CONFESSION 63

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"Wagner gave me PTSD."
It took Wagner 26 years to write his opera series, the Ring Cycle. It would take four nights at the opera and at least 15 hours to to watch and perform the entire thing. So what was a relative newcomer Jad Abumrad of young and failing Radiolab lab of 2004 doing trying to somehow describe the significance of this work to radio listeners in an hour? He was losing his goddamn mind. Months of work later, four missed deadlines, Abumrad was about to get fired.

After the piece aired, Abumrad noticed that his heart would race, the room would spin and his palms would sweat if he found himself running late. "Wagner gave me PTSD," he said, and we all laughed, audio producers and enthusiasts in a conference hall with close to 500 attendees at this year's Third Coast Festival Conference. But we all laughed knowingly. He was describing that dark dark place of deadlines, anxiety, fear, failure and unemployment.

Abumrad didn't get fired. He was a bigshot with a bigshot show, a bigshot like Ira Glass whose name was mentioned at every session this weekend. The Wagner show drove Abumrad into madness, into a dark German forest, as he put it. Abumrad struggled with the 50+ characters in the opera, none of whom could be cut from the podcast, insisted opera experts, psychologists, writers, and other bigshots he interviewed for the show. Eventually, he found his way out of the forest, and for the first time produced the kind of Radiolab show he dreamed of but until then couldn't pull off. Abumrad suggests regular, if infrequent, trips into the forest to push yourself, to sweat, to feel stupid, and then to come out the other end having learned something new about yourself.

I was in that forest for a couple weeks this year when the new school year was starting. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was drowning under anxiety and stress. I felt alone. The second part of my job at this school, the job of a journalist and community organizer, is a lonely one. I work in a school with teachers and students, not in a community center or radio station with reporters, editors, technologists, designers. I found guidance from a friend who's been with me through my community media days. We sat in my room in the evenings, and he poured on the ideas, and we talked and talked and talked. I missed this. He was helping me out of the forest.

And when I got mostly out, another friend told me she was pregnant. We were pregnant, I realized. The world was bigger, I remembered, then these deadlines, calendars, and racing hearts. My stress was gone. There was a baby on the way.