The Moth Radio Hour: Great Expectations

In this hour, expect the unexpected! False assumptions and surprising revelations at home, online, and in the fridge. This episode is hosted by Moth Director Meg Bowles. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Storytellers: Benji Waterhouse makes a house call during his first week as a psychiatrist. Comedian Jamie McDonald finds himself at the center of a Twitter storm. Salima Saxton and her husband try to build the "perfect life". Podcast # 905

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14Meg Bowles?

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles and I'll be your host this time. Expectations. We set them, manage them, and try to live up to them. Sometimes our expectations of what will happen next are spot on, and other times, we miss the mark. All of the stories in this hour deal with the goals we set for ourselves and how we hope things might unfold. Our first story comes from Benji Waterhouse. If you've ever been to a main stage event, you'll know that we bring people to the stage by sharing their answer to a question that we pose to all the storytellers. It's an icebreaker that introduces us to the tellers as they make their way to the stage. So borrowing from that, when I asked Benji,

• 0:56Meg Bowles?

  "When was a time your expectations did not meet up with reality?" he said, "When I was working as a doctor for the National Health Service and realized it was nothing like the TV show Scrubs." Live from the Union Chapel in London, here's Benji Waterhouse.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  I remember when I started at medical school, I was sitting in a great old lecture theatre, wearing a stiff, white coat. And our plummy dean was saying to us, "Your main job as future doctors is to keep your patients alive." Into my fresh notebook, I wrote, "Keep patients alive." And then I underlined it. By the end of the six years, though, I realized that I was less interested in the body and more into the mind. And so, I hung up my now-stained lab coat and specialized in psychiatry. I now know that people are quite confused

• 2:06Speaker 01

  about the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a psychic.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  So, just to quickly explain, psychiatrists are medical doctors who usually specialize in more serious mental illnesses, things like schizophrenia, and can prescribe medications. And, boy, do we.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  We also have the power to detain or section people, which is a strange superpower that allows us to lock a person up in a psychiatric hospital against their will and even force them to take medication without breaking the terms of the Geneva Convention.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  A sad, but what's considered necessary evil to keep patients and society safe. There are a lot of unfair, I think, misconceptions about psychiatrists, that the male ones all have mad families themselves, and wear cashmere jumpers and have beards.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Which just isn't true. This is a machine-washable wool polyester mix.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  The most... It is true, though, that one of my motivations for becoming a psychiatrist was hoping to get my hands on the secret codes to fix my own slightly dysfunctional family. So, I remember turning up optimistically on my first day as a psychiatrist, enthusiastic to get my hands on these secret codes. Instead, I was given a strangle-proof lanyard, a panic alarm, and self-defense training. Our judo instructor was this martial arts guy, and he told us, before he taught us the throws and the slams and stuff, he said, "The biggest bit of advice he would tell

• 3:54Speaker 01

  us if we wanted to last long on the medical register was that we avoid any of our patients committing homicide."

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This was nothing like Frasier.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Or how psychiatry was depicted in Woody Allen movies. But, he said, "Don't worry," he reassured us, "the chances of a psychiatric patient killing a random member of the public are very low." "Thank God for that." "Far more likely," he said, "they'd kill someone they knew, like their family member, or a mental health worker."

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And so, he said, I said, he said though, but don't worry, like, um, the most important thing, he said, was if going to see a patient in their home, the most important thing was that if you're going, it was that you have to go for safety, always go in pairs, if staffing levels allow.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So it was my first week and I was working in this, like, inpatient ward, which also, we also, under a consultant, we also had a clinic. And a patient one day didn't come to his clinic appointment, which my, my boss told me could be a red flag that people are deteriorating, so he wanted me to go and check he was alright. So I was going on this home visit, in this first week, I was alone, obviously. And I knocked on the front door, like, trying to not look like I was absolutely shitting myself. And the person I was going to see was called Billy, and he was a young man with something called paranoid schizophrenia, which, contrary to what Hollywood depicts, isn't actually

• 5:34Speaker 01

  about split minds and multiple personalities, but more usually, delusional ideas and hearing voices. And after knocking on the door, I was pleasantly surprised when Billy opened it, and he gave me a warm smile, and I told him why I was there, and he said, "Oh, sorry, I completely forgot." He said, "Do you wanna come in? Fancy a cup of tea, slice of cake?" I heard these were early signs that Billy was doing okay. So yeah, I gratefully accepted that. I went in, and the daytime TV was bubbling away in the living room, and, like, we went through to the kitchen, and as he was fixing the teas, Billy told me a bit about himself. He said he lived there with his mum, and he said they, they supported each other, and they, like, watched TV together, and he said, although they weren't churchgoers, apparently they watched Countdown religiously.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  But she was just out, he said. I took the opportunity to ask my generic psychiatric questions that my boss had taught me to ask, like, was Billy sleeping OK? Was his mood all right? Was he thinking of killing himself? No, no, no. Everything was fine, he said. Except for the voices. My ears pricked up. And that probably, I thought, explained the unopened packets of medication that I'd noticed on the side table. I tentatively asked him what the voices said. They're telling me to get milk, which is so annoying, because we've already got milk, he said. I relaxed a lot, because even I knew back then that schizophrenic voices are often

• 7:06Speaker 01

  more sinister than that, and psychiatrists don't tend to get struck off or make front pages for having patients well-stuck in the lactose department. But for completeness, I asked, do they say anything else? And Billy said, well, yeah, they're not going to like me telling you, but yeah, they do also say that I'm the Antichrist, and that the only way to wash away my sin is to sacrifice my mum. I thought, ah, yeah, that's more like it.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  But I just ignore them, he said. I just ignore them, they're stupid, I don't do what the voices say. I let out another huge sigh of relief. It's when patients don't feel able to ignore these so-called command hallucinations that psychiatrists don't sleep so easily. And so, this wasn't the case with Billy, you know, reassuringly, and as he was making me this nice cup of tea, and you know, I could hear the intro music of Cash in the Attic just starting up from the living room, and the sunshine was pouring in through the windows, I was thinking, I think I'm going to quite enjoy psychiatry.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And Billy asked if I took milk and I said that I did. And he was busy like removing the tea bags with a spoon. So I thought I'd help. I went over to the fridge and casually opened the door to discover

• 8:35Speaker 01

  milk.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Cartons and bottles and cartons and bottles and cartons and bottles of milk filling every possible compartment of the fridge.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  I froze. I literally couldn't move my body. Shit. Billy was obeying the voices.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  My eyes were like transfixed on this wall of white. And like trying to sound calm and normal, I just asked again where Billy's mum was. I just told you, she's out.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  I took one of the bottles out and shut the door. And when I turned, I saw Billy was now smiling and holding a kitchen knife.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Then he cut us two slices from the lemon drizzle cake.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  And he asked, he thanked me for the milk and he put some in our teas and we went to sit down in the living room in front of Cash in the Attic. And it was this incongruous scene where I was just thinking, Benji, like if you're, it's like just try, if you behave normally, everything will be normal. But I could barely swallow this cake in my dry mouth, like trying to wash it down with sips from this scalding hot tea. But my mind was racing through all the worst case scenarios. Like I was just replaying that warning that the, our self-defense judo instructor had told us, like far more likely they'd kill someone they knew, like their mental health worker or a family member.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And I asked specifically where Billy's mum was. Shopping, apparently. And as we sat there, I said like, but, but, but will she be coming back soon? And Billy went, shh, just nodded me to the telly.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And my eyes kept being drawn to this like stair staircase like at the back of the room that led up to this other floor. And I asked Billy if I could use the toilet and he said, "Well, I mean, yeah, if you must." I didn't actually need to, like the adrenaline surging through my body had seen to that. But he said, "Yeah, it's upstairs, first door on the left." So I got to the foot of the stairs and I kind of looked up at this dark landing. And I hesitated, I was like, "Am I really gonna do this? This isn't what I fucking signed up for."

• 11:19Speaker 01

  And so I went up the stairs and at the top of the landing, there were two doors, both slightly ajar. And I pressed, I gently pressed open the one on the left. Yeah, it was just a bathroom, empty. And I let out this breath that I felt like I'd been holding in for the last few minutes. But I knew there was another door. And I could feel like my heart like beating out of my chest, my shirt just felt like way too tight, like sticking to my back with sweat. And the thing was like, I already knew what nightmare awaited me on the other side of

• 12:02Speaker 01

  that door from tabloid front pages and horror films and true crime documentaries. I went to open the second door. Bang! The sound of the front door closing. And from downstairs, I heard a woman's voice say, "Hello, love, I'm back. Crazy busy in Tesco today."

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And as I headed back downstairs, I overheard Billy say to his mum, "Did you remember to get milk?" In a loving, kind of, "What are you like?" kind of way. She said, "Yes, angel, I got you your milk." And I managed to avoid sectioning Billy, on the condition that he restart taking his medication, which, with much persuasion from me and his mum, we managed to make him agree to. And back at my workplace in the hospital, I was telling my boss about how shit scared I had been. And he told me that actually, people with schizophrenia are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  He also told me that alcohol and drugs are far bigger risk factors for homicide than schizophrenia is. So actually, technically, I was safer being in a psychiatric patient's house than at a psychiatrist's house party.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And it's a weird one, because I am now the consultant psychiatrist with ten years' experience now. I've seen thousands of people not dissimilar to Billy. And I've had a few close shaves, but I'm yet to judo slam any patients, which is a strange thing for a doctor to boast about.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And the dean of my medical school, I think, would be proud of me too. All of my patients, luckily, are still alive, as are the people that they've kind of crossed paths with. But I sometimes wonder at what cost. Yes, with medication, Billy's voice has quietened, and we got the milk situation under control.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  But they took away other things. On this powerful antipsychotic medication, side effects meant that he'd sleep for like sixteen hours a day. And when he was awake, the lethargy meant that he felt like a zombie. The meds also gave him obesity and later diabetes and heart disease. And during a painfully lucid moment when I was reviewing him later in the year in clinic, he said to me through groggy eyes, "I know you're gonna write in the notes that I'm doing well, aren't you? Just because I'm taking my meds, but on them, I'd rather be dead." So I'm still very much looking for the secret codes

• 15:07Speaker 01

  for my family and for, at the more extreme end, people like Billy. It seems that often, you know, the solutions to people's lives aren't straightforward. And even psychiatry's modern best cures, you know, best treatments can be as disabling as the conditions that they aim to cure. And it's been weird for me, like, remembering that back then, you know, ten years ago, that the thing that really scared me was the patients. But now, with the benefit of experience and being more informed,

• 15:48Speaker 01

  by far the biggest thing that I'm fearful of is that, as a psychiatrist, I am maybe causing more harm than good. But maybe if I wanted things to be black and white, I should have specialised in radiology.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 16:24Meg Bowles?

  Dr. Benji Waterhouse is an NHS psychiatrist and an award-winning comedian and author of the bestselling book, "You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here." He's also a resident host of our open-mic Story Slams in London, and not just because he lives five minutes away. You can find out more about Benji on our website, themoth.org. Coming up, a man finds himself in the eye of a social media storm when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 17:50Speaker 03

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• 19:26Meg Bowles?

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. In this technological age, people have expectations of those in the spotlight. And social media platforms allow them to easily share their opinions. Everything people do and say is scrutinized, interpreted, and sometimes wielded like a baseball bat to make a point. But even those with the best intentions sometimes miss the mark. When I asked our next storyteller, Jamie McDonald, "When was a time that your expectations did not meet up with reality?", he said, "Being asked to be on the panel for the television show, Have I Got News For You?, it was even more fun and nerve-wracking than I ever imagined." And just a note, we know that the social media platform that's referenced

• 20:10Meg Bowles?

  has had a name change, but it was Twitter when the events in the story took place. Live from London, here's Jamie McDonald.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Is that high enough? Is that high enough? Is that as high as it goes? Okay. Thank you very much. Good evening. Hi.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  So, October 2022. I was invited to be a guest on the long-running satirical panel show, Have I Got News For You?

• 20:46Speaker 05

  And if you're not familiar with the format, right, the show, it features two teams, each with a guest captain by comedy legends, Paul Merton and Ian Hislop. And together, we answer questions humorously on that week's news. The show's an institution, right, it's been running for over thirty years and its panels are kind of who's who of comedy greats, right, so to be invited on, it was a massive highlight in my stand-up career.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  Only slight concern. The show is riddled with loads of video and picture rights.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  Which is a kind of unique challenge for a blind comedian.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  But I wasn't worried, right, because in this game, you know, my concerns are more about, you know, how do I get to stage, you know, without killing myself or somebody else? So a few pictures, I wasn't bothered, I was just excited. And the day of the recording arrived and I was collected from St Pancras Station in this like air-conditioned Mercedes Benz, like a superstar.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  It was driven through London, up to the studio where I was greeted by a runner and I was whisked down to hair and makeup, then it was up to this audience-packed studio where amidst this light-flashing din, I met the captains, you know, Paul and Ian, who are, they're two comedy heroes of mine. And we were applauded into our seats and from nowhere I was given a bottle of water and a layer of anti-shine powder.

• 22:26Speaker 05

  There was some shouting, the cameras started rolling, the theme tune blasted out, and with this kind of bowel-melting surge of adrenaline, we were off.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  Now, prior to the show, right, the producers and I, we had had a chat about the video and picture rounds, and we all just thought, right, it would be funny.

• 22:55Speaker 05

  That whenever a picture or a clip come up for comment, I just have a guess

• 23:06Speaker 05

  at what it might be. So a Ford Fiesta popped up. I guessed it was Vladimir Putin.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  More unseen images popped up. I kept guessing it was Vladimir Putin. It turns out it was a very effective answer. It went down well with the audience, the recording was good fun, the producers were happy. You know, I thought, "I've done a good job."

• 23:34Speaker 05

  The morning after the show aired, my wife and I, we were driving to Bristol. And I opened Twitter, just to see if there'd been any buzz around the show. And boom. I was hit with this Force 10 Twitter storm. Now, if you don't know what a Twitter storm is, it's where a ton of Twitter trolls decide to suddenly get incandescent with rage at a person or an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with them. They lampoon, they attack, they go nuts, in this case, on my behalf, until something else as equally as nothing to do with them happens

• 24:18Speaker 05

  and they bugger off to shout at that for a while.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  These are some of the tweets from this storm. I've changed the names, the handles, just to protect identities.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  @ImaPatonizingBellend

• 24:39Speaker 05

  wrote, "Shame on you, have I got news? You invite a blind person onto your show and you make absolutely no adaptation to the format so he can take part." Okay. And then @Don'tWorry離線人，I'll stand up for you.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  Roach. Am I missing something here? What's wrong with giving the poor guy? Hey, poor guy, prick.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  What's wrong with giving the poor guy an earpiece for audio description? Because that would be about as entertaining as a seat-heavy game of musical chairs. So I thought, hang on a second, I'm gonna have to set the record straight. So we pulled into this rundown motorway service station, where I tweeted, "Last night was a career highlight. I absolutely loved being on @HaveIGotNews. I really appreciate everybody's concern on my behalf, but at no point did I feel excluded in any way." Hey, job done.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  I nipped that in the bud. We bought ourselves a triumphantly horrible service station picnic, and we got back on the roads. But even before the heartburn from my rank motorway pie could kick in, I got this reply, @Shush, now disabled, shush. Roach. "Thank you, Jamie, but the concern wasn't simply personal. It was lazy and showed poor production values. You should have been facilitated to provide your very best contribution."

• 26:36Speaker 05

  I thought, all right. "Blind people need to be shown to be provided with full inclusion." Oh. Oh, do we now. I know sometimes people do the wrong things for the right reasons, but man, I was fuming. Because I had spent a long time trying to figure out how to own my disability. So to have these keyboard warriors wrestle it from me with a patronizing pat on the head on it. "It's okay, Jamie, we'll take it from here."

• 27:11Speaker 05

  It really boiled my blood. Because I started seriously losing my sight in my mid-teens. And actually, to this day, people still say, "Oh, that must have been a very tough stage of life to start losing your sight." Which kind of implies it was a good time.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  "Ah, lucky you going blind in your 40s."

• 27:35Speaker 05

  And it wasn't a good time. And I was embarrassed by my failing eyes, to the point, I spent my late teens and a good whack of my 20s in denial. Kind of pretending I could still see. But sight, sight is surprisingly tricky to fake.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  I mean, I was nailing myself off street furniture, stumbling into main roads, constantly smashing into strangers. I just thought I was aggressive and rude. You know, I did, I had to stop kind of misrepresenting myself as this bollard-bashing job before I get run over or punched. You know, I need to accept the inescapable fact that I was, I was losing my sight, which I did, at the age of 25.

• 28:33Speaker 05

  And my transition from able to disabled came when I started using this, right, my white stick. Which, to my amazement, wasn't just an excellent mobility aid, but it was also instantly explaining why I was accidentally in various dodgy situations.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  It was transformational. Because before it'd be, "Oh, quick, there's a big Scottish pervert creeping around the ladies."

• 29:08Speaker 05

  But now with the stick, it was, "Oh, there's a big blind sweetheart lost in the loo."

• 29:18Speaker 05

  It was brilliant.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  And, and strong, strong human traits are often characterized through metals. You know, steely-eyed, iron-willed. My, my white stick was giving me a brass neck. Now, a brass neck is a, is a very high tolerance to excruciatingly awkward or embarrassing situations. It's very popular amongst politicians. And it was lucky, because I'd been running out of options, you know, what was I gonna do? Was I gonna spend the rest of my life being embarrassed by my eyes? Sod that, you know. Ironically, I, I was, I was starting to see the humor in them. And the, the first sight situation I remember finding funny, I was in a supermarket,

• 30:05Speaker 05

  and I reached out for an apple. And just as I was about to grasp the Granny Smith.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  I glimpsed another hand going for the same piece of fruit. So I whipped my hand back and I said, "Sorry." Just to realize that the apples were next to a mirror.

• 30:27Speaker 05

  I just apologized to my own hand.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  I chuckled away. No, my, my brass neck was allowing me to own my disability, and that was incredibly liberating. And, um, you know, constantly finding my life funny kind of naturally led me into stand-up comedy. And now, my comedy and my blindness are inextricably linked. So to be invited onto a show like Have I Got News For You? Wonderful, you know, chatting over ideas with producers, brilliant. But now, I had all these faux-outraised trolls deciding I hadn't been in on the joke.

• 31:10Speaker 05

  I'd been exploited. Not only were these people hijacking my disability, but they were using it to go after a show I'd loved been on. And no joke, right, the Twitter storm, it made the papers. The Sun, the Metro, the Times, all attacked the BBC and Have I Got News For You on my behalf, right? Not one of them asked me for comment.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  And tweeting my enjoyment of the show hadn't worked and I was very reluctant to engage any further in case this was taken as some kind of vindication or recognition. Like, God knows how much the storm would rage if they felt they had agency. I was absolutely powerless in the face of it. So I did what you do in any storm. I battened down the hatches, hope it blew itself out before it wrecked my career.

• 32:03Speaker 05

  Producers don't love it when you turn up to their show completely with your very own angry Twitter mob.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  And part of me started thinking, have I got this wrong here? Do I have the right to full ownership of my eyes or do others have a stake in them if I'm using them for entertainment? It wasn't so much an existential crisis, it was more a question of, do I, as a blind person on a high-profile show, have a duty to entertain or to uphold best accessible practices at all costs?

• 32:40Speaker 05

  At the recording, if a voiceover had come on saying, "Jamie, you're looking at a picture of a Ford Fiesta." It's brilliant.

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's accessible, but as a comedian, what am I gonna do with that?

• 32:56Speaker 05

  I'd probably say something like, "Ah, just another car I can't drive."

• 33:01Speaker 05

  The trolls would go nuts. Incensitive monsters! How do you tell a blind person he's looking at a picture of a car?

• 33:11Speaker 05

  You can't win. And I think one of the problems is that some people, they see disability as one thing. It's not. Blindness is like infinite combinations of psychological and physical impacts on people. You know, you could, relatively good sight, be miserable, vice versa, everything in between.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  Blind people, we're all different. We're like snowflakes. Not two of us the same. And if a lot of us fall, people panic.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  And I was reflecting, I was reflecting in all this when I opened Twitter to see how the storm was doing. And it was, it was finally fading, but one tweet did catch my attention. At finally somebody with some skin in the game, wrote, "I watched this as a newly acquired sight lost woman. And I found Jamie the cup of tea with no sympathy I'd been needing. Being Glaswegian, I got both his personality and his patter." And that decided it for me. You know, these trolls, they may have given themselves the right to attack anything and

• 34:33Speaker 05

  everything they please, but I, I have been given the privilege to use my eyes to make myself and other people laugh. Thank you.

• 34:53Meg Bowles?

  That was Jamie McDonald. The day after Jamie told this story in London, he got a call from the people at Have I Got News For You, asking him to be on the show again. He told me that, like before, they didn't change the format and this time, there was no Twitter backlash. Recently, he took part in another popular television show in the UK called Celebrity MasterChef. And though he couldn't tell me the outcome when we spoke, he did assure me that he had all his fingers.

• 35:23Meg Bowles?

  In the bio he has on his website, he says, "He doesn't believe disabled people triumph over their adversities. They triumph with them and get to have some fun along the way." You can find out more about Jamie and all the storytellers you hear in this hour on our website, themoth.org. While you're there, why not pitch us your story? Does a story in this hour remind you of something from your own life? Stories, big or small, we'd love to hear from you. Coming up, what happens when all your great expectations blow up in your face when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 36:43Speaker 06

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• 38:12Meg Bowles?

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. The expectations we set for ourselves are often based on what we've seen or heard around us, our family's hopes and dreams, our successful friends, the people we see on Instagram or TV, living glorious and happy lives. What happens when you manage to meet those expectations, but then find they aren't the key to happiness you hoped? When I asked our final storyteller, Salima Saxton, "When was a time that your expectations did not meet up with reality?" She said, "Usually when I improvise mealtimes." Here's Salima Saxton, live at The Moth.

• 38:54Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 38:58Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 39:01Speaker 08

  So, it was Valentine's Day. My husband Carl came into the sitting room and he closed the door. He was wearing a big, thick winter coat, even though it was quite mild outside, and he was shivering, he was trembling. I didn't recognize him.

• 39:18Speaker 08

  "Something terrible's happened," he said.

• 39:23Speaker 08

  "My husband Carl is a copa. He is a man with a plan. If you want someone on your team, pick Carl. He's, well, he's an oak tree."

• 39:36Speaker 08

  Then he said, "I just can't do this anymore. Whatever I do, it is never enough." He had a business, he has a business. He'd been navigating it through COVID, through Brexit, through all of it. And I'm embarrassed to admit right now that I just kind of got used to him being stressed all the time. I barely saw it anymore. And then he added, "Do you love me? Can you still love me? Because sometimes I just think it would be better if I wasn't here anymore."

• 40:12Speaker 08

  I met Carl when I was twenty-two, in the waiting room of an audition room for a Bollywood film. Neither of us got the part.

• 40:24Speaker 08

  I asked him for the time, as a really spurious reason to talk to him, because he was simply the most handsome man I'd ever seen in my life. On our first date, I asked him if he wanted children over the starter. I cried over the main course. I am a crier. And over dessert, I very optimistically asked him for a second date. Miraculously, he agreed. And six weeks later, he asked me to marry him.

• 40:57Speaker 08

  The following summer, we were married in a London registry office. Me in a red vintage dress, him in an ill-fitting suit. But he still looked really handsome. We cobbled together a reception at a pub down the road. A chef friend of ours made a big chocolate cake. We bought tonnes of box wine from a cash and carry. So on my side, my family. There was my dad, very angry because I'd walked myself down the aisle. There were my extended family, the Buddhists, the Amnesty International members, the Liberals, the very earnest guests. On the other side was Carl's family. They were different.

• 41:41Speaker 08

  There was a man called Mickey Fourfingers, whose...

• 41:45Speaker 08

  whose name really explains the man. There was a group of ex-cons, whose gold jewellery competed for attention with their gold teeth. And then there was his dear dementia-ridden mum, Pat. She'd actually been a getaway driver for her naughty brothers in the eighties. She was an amazing woman, but now she was... She just called everybody darling, very, very charmingly, but mainly because she didn't really know where she was or who any of us were. So it was a joyous, it was a sad, it was an awkward, it was a stressful occasion. And it made both of us yearn for elders that could be there to hold our hands in such big life events.

• 42:32Speaker 08

  We both wanted to rocket away from our upbringings. Carl partly for physical safety, both of us for emotional safety and and together we did that. I also had ideas of success from 90s rom-coms and TV series. Do you remember The Party of Five, The O.C.? I had an idea that if I had a kitchen island, freshly cut flowers, linen napkins and a gardener, like just a weekend one, then somehow the perfect TV family would just walk in. So together Carl and I did actually do some of that. We lived in the shi-shi neighbourhood.

• 43:17Speaker 08

  I had a tiny dog that I carried under my arm, Raymond, because he couldn't really walk very far. And our three kids, they went to a progressive private school where they called the teachers by their first name, didn't wear uniform and didn't learn so much. But they were happy in their early years at least.

• 43:42Speaker 08

  I hadn't had this kind of education, by the way. I'd been to a state school, I'd ended up at Cambridge. I'd really been like a happy geek at school. And sometimes Carl and I wondered what we were doing, kind of pushing ourselves to such an extent to make sure that our kids went to that kind of school. I think it was another idea of ours, to be safe, to be successful. But there wasn't much joy in all of this, you know. We were just like busy, frantically scrabbling up this hill all the time. Yet we had the kitchen island. We did have linen napkins, but they were grubby and they were mainly kept in the back of the kitchen cupboard.

• 44:25Speaker 08

  So that Valentine's evening, when Carl said to me he couldn't live like this anymore, it cut through all of it.

• 44:34Speaker 08

  He kept saying to me, "Do you love me? Can you still love me? Do you love me?" And I kept saying, "You are loved. Oh my god, you're so loved."

• 44:45Speaker 08

  I felt angry. I felt angry at him, I felt angry at me. How could we have got this so wrong? That the boy in the ill-fitting suit was asking me whether I still loved him?

• 44:59Speaker 08

  I phoned our family doctor, who said that she thought Carl was having a breakdown and that he needed medication and respite immediately.

• 45:09Speaker 08

  I phoned a friend whose husband had had a breakdown a few years earlier. And I remember standing on the front lawn in my pyjamas. It was dark, I was freezing cold, and I was kind of whispering into the phone so that my kids wouldn't hear, so the neighbours wouldn't hear, I mean, who cares?

• 45:29Speaker 08

  So I realised that things had to change really quickly. This life of ours that we had created was a weight around us, and Carl in particular was gasping at the surface for air. I had to change things immediately, I knew it, so I told Carl that. I said that we were going to move to my childhood home, that we were going to take the kids out of the school and we were going to do things very differently and look after him. He'd always looked after us.

• 45:59Speaker 08

  So, I did that. It was a bit like triage, I suppose. I gave notice to the school. I started to pack up the house. And then I would drive out of London with my car filled to the brim to set up my kids' bedrooms in advance of us moving. I would do that at that end. I would go to the Tiv, visit schools, and then drive home to London sobbing.

• 46:26Speaker 08

  I, I felt like I'd taken a shrinking pill. I felt like everyone in London with their game faces was saying, "Who did you think you were, trying to live this big life?" I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed for feeling ashamed. I, I remember saying to people, "Oh, please don't tell them, because I think it would make really good gossip."

• 46:51Speaker 08

  But then, then there are the people, and there are the moments that stand out for me.

• 46:58Speaker 08

  There was the friend that flew across the ocean with squishmallows for my children and words for me, saying, "We have got this, we have got this." There were the class mums who organised my son's birthday party. There was the woman in the playground who squeezed my hand because she could see I was feeling really wobbly.

• 47:19Speaker 08

  All, all those signs of kindness had actually always been there, but I'd been too busy looking for other things.

• 47:29Speaker 08

  So for about thirteen weeks, I lived on coffee, sausage rolls and adrenaline. And by that April, my kids were in their new school, coal was beginning to resurface and I could kind of exhale again.

• 47:45Speaker 08

  That February the fourteenth, oh, it took the sheen off everything. I couldn't give a fuck. Can I swear? I don't know, can I swear? But I couldn't care less about... I couldn't give a fuck, actually, about...

• 48:04Speaker 08

  About appearances, suddenly. I just couldn't. I felt like I'd woken up.

• 48:14Speaker 08

  We lost Deliveroo.

• 48:19Speaker 08

  We lost complicated cupcake flavours. We lost hotel people bar watching, which I love. We lost the perfect butter chicken tarely.

• 48:33Speaker 08

  Oh, and we lost twenty-four hour access to buttons, chocolate buttons and Pringles.

• 48:39Speaker 08

  We lost the people for whom a postcode matters.

• 48:44Speaker 08

  Most surprisingly of all, we lost the fear.

• 48:50Speaker 08

  Because, you know, when your life explodes and it morphs into something far better, the fear evaporates, disappears, distills, just goes into the atmosphere. I'm not scared anymore. There's just like a little firefly of fear and that's to do with the health of the people that I love.

• 49:12Speaker 08

  There was an afternoon last summer. I was sitting in the garden in the farmhouse that we now live in and it was sunny. And I was watching my husband and my son tear up the lawn on the ride on mower. They were my two girls and they were leading their friend's horse, Stan, to get a bowl of water just inside the front door. And there was our cat, Tigger, failing to catch a mouse in the hedgerow. Tigger was an indoor cat, actually, in London. But now, well, gone is this skittish creature whose mood you could never predict. Instead...

• 49:51Speaker 08

  We have a creature that leaps up trees, parties all night, purrs by the fire. She knows exactly who she is, I think much like all of us. Valentine's Day. It reminded me that most success is a wiggly line on a grubby piece of graph paper. I used to think of success as tick, tick, tick, ambition, ambition, ambition. Now, now I think of it as finding the people, finding the places that make you feel safe and bring you home.

• 50:35Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 50:45Meg Bowles?

  Salima Saxton is an actress, writer, and podcaster. She co-hosts the Women Are Mad podcast, where she interviews extraordinary women and finds out where and when anger has been a positive power in their lives. Salima says, "My husband and the rest of my family continue to bloom and look back on this transformational moment as a gift. It truly was the beginning of us becoming ourselves." She's still working on not being a catastrophist and daring to believe that everything actually could work out. She says she now reminds herself to look for daily, unexpected moments of joy, even in the midst of the mundane.

• 51:26Meg Bowles?

  You can find out more about Salima and her podcast on our website, themoth.org. To pitch us your story, you can go to our website and look for "Tell a Story," or you can call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-M-O-T-H. The best stories are developed for Moth shows all around the world. That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope it met all your expectations.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Meg Bowles, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Co-producer is Vicky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin, Jenness, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Kluch, Lee Ann Gully, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Casa. Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Golt MacDonald, Wolf Peck, and Chet Baker. We received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producers Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.