Update on life and moving back

Pushin Hi. Hello Again in the studio? Yes and in your earbuds. and Wh do we have on the docket today? This one, her name's Julia. Okay, this episode is the first one that I ever did with a stranger Like someone that wasn't a friend or a family. and it was a little scary. It was a little intimidating Julie is a journalist and I needed to like step up. U It's a great episode. Partly because of Julia kept me on the straight and narrow. Yeah, no, I was gonna say it's great not because of us, but because of Julia and spoilerert another woman we talk to If you stick around at the end of the episode, I talk again with Julia and And what was really very gratifying to me was how the episode really did have an important impact on our life U All right, well I'm looking forward to listening to this one again. Yes, let's both Sit down. I'm already seated by and Silence Uh, do you have any snacks? No, I can't eat a snack silently. It was a trick question. Oh, did I pass? Yes, you did. Thank God. All right, and here we go Oh but first. We're going to pay those bills Pay my automobils. W a word from our sponsor This is an IiHart podcast. Guaranteed human This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card There's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life Apple card is one of those things It can be applied for right in the wallet app on iPhone and approval can happen in minutes So it's ready to use immediately I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet fishing out the credit card, using it, putting it back in my wallet or oops, maybe I use cash. 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Addal term and condions apply for bonus offers, sububject to change or end at any time Hello Happy birthday, birthday girl Are you going out for dinner tonight with Rick or anything? What? It's not my birthday for another seven months. He hang on a second. Hang on. I'm hanging.ang I'm in traffic, so that's perfect Acording to my calendar alert, it is your birthday. my birthday. Are you stop? You're one hundred percent sure I don't know how many times I'm going to say it's not my birthday, and how many times you're going to repeat that it is my birthday This year you didn't actually remember this year you forgot to call me on my birthday Not even an email Okay. Okay, what about that time you got me an ice cream cake for my birthday Knowing I'm lactose sensitive. Do you remember The man at the roller ring kept on knocking on the bathroom door Kidding me? Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein And this is heavyweight Today's episode Julia Julia is a journalist And she's endlessly curious about the world around her Once, on assignment for the New York Times, she investigated the benefits of bacteria And as a part of her research, she didn't bathe for a month She's done political stories too where she's kept after a source or a story for years. Which is what makes her reluctance to seek out the answer to a question that's been dogging her for over two decades All the more curious I think the story begins on a Monday I'm pretty sure it's a Monday And I was fourteen years old This is Julia And the question she can't stop thinking about revolves around a moment from her own life. It all began twenty one years ago. in the eighth grade at one of the fanciest all girl schools in Montreal. I remember wearing my itchy green You have to wear a uniform there? Yes. Okay. That's sort of a puke green uniform with a button down white shirt. and on Mondays we had to wear ties We also have bloomers I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were. It was just sort of like A balloon with holes in the bottom. And were they ruffled? No U Cursed with a lifelong inability to distinguish between bloomers, culotes, pantaattes, pantaloons, drawers, and even knickerbockkers, I was glad for the opportunity to finally sort it all out The shape of it. But that's not why we're here So after about fifteen minutes of inquiry, I was ready to move on Okay, sorry. Yes. go go on and as I left Morning Assembly on Monday and walked into Homeeroom I lookooked for my desk And u I stopped and looked around and It was missing My desk was gone. And that was where it started The desk had been hidden by her classmates, and that was just the beginning Without warning, the girls she'd been friends with since third grade completely froze her out And Julia had no clue why To top it off, her best friend was the ringleader The girl who used to be my best friend I guess we can give her a name. Let's call her Jane. It was just strange Kning that she and I had hung out. at my house and all of the secrets we'd exchanged and all of the fun we'd had and then you know, seeing seeing how she was being now, it just it was a bit surreal, but Um So then what started happening was every time she walked into the classroom Julia noticed that the girls would drop what they were doing and study her If she so much has scratched her nose or sniffled They'd furiously take notes It seemed like everyone was collaborating on some big project that she knew nothing about The notes were collected by Jane who buried them in her desk The girls kept at it Day after day until finally, Julia reached her breaking point She gathered up her courage and like the good reporters, she'd eventually become decided to investigate I eventually snuck into homeroom one day during recess, it was empty and I searched Jane's desk. And there at the bottom I found nicely bound document with a cover page. And I picked it up and read it and said one hundred reasons why we hate Julia In my memory, this document I'm holding is hundred pages long, but I'm sure it was only ten and I opened it and Inside I read about myself Everything was something about me that they hated I hate the way she walks I hate the sound of her voice I hate her face After that, Julia started skipping school Eventually, she told her parents what was going on and they contacted the administration Bullying continued Ultimately, her parents decided that the only solution was to send her to a new school But Julia still had a few weeks left at the old one I became a double agent I pretended that I was coming back the following year and I didn't tell anyone I was Changing schools because I had no friends left to tell The school year ended, and her new life began But because her new school was so close to the old one Julia lived in constant fear that her old life would find her Every day, she'd map her route to and from school carefully avoiding the streets or old friends lived on. The coffee shops they hung out at And for the most part It worked. For those first few weeks at her new school, she managed to hide in plain sight She was starting to feel like things would be okay Then One day after school, Julia was upstairs in the den, doing homework. and the doorbell rang She went to her parents' bedroom window and looked down at the doorstep and saw standing there Her former best friend Jane. along with a few of her old classmates. I hit the ground as if someone was shelling the second floor windows I was in a state of total panic and I saw them of my mind's eye there on the front steps. waiting for someone to answer the door and u I was just on the ground trying to breathe and they they rang the doorbell again. and I waited Eventually They left And this is the moment that Julia has fixated on for over twenty years Why had the girl shown up at her door And what do they want? Maybe they'd shown up to bully her But maybe they'd had a change of heart Reized how mean they'd been and we're there to apologize Whatever the case, Julia was too scared to open the door and find out And that decision to not go downstairs and face the girls who tormented her. still haunts Julia Even listening to her talk about it all these years later It still feels raw I'm thirty five now and day has become One of my only regrets. because the memory of my weakness. sometometimes supersedes all of the strong things I've done since then. And it makes me feel weak even though you were You were just a child. I was fourteen I think it's the memory of that fear still somewhere In my physiology, it makes me fearful when I think of it. I just wish I'd gone down there. I wish I'd had the guts Oh What do you think has stopped you up until now from just posing the question, you know, like just finding the girls and just asking them why they were there that day? I'm afraid to find out what I did to bring on the bullying because it's very possible that I was bad I think deep down, I don't really know what was wrong. I don't know what was wrong with me and I don't want to know what was wrong with me I mean, it feels like you're being really hard on yourself or being hard on this littleittle kid, basically, you know? Like you look at photographs of yourself at that age U I try not to Well, I think you'd be surprised by like I mean, I have memories of being that age where I thought like I was at weddings and I thought I was like flirting with adult women and stuff like that and I look at pictures of myself and I look like A cabbage patched doll You know? I think I probably looked like the Tin man because I had a full set of braces. and then after I graduated from my braces, I immediately went to headgeear neck gear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that, I've only seen them on TV sitcoms comombine that with My glasses It was a sad state of affairs As soon as she graduated high school Julia left Montreal for good. depending on how, you know, the outcome of that conversation, I might have chosen not to leave Montreal U When I amm in Montreal, once a year I I avoid the neighborhood I grew up in where all of this went down for the most part and Those girls are long gone. I mean, we're all grown as women now with careers and jobs and kids. and Here I am avoiding friends of friends on Facebook because I don't want any of those girls to know what's going on with my life Do you feel like had you answered the door and they kind apologized to you That would have changed your life in some way that it would have changed your relationship with your past and the city and these friends U I think it might have I'll never know. what they wanted to say to me. because I didn't answer the door It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your whole life running from So when I gently suggest that you try to find out why they were at the door that day Julia suggests that maybe the past should just stay in the past You know, we move on with our lives and we You know, we move on. And u It's another thing to open up, you know, that Pandora's box again Even the language that you're using about fear of opening up that Pandora's box, it is so similar to the language that you used in describing like fear of opening that door So what you're saying is I should really just finish the job. I think so fter the break. Oing Pandora's box. This show is brought to you by Better Help. BetterHelp's twenty twenty six State of Stigma repeport surveyed two thousand Americans and revealed that eighty five percent of Americans believe getting support is wise, yet, seventy four percent said society discourages people from doing so Lila Holt, Do you believe in therapy I go regularly tail mustusts All my friends are in therapy. When I was younger growing up in the nineteen forties, therapy was more of a stigma. Your generation talks about mental health more openly. I think that's wonderful. I think it's healthy. 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Visit beachbum dot com to find a location near you In spite of her initial trepidation, once Julia decided to find out why the girls came to her door that day She was all in Watching her take it on was impressive Julia went back to Montreal and reached out to her former best friend, Jane who agreed to meet with her, but said she didn't remember anything And so for the first time since eighth grade Julia returned to her former school to go through the yearbook and find the names of her old classmates And then She started searching I reached out to probably twelve girls from Um, from my my grade And at my worst moments, I imagined that none of them were going to write back and it was sort of going to feel like You know, I was I was on the outside of the group again, you know And that the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were still in play and all that. But then the responses started to trickle in Hello. Hello. Hello? Yes. This is Julia. Julia logged hours and hours of interviews and rang my doorbell. I thought you might have been one of them. I don't think so. Do you remember anything about that? Was I there? No. Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school, to be honest. I remember one time you were hiding in a bathroom stall But just like Jane Not a single person said they could remember showing up at her door that day.. Well, I honestly don't remember doing that. I don't, I don't. I don't, I'm sorry. I don't. I don't remember anything I'd Don't remember it. I promise you I have no recollection of this Well what each of them did remember was their own pain There'd been a lot of bullying that year And no one felt safe Julie heard about one girl who'd found her desk filled with meticulously cut out images from porn magazines Another girl remembered someone spreading rumors that she had AIDS I hated that place, said one It's all a big fog of chaos, said another dark cloud over the class. You never knew who you could trust. We were awful, awful little girls The more Julia heard about it, it started to sound like a Stephen King novel And not one of those cuty ones about clowns or talking cars In almost every conversation, one name kept coming up as the person who had it the worst Even Julia acknowledged it. The name was Sarah Taba Sarah had the misfortune of being the only eighth grader who was slightly overweight. And as such, she was always kept at a distance In high school, I was also someone who existed on the margins So I understand how oftentimes kids like me It's like Sarah Taba become the eyes and ears of the school Fidgety, uncomfortable witnesses Forced to watch from the wings I'm reminded of this all the time with the friends I went to high school with who were more popular than me Remember the time Robert Siolk wore a three piece suit to school I ask? The time Madame Robert slammed the classroom door so hard the clock fell off the wall The day Sharon Weiner got suspended for leaving the schoollyard during recess, Of course they don't They were living their lives But I was on the sidelines taking it all in Remembering Hi Sarah. Hi. It's been a really long time. Yeah. It Yes, it has Having all these conversations made Julia think about Sarah and what she might remember But when she asked her if she had any recollection about the day those girls showed up at her door Sarah couldn't remember anything The first thing I thought of, when you said a group of girls drying his doorbellt, I immediately thought it would be like it wasn't people coming looking for you to be like, We miss you, where are you Grade eight was a bad year at that school. Either you were being bullied and kicked on or you had to turn around and become the bully Yeah, something toxic something dark I think normal bullying, if there's such a thing as normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim and the like But was it was just so pervasive Do you remember the day? that you realize that I was gone. I don't actually know I remember feeling like you were just sad all the time Remember you being sad too Yeah One thing I remember People would call you Tubby Taba Doesn't surprise me, yeah I remember a lot of the stuff like think that our grades behavior had impacts on the staff What do you mean Well I actually assume Iuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't, but Miss McDonalds killed herself the following year Yeah Miss McDonald was Julia's favorite teacher, and Sarah's too. Miss. McDonald had gone to the school as a student and later returned to teach biology She was the fun teacher who wore frog earrings? You think that there was something to do with What was happening in the school that caused her to to commit suicide I think it had a role in her depression. She left right in the end of our grade eight year She because what I knew of her It was her school. It was her It was she was an old girl. She was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love of animals and biology in all of us And we were a bunch of brats. I remember there being a lot of associations between that pig that she had on top of her TV. and her a lot of comments about her weight Yeah. had an impact Miss. McDonald had been hospitalized over the summer And when she came back in the fall, she was no longer the biology teacher, but a substitute The last period of the last day she taught before she killed herself was a class called personersal and Religious Education The students consider the class a joke. Sarah was there that day and the grade was just running around doing everything they weren't supposed to do in the class tried to get people to calm down and sit down and pay attention and And she wasn't even trying to teach us anything. I don't even know if there was any material to cover that day And then we showed up at school Monday morning to find out that she killed herself over the weekend He was my Gll M She was the person who survived the school despite not being be stereotypical. prefect or perfect girl. it was in this wonderful round woman who rejuvenated life and an overweight teenager for me, that was like so you don't have to be perfect to keep anything with of my role model who the next year killed herself and like shattered all my dreams that you can go about living your life the way you're living your life in this environment and succeed which made me want to completely change my body The only way that I was going to get through this school was to lose a bunch of weight to gain the respect of these people that have basically disliked me since I was eleven And I did it Yeah, I've been really over the years, I wondered about you. and then when I looked you up on Facebook, I saw pictures of you and I clicked right by them. I thought, oh, I have the wrong person. Yeah because you didn't look like yourself Right. So I mean, you didn't You just stopped eating, it sounds like Yeah in tenth grade. tenth through eleventh grade. and then basically destroyed myself in the process because it's an illness that I've been battling for the last twenty years. It's amazing what your childhood experiences can push you to do that I definitely remember because that's how I ended up in suation I am now. I'm actually talking to you from outside of a clinic for treat and eating disorders Uh I'm really sorry, Sara It's not your fault B the sad reality of all of this since it's like Yeah Please picture, you know my nerdy looking fourteen year old self giving you a big hug. you all Thank do have to let it go because we have to have lunch now but it was nice speaking cute and do keep in touch The conversation had left Julia feeling devastated The scale of her own pain had been altered in the face of Sarah's. Later that night, I couldn't stop thinking about Julia and Sarah's conversation And as I turned it around in my head A theory began to form Miss. McDonald had died around the start of the school year Wasn't it possible that those girls had shown up at Julia's door to let her know Maybe they'd been worried about the way Julia had just disappeared from their school and feared the worst Wasn't it possible the girls had mant good that day that they came to the door And if so Wouldn't knowing that change the way Julia felt about the past twenty years and maybe even change the way she saw herself So I took this last task upon myself Hey, is this Christine? Hey Jennifer, this is. I phoned up all the people Julia had already spoken with And I ran my theory by them honest, I would love to believe that's what their intentions were. I can't be sure about anything. I't say yeah, sure, that's it because I don't have a memory of it Thank you. Bye All right, yall have a great night Bye bye bye Jonathan By bye. Okay. o. okay, take it easy. Bye. Bye bye There was only one thing left for me to do I I just feel like I'm at a loss. Like this whole thing started off as me encouraging you to to give it a try and that it might be helpelful in some way and I donon't feel like I brought you any closer to knowing what happened door that day and I just if there's one of us who's disappointed It certainly isn't me I don't know whether I was emotionally equipped to open the door as a fourteen year old, but To me, the important part is is that I open the door Now I couldn't have U couldn't have confronted that if I hadn't literally Done What we decided we were going to do. if I hadn't had these phone calls and ask these hard questions U And I've forgiven That little girl for being so frightened. I was so ashamed. I was so regretful. And I don't blame myself for being afraid then, I had every right to be It wasn't rational. And so I think the biggest challenge for me in all of this was to allow myself to slip back into that fourteen year old girl's skin and say, lookook, you know, I get it It's okay No, it's okay I'm proud of who I was then. It's been a long time since I could say that And you feel like that's happened, like that's happened in this process? Yeah, I do Well, that makes me feel better Well, I'm happy to make you feel better, Jonathan. Ding Dong U I'm Ding Dong. Is this the part where I rewrite history and answer the door? That's right Ding donong. Okay, I'm answering the door. Okay. Open the door What happened to you I changed schools And you know why