New Year, New Leaf: The Moth Podcast

To celebrate the dawn of 2026, we’ll have two stories of people trying new things, taking a leap, in one case literally, shaking their lives up, and turning over new leaves. This episode was hosted by Kate Tellers. Storytellers: Laura Gilbert starts a new job as a software engineer and deals with imposter syndrome. In desperate need of an easy class to graduate college, Elliot Higgins took a skydiving 101 class. Podcast # 957

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Moth. I'm Kate Tellers. The hangover, real or metaphorical, from your New Year's bash is over, your holiday parties are in the rearview, and you've logged countless hours in the endless goodbyes of merry gatherings. Now, the pressure is on to become a completely different, better, and more successful person in 2026. It's impossible not to wonder, how do I, essentially, turn over a new leaf? And though people are asking that more often in the new year, that question's always present. Well, to help with that, on this episode, we'll have two stories of people trying new things, taking a leap, in one case, literally, shaking their lives up and turning over new leaves. First, we have Laura Gilbert,

• 0:47Speaker 00

  who told us at a Philadelphia slam where the theme was "Crossroads." Here's Laura, live at The Moth.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  As a child, I was unconfident in new situations, so my parents repeatedly gave me the advice, "Fake it till you make it." So much so that I, as an adult now, feel like this is sort of stamped onto me like a birthmark. So when my current manager told me that it was time to add me to the on-call rotation, while hearing this struck terror into the depths of my very being, I responded by aggressively agreeing with how good of an idea this was. "I am a software engineer at a tech company," which is a sentence that still feels really unnatural to say because my tenure, both at this company and as a software engineer at all, is nine months. Prior to the pandemic, I was a freelance dancer and improviser, and then when everything changed for everybody in 2020, I found myself looking for new ways to make a living. And I had taken a few computer science classes in high school,

• 1:42Speaker 01

  and I remembered really liking it. So I enrolled in a free, week-long, online intro to JavaScript course. And in the beginning, every piece of code I wrote was riddled with errors, but that's when I discovered what I think is the best-kept secret of software engineering, which is this: if you sit there long enough and you read each error, which is just the computer trying to explain to you its experience, you can fix everything. And at the time, in the world, I could do frustratingly nothing to fix any of the very big things happening, but within the confines of my coding environment, every crisis that surfaced was something that I could do something about. So I enrolled in an online coding boot camp, and I was fortunate enough to get a job afterwards, which leads us to now, nine months into this job, where I very much feel like someone

• 2:25Speaker 01

  who has snuck into a movie theater without paying and is just waiting for someone to figure out that I don't belong there. Because there is a not-small piece of me that really believes that for the past nine months, I've just sort of been keeping up this charade, relying on a presentation of competence and intelligence, because surely I am not capable of doing the job that I have. I am firmly in the "fake it" phase of the "fake it till you make it" timeline. Every meeting I attend is full of people with multiple advanced computer science degrees, and I am also there. I mean, there's just... And now, we've reached this... Here's the thing, there's really just not enough evidence to disprove my current working theory that the only reason I am where I am is because I am, like, nice and outrageously

• 3:10Speaker 01

  lucky. So now I've reached this point, nine months in, and it's a pivotal moment, and it's the moment that I am certain is going to bring down this house-of-cards illusion of competence I've been building up, because this is the thing I cannot fake. Being on-call means being the person in charge of keeping my team's piece of the internet alive for seven full days, 168 hours. Being on-call means you take your work phone and your laptop with you everywhere. You shower with your phone on the toilet seat, because there are very specific time limits within which you must respond to alerts. Behind the scenes, there are all these automated systems kind of tracking the health of the software, and if any of these indications sort of starts to trend wonky, it triggers a page to the on-callers so we can get some human eyes on the issue. And last Monday, those human eyes were mine.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  So it's 4:00 in the morning, and I'm lying in bed, lying in bed with my work phone, like, right next to my ear, turned to volume 100, as though I am not already sleeping, the feather-light sleep of an animal being hunted.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And my phone goes off, I'm being paged. So immediately, I'm like a frothing mess of anxiety. I'm moving so quickly, I'm basically like summoning objects to me. My glasses are whizzing onto my face. My crocs are zooming onto my feet, so I can more quickly run to my laptop. I get to my laptop. All these bizarro sensations are happening. My wrists are sweating, my teeth are chattering. I'm opening my laptop, I'm looking at the monitoring dashboards, because something very bad is happening, and it's on me to fix it. I want you all to be able to picture the monitoring dashboards. So I'm gonna ask you to picture, you know the Cave of Wonders from Aladdin? But it's just graphs in there. So I'm clicking into the graphs, I'm sort of sorting by dimension. I'm narrowing things down, refining, I'm seeing clues.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  It's like being a graph detective, really. You're seeing spikes, and you're kind of piecing the clues together. I'm on the trail, but it's a nonlinear trail. I'm following a lot of red herrings. And at some point in this process of synthesizing this information, a point that I don't even really clock, my teeth stop chattering. Because in this moment, it turns out that the antidote to anxiety is not calmness, it's curiosity. Something really bad is happening, and I wonder if I can fix it. And over the next few hours, I helped fix the broken thing. And it was this super-interesting reminder that this has always felt like the part of the job that I didn't have to fake, this desire to sit down and stay seated until everything's better. And there are so many parts of this job that still feel so unnatural. Like, anytime I go into the office, I feel like I'm in a movie.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I'm like, "Ho, ho, ho, here I am, badging in and using the elevator." But like, maybe all these experiences together don't mean I'm faking it. Maybe this is just what making it looks like for me right now. My on-call shift ended yesterday at 2:00 PM. And while I can't say that I'm not nervous about my next one, I'm trying to reframe it a little bit. Because maybe being on-call is like this high-stakes, nerve-wracking opportunity to kind of get back in touch with sort of the beautiful privilege of software engineering, which is when something is really broken, like, maybe I can help fix it. Thank you.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  That was Laura Gilbert. Laura is a writer, improviser, and former Google software engineer. She is currently the staff writer for a food blog called Rainbow Plant Life, and writes and performs her own work, much of which can be seen on her Instagram. Growing up, I always thought my name, Kate, was pretty boring. It didn't help that the majority of my classmates shared my name. In my high school singing group of 12, four of us, a full third, were Kate or Katie. So when I studied abroad in college, I tried to change my name to something more fun: Cat. Except, I'm not a cat, with a C or a K. When people called me Cat, I kept not responding. Kate, it is.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  After the break, remember how I said a story would be about literally taking a leap? Be back in a moment.

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• 9:04Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Our next story is from Elliot Higgins, who told this at a Denver Story Slam, where the theme was "Anniversary." Here's Elliot, live at the Moth.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Hi, everybody. Let's go back to 1975, and I am a pre-med hippie at University of Oregon, and I desperately need another hour of A to pad my GPA. I had huge hair, I had a bitchin' hippie bead necklace, and super cool bell-bottom corduroys, and a "let's party" attitude. And, so, I was desperate for this A, and all of the easy courses like Bowling 101 were taken. So, you know, what am I supposed to do?

• 9:55Speaker 03

  And so, out of the blue, a miracle manifests itself by U of O's first-ever offered Skydiving 101 for college students. And, so, I mean, what's to think about? I sign up immediately, "What's the big deal, man? You get a parachute." So, I... So, our jump master was, he looked like Gimbley from Lord of the Rings. He was a burly fella, about five foot one, bushy hair, bushy beard, beady eyes, and he did not like... He was a serious man, and he did not like hippies, and we called him the "leaping leprechaun."

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Our class met every Tuesday and Thursday night, and we'd meet at the wrestling gym and jump off of bleachers and practice our landing on the mats. So I'd go pretty high and just have a frickin' blast. And, you know, I'd pull off some really nice landings, tuck and roll, and come up pumping my hand and go, "Airborne all the way, sir!" Wednesday afternoons, we met in the same gym and we practiced folding our parachutes. And these are the parachutes you're gonna fold. It's gonna be on your back, and you're gonna jump with it. So those were No Weed Wednesdays.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  So now, after six weeks of our intense training, it's time to jump out of an airplane. And so as a new jump cadet, you have to go up for an observation ride to make sure it's a good idea for said cadet. And so they pile me in the back of a small plane. We get up to jump height, about 3,000 feet. Three people pile out of the airplane. That's when reality hit this hippie in the face like a pie. I'm going, "Holy shit, man. I wanna go back to the gym and just jump off of the bleachers again."

• 12:04Speaker 03

  And so we land, and I just sprint to the jump shack, and I call my father on the payphone. I go, "Dad, I mean, I'm in a pickle here." And so I listen, or he listens, and there's a fatherly pause. And he, my father says very clearly, "Son, you get your ass on that plane and out of that plane, no excuses." And I mean, that was like, "Well, no help here." And just... Just then, the leprechaun comes up to me and goes, "Well, are ya, well, Mr. Airborne, are ya gonna jump or ya chicken?" And I go, "Oh, yeah, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba." "I wanna be first out, I don't watch, it freaks me out." He goes, "All right, get ya chute and let's go, you're holding up the show."

• 12:47Speaker 03

  And so I struggle into my chute and I waddle after the leprechaun and I I pile into the, pile into the, uh, plane last, 'cause I'm gonna be first out, and we are at 3,000 feet, way sooner than I wanna be. There's a bunch of yelling, they cut the engine, and the leprechaun turns to me and just goes, "Put your feet out, get out and go." Well, I've never done this before, and it's windy out there, you know, and...

• 13:14Speaker 03

  So I turn to the leprechaun and I say, "Sir, I'm having a..." Boom, he stiff-arms me out of the plane.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  And, you know, my first thought was, "Oh, I've just been thrown out of a plane."

• 13:27Speaker 03

  My second thought was, "I wasn't ready," and my third, there was no third thought, and whoomp, my personally-packed parachute, deployed, beautiful... Oh, no! I had it wrapped wrongly around my, around my testicles, and it's like I'm floating to Earth on my testicles. And so what's a hippie to do? I pull up on those risers, and I'm doing a pull-up, and I'm flying that chute everywhere. And I am zooming, and so just then, the leprechaun comes flying by in one of those really cool parafill chutes, the modern one, and all I heard was, "What the hell are ya doing?"

• 14:12Speaker 03

  And all he heard was, "My ball!"

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And so things are happening pretty fast, and, uh, and so now Mother Earth is rushing up to caress me in her womanly bosom.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  And I have, I mean, my balls are killing me. And I am, I am not going, I've abandoned all training. I'm flying the chute and I just plant this baby. And so instead of a five-point landing tuck and roll, I did feet, knees, helmet. And, I mean, I had my bell rung so badly. I was seeing stars and I'm struggling to get up and I'm trying to manage my chute and get out of my, and I deployed my federally packed reserve chute. That is such a no-no. And the leprechaun comes roaring up and goes, "Well, Captain Airborne, it looks like you don't get an A.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to jump two more times to get that A." So I did, and I barely got into dental school.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  That was Elliot Higgins. Elliot says that he got into dental school by the skin of his teeth. And upon graduation, he was recruited to go to Southeast Asia and serve the expatriate community, which was a whole new world of friends and opportunities. 1982 to 1995 was a blast, and things continue to be a blast. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you to our storytellers for sharing with us and to you for listening. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope that you turn over a fun new leaf in 2026.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, senior director at The Moth, and co-author of their fourth book, How to Tell a Story. Her writing has been featured in McSweeney's and The New Yorker. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Marina Cluchet, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardenale, Caledonia Cairns, Suzanne Rust, and Patricia Uranya. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else,

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  go to our website, themoth.org.