Note: This post includes some profanity.
{photo by Ed Gregory}
This grief has a gravity
It pulls me down
But a tiny voice whispers in my mind
"You are lost, hope is gone
But you must go on
And do the next right thing."
“The Next Right Thing,” Robert Lopez/Kristen Anderson-Lopez
My 30th year on earth was shaped by two forces. The first: A bad thing I did, a mistake I made that hurt people, myself included, and from which I’m still reeling. The second: A good thing I did, a story I lived and breathed and refashioned into an audio drama.
I have never fucked up as badly nor created anything as beautiful as I did this year.
One threatened to drown me, spiraling in the pain and mess of it all; the other kept lifting my head above the water and making me laugh and giving me something to love, something to fight for.
What is saving your life right now? It’s a question Barbara Brown Taylor asks in her book An Altar in the World. I’ve seen other bloggers answer this question, have answered it myself, but never before have I been so sure about what is killing me and what is saving me.
This year, what saved me was telling my story by telling someone else’s story … someone else who grew up evangelical, someone else who got depressed and drank too much, someone else who got hurt by people who claimed to speak for God and stopped seeing God altogether and felt so very, very alone.
Her name is Addie. “Everything is just so fucked up for me right now. It’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” her character says [in my adaptation] when she’s hit rock bottom. Months after writing that line, I found a variation of it in an unsent letter I’d written around the same time.
Years before Addie reached this point, when she was still aglow with hope and certainty, someone asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She said something like, “I don’t know exactly, I just know that I don’t want to live a normal suburban life either. I want to do something great for the Lord.” In a blog post of mine from 2010, I found, again, a parallel: “I’ve discovered a heart for missions and a discontent for living the typical suburban middle-class life with a 9-5 office job and all the trappings. I want to live for God wholeheartedly.”
When I first read Addie Zierman’s book When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over, I was 25 years old, I had just broken up with my first boyfriend, and I felt very alone as a Christian radio host and a Christian youth worker who wasn’t sure she believed in God anymore.
Except for the part about marrying young, Addie’s story was, in many ways, my story. When I met the author a month later, I remember marveling over our similarities. We were both writers, we had both attended evangelical colleges in the Midwest, we had both lived in China during pivotal times in our lives, and the boy-I-thought-I-would-marry had the same name as the boy she married.
I tore through the book in two days and felt absolutely seen and absolutely gutted by the end. Yes, that is what it feels like to be so alone. Oh, I wish I was on the other side of this. Every time I reread the book, it would hit me hard. It was always at the top of the list of books I would recommend to people like me, people who liked memoirs, people who had grown up evangelical … really, anyone.
Time passed. I moved to Denver. I stopped spending all my time with conservative evangelicals. I found a church that didn’t make me feel tense, that felt like home … until it didn’t anymore. I worked as an administrative assistant and I played board games and ran in my spare time. I found boys who wanted to date me, but who were almost never the boys I wanted to date. I got a cat.
And then, lost and restless and creatively unfulfilled, I moved to Syracuse, New York, to get my bearings and get my master’s degree in entertainment media. I started telling stories I liked, stories in sound and color that I was proud to put into the world, stories that, in spite of myself, tended to have some sort of connection to religion or spirituality. For all I’d let go of, I couldn’t help but plumb the depths of my childhood faith and its second and third cousins for glimpses of beauty and mystery and love.
But in the meantime, I was falling into another bout of depression, and it was a bad one. When things were at their worst, I felt around in the dark for something, anything, to feel less alone.
On my first try, I found a week’s worth of companionship behind a hundred trampled red flags.
I didn’t know who was seducing whom: him, me, both of us, or neither of us.
All I knew was that I was playing with fire, but I didn’t want to stop. And then I did, and everything caught up with me, and it wasn’t pretty. Everything was still dark, but now the darkness – or part of it, at least – had a name. Suddenly I was no longer swamped by the absence of feeling, that indescribable void, but by the pain of heartbreak.
I drank too much. I listened to “All Will Be Well” by the Gabe Dixon Band over and over again until I felt a glimmer of hope, or at least calm enough to fall asleep. I went to group therapy. I talked and thought incessantly about What Happened, trying to answer my unanswered questions and understand my feelings, building something one day and then burning it down the next.
On my second try, I found Addie’s book again.
But I'll keep looking for the bright side
In the darkest hour of night
Keep an open eye to the sky
Try to find all my lost faith
“Bye Bye Symphony,” Foxy Shazam
In one of my spring classes, I was tasked with building a long-form audio project of my choice. When We Were on Fire flitted into my mind, but I brushed the idea aside, or tried to. That would be too big and too much for one semester. On the first day of class, I told my professor that I would make soundscapes of poems. But no, almost as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t it; I would regret it if I didn’t make a dramatic audio production before leaving Syracuse. Two days later, I wrote to a friend and fellow reader of Addie’s work that “I think I'm going to adapt Addie Zierman's ‘When We Were On Fire’ for radio drama this semester.”
And indeed it was too big and it was too much, but I wouldn’t trade those sleepless nights for anything in the world.
Little by little, I stopped obsessing over What Happened and I started obsessing over Addie’s story.
I started by rereading the book and rhapsodizing about who should play who, scribbling notes during law class as I scanned the room. One evening, I sat down to begin the script for part one and never made it to bed. To turn 100 pages of prose into a 10-page script without losing the essence of the story was a challenge I fell head over heels in love with. I was all in.
Addie has a beautiful, almost cinematic, way of writing scenes and dialogue. Some of these conversations I was able to bring virtually untouched into my adaptation, others were a little shorter or longer or different, and still others were my own informed creations.
I loved my scripts as much as I loved the production they became, the way each scene flowed into the next, how I made it make sense without a narrator, how my dialogue blended so well with Addie’s dialogue that I soon forgot which was which. The book is organized into four parts, so I wrote four scripts, usually in eight-hour blocks of time. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fourth script. And I saw that it was good, then tried to get a couple hours of sleep before class.
I said “yes” to many things that semester – too many things – but my audio drama was the only one I fell in love with, the only one that rarely felt like work, the only one that made the winter darkness and the inner darkness a little lighter around the edges. Part of this was because of the people I met and worked with to bring the story to life.
Because it’s a memoir, my lead actress would be in almost every scene. I needed someone who wasn’t just willing to do me a favor, but someone who was excited for the role and had the time and capacity to spend long hours in the studio talking, crying, laughing, flirting, singing, and shouting. I found this person in Aria Sivick, who has since become one of my dearest friends. And yet, for all the time we’ve spent together outside the studio, it will be months, if not years, before the number of hours I’ve heard her as herself surpasses the number of hours I’ve heard her as Addie. Josie and Grace played her two best friends; Josh was the husband; Will, the emotionally abusive high school boyfriend. Matt, Kari, Tina, Brendan, Ashleigh, Jonathan, and dozens of others lent me their voices.
{production art by Skylar White}
Somewhere along the way, I realized that I wasn’t just telling Addie’s story; I was also writing a love letter to the Newhouse School. I cast as many of my friends and professors as I could, and for those who didn’t have time to come to the studio, I pulled clips from other podcasts we’d recorded together and slid them into the background of coffee shop scenes. I even asked a professor on sabbatical in Australia if he would record himself saying a line that I could fold into one of those scenes. The day before spring break, I had 10 people scheduled to come in and record a few lines each, and all of them showed up. Another morning, my production class and I sang three verses of the hymn It Is Well with My Soul for one of my montages, and then, while the recording light was still on, we became doctors and nurses and bachelorette party attendees.
Some of my fondest memories are of those Tuesday nights in the studio, when I would bring chips and guac and that evening’s scripts, and the two or three or four of us would record for a few hours. My studio engineer would set up the microphones: Two Neumann U87s, at least, and a shotgun mic. My actors would face each other, their scripts on blanketed music stands to minimize reflections, and I would direct them from the control room. Usually I said things like, “Let’s do the scene again, but sound more drunk,” or “This time, talk over each other,” or “Say ‘born again’ like this.” The most memorable days, though, were those when I said, “Make the sounds you make with your mouth when you’re kissing someone.”
I loved directing. I loved knowing how I wanted a line to be said and being able to communicate that and hearing my actors bring their characters to life. I loved when they would take a scene in a different direction than I expected and it would just work. I loved the energy in the room. I loved feeling confident and inspiring confidence, that magical moment when you hear a line and maybe you can’t say exactly why, but you know: That’s it. That’s the one. And I loved laughing. We laughed so much, over flubbed lines and in conversations between takes and especially with those awkward kissing simulations.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
“How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43),” Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My love overwhelmed me at times, in the best, but perhaps not most productive, ways. I would fall in love with the way a scene sounded once I had picked the takes, or added the sound effects, or mixed in the music, and I would listen over and over and over again and grin like a crazy person.
I would spiritually manipulate myself every time I heard a particular scene in part one. Listening to part two made me believe in love again. A scene in part three made me cry even before I’d done any of the sound design. And then in part four, I found myself breathing along with Aria when her character was in labor.
“This is fucking brilliant,” I would say to myself, usually in the middle of the night in the middle of my couch, in the middle of one of my 44 scenes, and even in those words I was quoting myself, quoting a line I had written for one of the characters. I can still hear Grace say those words, and the clink of the glasses and the laughter of her friends and the buzz of the restaurant I built around her, around them. But of course that’s because I listened to that scene and every scene hundreds and hundreds of times.
It wasn’t always euphoria, though. The closer I got to the day of my Listening Party, the more I would psych myself out that I wouldn’t finish in time. “I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m fucked,” I would mutter, and then guzzle another soda and get back to work.
“It was my whole life,” I tell people, but of course it wasn’t, of course I had other classes, other commitments, other things I signed up for that I didn’t realize were too much until it was too late. But When We Were on Fire had my whole heart.
Now I know you're my true north
'Cause I am lost in the woods
Up is down, day is night
When you're not there
“Lost in the Woods,” Robert Lopez/Kristen Anderson-Lopez
Addie knew about my project from the beginning and gave me her blessing, but as I prepared for my Listening Party, I had a wild idea that I couldn’t shake. I asked for a budget from the school, and, once secured, I invited her to Syracuse for the big event.
She said yes.
May 7, 2019, will always be one of the best days of my life.
I felt it in my soul, then, and I feel it now. But it didn’t start out that way. I had played snippets of half-finished scenes for a few people, but for the most part had kept it close to my chest, waiting until everything was perfect to share it with my world. And then that Tuesday arrived and it wasn’t perfect. That was the closest I got to having a meltdown, that last night as I watched the hours tick away and realized that I would have to use placeholder music and rough transitions and rushed sound design in a few scenes. I had been awake for two days and two nights at this point, spending those nights clawing my way through what was left and testing the acoustics in the room, losing myself for an hour or two, weaving between the desks as I listened, back and forth, back and forth, then returning to my body with a jolt and a rush as I looked at the time, looked at all the empty chairs staring back at me, looked into a future where I had let myself down. This was the day I had looked forward to all semester, and it would not be all I had hoped it would be. I did everything I could in the time I had, then left, deflated, to take a shower.
If I had let this train of thought continue, I know I would be looking back on that night with regret – not because my production wasn’t perfect, but because I had let its imperfections ruin what should’ve been a beautiful night.
But I didn’t. I have no regrets, and it was beautiful; it was everything I hoped it would be.
When I got back to my apartment that night, bleary-eyed and tipsy and full of love, I reached for my journal to write down everything I could remember, everything everyone had said, how it felt to be in that room, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I pulled out my phone and recorded a voice memo. In the six minutes I was recording, I fell asleep three times, and even when I was awake I sounded like a parody of an exhausted person, but I have never been happier. When I listen to those six minutes, it takes me back more than written words ever could.
In some ways, this was the ultimate solo project, but in other ways … we made this, the 45 of us. Or rather, the 73 of us. On the back of the program, I wrote the names of everyone who had helped me along the way: Those who had read my scripts and given me feedback on auditions, those who voiced characters and members of the crowd, those who offered moral support and technical support and food. We were in the room that night, some of us wearing blindfolds, listening for our voices and the voices of our friends, not knowing what to expect, but finding ourselves swept up in the energy of the story, the energy in the room.
I know that the greatest thing is to love someone and be loved in return, but surely the second greatest is to make something you love and share it with others who love it too.
I’ve never made anything before that I loved so much or was as proud of as this audio drama. It didn’t solve my problems or fix my depression, but it gave me something to love and to pour myself into. It was a cathartic release and a reminder that beauty can still come from brokenness.
What saved me was discovering that I, who had only ever made halting imitations of other people’s radio dramas, could adapt a book so beautifully that the author would thank me for taking care of her story and my professor would be speechless and my friends would laugh and exclaim at all the right moments, and I would forget to be nervous.
“I don’t know what my life will be like when it no longer revolves around your life,” I told Addie that night. We all laughed, but I was at least half serious.
When you’re depressed, it’s hard to care about much of anything. I don’t know how many stories had the latent ability to pull me out of the nasty spiral I was in, but I’m so grateful that Addie’s was one of them.
Me, Addie, and Aria at the Listening Party {photo credit: Ellie Coggins}
When my Christian friends listen to my radio drama, they usually ask, “How similar is this to your story?”, meaning, I assume, “Do you still believe in God?” or “Are you still a Christian?”. And my answer is, “I don’t know.” For more than a year now, I’ve called myself a Christian Agnostic. The order of the words is important to me, Christian modifying Agnostic rather than the other way around.
“I almost got prayer beads the other day,” Addie says in my radio drama. “Everyone I knew growing up thought they were silly, they kind of pitied those who needed them. But it felt like a way to maybe connect my body and soul again. I like the word meditation more than prayer. Meditation, or contemplation. To contemplate love and light. Maybe that’s what prayer is.”
I don’t pray much anymore, but sometimes I sing. This fall, I walked the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage through northern Spain. Today, religious and nonreligious people walk much of the same route as their medieval forebears, more than a thousand pilgrims arriving in Santiago de Compostela most days.
I told those I met along the way that I was here to figure out what to do next with my life. That was true, but I also checked the box that said I was there for spiritual reasons, and sometimes, when I was alone on the road, I would find myself singing the hymns of my childhood. The language of faith is my second language. Sometimes, most of the time, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard, but sometimes I catch a glimpse of something else, of love or mystery or beauty, and I feel like I've stumbled across something right, whether or not it's literally true.
Now, back in Denver in these final, waning days of 2019, I’ve found myself drawn, as I always am, to the season of Advent. I think it’s because Advent is about longing, waiting, and darkness, about finding little bits of hope when everything seems bleak, even if none of the dots seem to be connecting. I am still as lost and restless as I was when I left Colorado a year and a half ago. Now more than ever, I want to light candles in the dark and whisper prayers for hope, peace, joy, and love.
Immersing myself in Addie’s story helped me work through parts of my own, but I can’t ride the coattails of this story, or any story, forever. Addie’s life continues after the last page of When We Were on Fire, and so does mine.
Now, I need something else to save me.
I know what it’s like to hold joy in one hand and sorrow in the other, to be broken and whole at the same time, to love too much in all the right ways … and all the wrong ways.
Right now, I can’t imagine loving another story as much as I’ve loved this one. I suppose that’s normal. I suppose it’s like when a relationship ends: You can’t imagine loving anyone else as much as you love this person.
But I know I will, someday. Someday, another one will steal my heart and together we will stand on clifftops and run through city streets, following love and beauty and mystery wherever they lead, and I will feel so much more alive and so much more at peace than I ever thought I would. And I will know that this, this is the best story yet, better than the ones I scripted in my mind, better than the ones with the red flags, better than the ones with mania at one end and depression at the other. I will reach out and lean in, remembering that magical moment when maybe I couldn’t say exactly why, but I knew: That’s it. That’s the one.
'Cause there is always a wrong to your right
And there will always be a war somewhere to fight
And god knows I've had some rough fucking years
Oh lord, oh lord, keep on keeping on
“Oh Lord,” Foxy Shazam