and really nuanced.

But I wanted to let you know that you wrote that James Byrd Jr. was killed in Viter. He was not.

So you might want to look into that. And I remember being in this beautiful apartment with really nice stuff with my uncle, wasted and just being like, oh, fuck.

Like, and realizing I’d spent so much time on every paragraph that came after and like no time on that paragraph. Like I hadn’t even Google checked it.

I remember my stomach dropping and my heart just like pounding and just standing there and just like looking at the phone and trying to do that thing I’d done before of just erase, just erase that this happened.

Like you’re gonna wake up and this is maybe not real.

Or, right, there was this whole sort of sense in which, like, maybe what I thought had happened hadn’t really happened, or maybe he was confused, or like something would change if I just stood still and just tried to get my heart to slow down.

You felt this. We have all felt this. This wanting to turn back the clock to change one simple thing, in Eva’s case a Google search, to make this feeling go away.

It’s not the end of the world, of course, but it damn well feels like it.

I was like, I need to take all the New York Times’ away. Like I need to somehow.

Wake up early.

I have to wake up early. I have to go everywhere in the world. Just put them in my basement.

It’s like that oncoming storm. I could feel it coming. I was like, don’t allow that to enter your actual body.

Just deflect it. I was defensive. I was like, you don’t know the true story.

That’s what everybody thinks. But I know it really happened because this cab driver told me. Clearly, I was not contrite.

I was not apologetic. Like nothing. I was trying to prove to myself that it was little, but also that I was right.

It was sort of like, as soon as they were like, you’re wrong, I kind of like, I was like, no, no, no, I can’t have been wrong because of my entire life being based on like, if I am wrong, I will probably die.

And Monday, I get this email from an editor and the subject line is possible corrections to the provider article. I did Google it, and I found that he was not killed in fighter. And I was like, oh, I think I really did actually fuck this up.

What was it like realizing that it was a mistake?

It was unfathomably difficult.

I mean, I just, I felt like I had broken the world, which like sounds so extreme. But I felt like, I felt the weight of the mistake that I had made.

And I remember kind of trying to bargain with myself and being like, maybe I can time travel and make a different mistake.

I mean, I remember sitting there and crying and just being like, like, you made a mistake, you made a mistake, you made a, like you can forgive yourself. And I couldn’t, I just like, and I was so, I felt so responsible.

And I was, and I just didn’t think that this could ever be fixed. It felt like a sin, like it felt like more than a mistake or an error. And because of what it was about, I just thought like, this is now the worst thing that I’ve ever done.

Like, I’ve now reached that point.

The New York Times stopped offering Eva stories. The publicist Eva had known for years, stopped talking to her. And Eva cut herself off completely from her subject, Dave.

Now, by 2016 standards, where the mistakes you make online can create a tempest in your iPhone, these repercussions seem kind of small.

2016, Eva could have been dragged on Twitter, could have been the subject of think pieces and teardowns, could have watched her name and her mistake spread in an internet wildfire of outrage. And that could have happened in 2007, too.

Gawker was totally a thing. The mean, dark part of the internet did exist. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Eva did what a lot of us do every night before we go to bed. And she took this incident, this thing she did, she made it a part of her. It was evidence of her badness, her lack of worth.

She spoke of it to nobody for years, but dished out her own internal self-punishment. And she was as ruthless with herself as an angry internet mob could have been. Why do you think it happened?

I mean, there’s like 14 levels of, I mean, like cosmically or personally, like why do I think that I made that mistake?

I think I was really young and I was really ambitious, and I was a little sloppy, and I was a little overenthusiastic, and I did not understand human consequences.

Like I was so disconnected from my own emotions and from other people’s emotions that it didn’t occur to me while I was writing this, that this was a human who had lost his life. It was just really, really out of character.

Like as much as I was like a totally sloppy, insane party animal drunk, like my work was still always really good. And then here was this just like spectacular fuck up.

And it was finally something that was like bigger than all of my self-deception or all of my infinite supply of alcohol and drugs. Like it just, it bottoms me out.

Eva’s bottom was so hard that a few months after the article published, she got sober. Fleva was set aside. And so was the life that she had lived.

Daytime Eva made it a few more months. But her mistake haunted her everywhere she went. Living in New York City meant she’d hear the words New York over and over.

And the words New York would make her think of the New York Times. Which would make her think of her mistake. After nearly a year, she packed up everything she owned and moved to Portland, Oregon.

Nobody asked her to leave New York. Nobody ran her out of town. She was starting over.

Or she was running away.

I mean, I made no money. I wrote about restaurants. I did nothing that had any stakes at all.

And I remember just being like, I’m just, I’m going to live my life privately.

Like, I’m just going to have a private life and a quiet life and live in Portland and like, live in this house and pay $400 a month in rent and sleep in a food town on the floor. And I’m 27 and like, everything is fine.

And I’m just going to eat Oreos. And like, it’s great. And I’m going to go to grad school and become an academic and completely change my career so that I never have to be in this position again.

Right? Scholarly stuff gets peer reviewed. It’s a conversation with like five people.

I’m going to write about domestic architecture. Like, everything is going to be fine. And I’m just brand new Eva, totally brand new Eva.

And I’m just going to like cut this thing out of my mind.

Brand new Eva spent some time in Portland and moved to Berkeley for grad school. This life-changing mistake was something she didn’t talk about with anyone until about a year ago.

I’m working with this woman and she’s kind of helping guide me through just like looking at my life through the lens of my career.

And one of the things that she asked me to do is kind of write down a list of like things I had done that didn’t like feel great.

Sounds great, right? Like so fun, best list ever. So Eva works out her list, but the New York Times, Vider, Dave Anderson, it doesn’t make the cut.

Because the point of this list was to include things that could be fixed.

But I was working with this woman who I really, really trusted and I realized I hadn’t trusted anybody as much as I trusted her. I also by this point had met my husband who really, really loves me unconditionally.

I had this experience of profound romantic love that also came with this really unconditional acceptance and this woman who I was working with. So I was like, okay, I’m just going to take this out for a walk.

I went to her house and we talked about everything else, which was all like, I didn’t return an email. She was like, okay, go return that email.

My favorite, delete it.

Right. Exactly.

Never happened. Doesn’t count.

Then I was like, okay, here’s a really, really, really, really, really, really bad one. I remember I didn’t make eye contact with her. I was so terrified that she was just going to fire me.

Instead, I told her about this and she was like, okay. Yeah, that is really bad. She was like, okay, so who are the people who were involved in the story?

I wrote down all the people who were involved in the story. The photographer, the editor, the publicist, the person who did the correction. We came up with a plan that I would just call them and talk to them about it.

And I think for like four or five months I kept forgetting.

This is the kind of thing that makes my heart pound even thinking about it. If burying your feelings and memories is hard, then dredging them up and confronting them is not going to be a comfortable experience.

So I don’t blame Eva for putting it off for months. But eventually she couldn’t put it off anymore. She had to make a move.

So she started with Dave Anderson, the photographer.

In the eight or so years since they’d last spoken when he called to point out her mistake, Eva was certain that this piece had affected him negatively, that her mistake had detracted from his work, that there was bad blood.

She sent him an email and asked to talk, and he said yes. They set a date, and she called him.

My heart was like pounding again. I was just like, I don’t even know what to say. I didn’t like have a script.

I was just like, okay, I know what I basically want to get across, right? Which is that I was careless with his work, and I was wrong, and that I made a mistake.

And by this point, I’d been able to say like I was wrong, and I made a mistake a couple of times. So we get on the phone, we sort of start talking, and he’s like, yeah, so you know, what are you doing? Where are you?

And then he was like, so where are you calling? And I just said, I was like, as you probably recall, I wrote a story about your work for the New York Times. And I am calling to apologize.

And I have thought about it probably every day since then. And I said, I was like, I’m not calling for forgiveness. I just need to say this to you.

And his response was so not what I expected.

No big deal.

This is the photographer, Dave Anderson.

It really wasn’t a big deal. I knew it was a big deal for her because she was a young, talented, amazingly talented writer who was very ambitious and was getting opportunities at an age people don’t often get them.

And this was her big bright shining moment. And I knew that an oversight like that could have devastating consequences to her as an aspiring reporter.

I remember when he said that, I was like, it had never occurred to me that a response would be compassion because I had no framework for compassion for anyone or myself. And he didn’t say like, it’s okay.

He was just like, you didn’t deserve the punishment that you gave yourself. And that was kind of mind blowing.

Well, I think she was shocked. That’s my reaction, that she was shocked and then she was incredibly relieved. And I think, you know, I said to her, you know, I really liked you.

I thought you were great. I was hoping we would be friends like all these things. And I’m so glad to have this opportunity to reconnect.

I’m so glad you called. She said, you know, I don’t think you have any idea how much of a role in my life this thing has had in the years since it occurred.

And while I knew at the time it was a really big thing and it would have repercussions for her, I was not prepared to hear how it had haunted her and haunted her for years and years and years.

It was almost like the initial pain had not faded for her. It had just festered. I felt terribly for her.

How do you feel, though, to be told you didn’t deserve what you did to yourself?

Oh, my God.

It was just like, I mean, I just got like full body shivers just hearing you repeat that.

Like I just was like, it’s like everything suddenly makes, like why I had left New York so suddenly, why I had just stopped pitching anything, why I had given up on the idea of like writing a book, why I had moved to a town where I knew one person

who I knew wouldn’t ever care. I just, I just, it’s like I scrolled through the last like seven years of my life and I was like, oh my God, this thing that I’ve been carrying around has like colored every single decision that I have made in ways that

I haven’t even known. And all of a sudden this person is saying like, like, yes, you made a mistake. Yes, it was really bad. And also like, like you’re still a really good person.

And I just, I remember like trying to, I remember crying. I mean, I cried and I was like, it was like being seen really fully in a way that like wasn’t dangerous or bad or judgmental.

And it was kind of, there was a lot of that kind of happening around this time where people were starting to see me and I was starting to allow myself to be seen.

And this felt like another way in which being seen could be a really powerful thing instead of like if somebody sees that I am capable of making a terrible mistake, then the question that I wake up every morning thinking, you know, am I loved and

like, how am I going to lose that? Like maybe that doesn’t need to always be the first thing that I think.

What does it feel like to give someone absolution like that?

Oh, my gosh. I mean, you don’t get an opportunity to be heroic very often. I felt like a hero, and I didn’t have to do anything.

That’s the greatest gift anyone can give you. I didn’t have to fake it. I didn’t have to lie to her.

I didn’t have to be disingenuous. I mean, everything was real, and gosh, you know, I don’t really want to be a part of anyone’s burden, but if I happen to be, then the sooner I can get it off their shoulders, the sooner the better.

And so I felt really good about it. I was proud, you know, and, you know, I was incredibly impressed with her. Again, you know, I always, she’s impressive.

She’s always impressive.

One of the hardest things to learn and to remember is that you are not the things that you’ve done. We do, all of us, contain multitudes.

We’ve done incredible things and terrible things and things that are more terrible in our heads than they actually were in real life. But choose a random sampling of things we’ve done and will we remember the 99 good ones or okay ones? No.

We’ll spend our time obsessing over the one that missed the mark, the one we shouldn’t have said or done or written, the thing that got called out in a meeting or on the internet or in a correction in the New York Times.

I thought it was so terrible and it actually wasn’t so terrible.

And so what I feel now is shame at having made such a big deal out of it, which is just this second layer of ways in which I can judge myself, which is so like, we’re too loud, we’re not loud enough, we’re overreacting, we’re underreacting, etc.

And I’m just like, okay, I just at every point really did the best with what I could and that capacity just increased.

We do for the most part, just do the best we can. And that’s easy to say when we’re doing well, when things are falling into place for us, when doing our best is good enough, it’s much, much harder when we fall short.

That’s why we do things like lay in bed at night and walk through scenarios that will probably never happen. Why we have conversations and even arguments in our heads that will never happen in real life.

It’s why Eva could keep a death grip on one sentence she wrote in 2007 and turn it into a whole story about how bad she is and unworthy. How she could drop everything she worked for and run from a city she loved.

This is something I see in so many people. My friends, acquaintances, strangers, myself. Fight a quarter for every minute I spend obsessing on my mistakes and shortcomings on all the wrong things I’ve done or said.

I would seriously be doing Scrooge McDuck dives into a swimming pool of money every single morning. The kindness and compassion that Dave showed to Eva is so much easier to come by than kindness and compassion from ourselves.

We are quicker to lift the burden off another person than to unyoke ourselves from our shortcomings. We are, tried as it is, our own worst enemies and critics, slow to show ourselves the love we would give to another.

We are always looking to someone else to absolve us of our sins, to tell us we are okay, that we are not beyond redemption, that we aren’t just flaming dumpster fires pretending to be people. When, couldn’t we just tell ourselves that?

Probably, but, I mean, I wouldn’t believe me. Dave is a hero, because he showed a person love who didn’t think she deserved it.

He didn’t give her the keys to free herself from the internal prison cell she’d built, but he showed her where she’d hidden them. Eva’s her own hero, because she did what is so hard to do.

She picked up the keys, turned them in the lock, and let herself go. Now, Eva’s enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Berkeley.

She’s married to a lovely man. She’s teaching, and she feels like she’s really good at it. She’s so California, she took yoga teacher training, folks.

She’s happy. In the book she always wanted to write, she’s writing it. It’s called How to Be Loved.

Terrible, Thanks For Asking is hosted by me, Nora McInerny. Our producer is Hans Butow. He is just the best.

I really like him as a person. Special thanks this week to Anna Reed, Jonathan Blakely, Colleen Schaack, Kate Moose and Molly Bloom. You are angels.

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Here’s what you do. You text terrible2 to 677-677, and we’ll text you a link with something that wasn’t in this podcast. I can’t tell you what it is because it’s a surprise.

That’s my baby in the background. It’s just, you know what it is? I’ll tell you.

It’s 18 minutes of just the baby talking over me in a sound booth, and then me saying things like, Oh, baby! So if that kind of content sounds interesting to you, you’ll want to text Terrible2 to 677-677. I mean, these could be anything.

This could be several minutes of me sneezing into the microphone, of me accidentally eating while we’re recording, of me having trouble saying common words, like, we are recording, my baby hiccuping and me getting angry. Who knows?

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Can you believe this kid? Some people’s children. This is millennials, right?

Or I don’t know, is this a millennial? He was born in the millennium. I don’t know.

Is he a millennial? Somebody tell me. Is my baby a millennial?

Please let me know on Twitter. Terrible, Thanks For Asking is a production of American Public Media.