In this hour, stories of searching for fulfillment and finding one's bliss. Unconventional self-care, making ancestors proud, and a quest for the perfect gift. This episode is hosted by Moth Senior Director Jenifer Hixson. Storytellers: Ann Guo battles postpartum depression by soliciting dares from her family and friends. Morgan Givens joins the police academy, following in the footsteps of his trailblazing grandmother. Ruby Cooper strives to give her son everything, until he asks for an untraditional Christmas gift. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the pursuit of happiness in this episode?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, the pursuit of happiness. It's a deep concept from our Declaration of Independence, our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Scholars and lawmakers and regular citizens have debated the meaning of these words since they were first inked in 1776.
In this hour, people pursuing their versions of liberty and happiness in ways unforeseen by the framers. For example, our first story is by a woman who turns to crowdsourcing to find her joy. Live from the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, where we partner with public radio station WGBH, here's Anne Guo.
Chapter 2: How did Ann Guo find joy after postpartum depression?
back in January 2014, I'm driving toward a hotel in Cambridge with a sense of dread in my stomach because I can't believe that I, a 38-year-old professional Asian mother, I'm about to become a party crasher. And not just any party, it's the Goldberg Bar Mitzvah. This all started back in 2008 when my son was born, a time that should have been the happiest in my life.
I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. All of a sudden, at work, around the water cooler, I no longer know what to talk about. Instead, I find myself smiling a lot, partly to hide how I was truly feeling inside, and partly because I once read somewhere that the act of smiling will trigger happy chemicals to release in your brain.
And I can tell you from personal experience that it's a load of crap. The depression lasts around two years or so, but it's not like after two years of darkness, I wake up the next morning and win the lottery. And the happiness and joy from winning the lottery fills up that big emotional deficit from the last two years. Instead, I'm dragging around this deficit, this huge burden, everywhere I go.
And anytime I have a bad day and I'm feeling a little down, I would worry, maybe it's coming back. Overall, life just felt kind of flat. And I couldn't help but wonder, is this my new normal? Will I ever be as happy as I once was? Now, by the time my son turned five, I said, all right, enough is enough. I'm going to have to do something about this.
In fact, I'm going to print my own winning lottery ticket. It's going to be something that brings me so much joy and happiness, it'll fill up my emotional bank. Now, what could that thing be, though? I figured I'll look to my past for some clues. So I sat down at my kitchen table and made a list of all the most joyful moments in my life.
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Chapter 3: What are some unusual methods for self-care?
And I look at it, and a lot of them involve going on silly adventures. So I said, all right, if that's what it takes to get back to tip-top shape, so be it. I declare the year 2014 to be the year of adventures, where once a month, I will make time and go on an adventure.
And to help me come up with ideas, and also to help hold me accountable, I sent a mass email to family and friends, making them a deal they can't resist. I said, look, you now have an opportunity to dare me to do whatever it is you want, provided that you donate money to my favorite charity. If I hit my donation target, I will do your dare, no matter what it is.
And I dubbed the project Care Dares. And boy, did the dare start flowing in. I'm to walk 100 miles from Boston to Northampton, Massachusetts without bringing any money or food. I'm to make a boat and float in it on the Charles River. And I'm to speak only Shakespearean English for entire week. My husband, Dan, who's Jewish, challenged me to crash a bar mitzvah.
A coming of age celebration for a 13 year old boy. So as I'm pulling onto Memorial Drive, just minutes away from the hotel, I'm starting to experience some serious anxiety. Because if people ask me who should I say I am, I probably won't blend in with the Goldbergs. So I have to be related either through adoption or marriage.
All right, so if a family had adopted a baby girl from China 38 years ago, you'd think they know who I am by now. All right, so that's out. Marriage. Maybe I'm just uncle so-and-so's date. Or maybe one of the kids attending the party, I'm the stepmother. Or maybe I'll just ask the person to guess and just nod to whatever it is they come up with.
My plan is to go in there, chit-chat with a few people, maybe get on the dance floor for a song or two. If there's a limbo contest, there's usually a limbo contest, I might even participate. What I won't do, however, is eat or drink anything because I don't want to be stealing. On top of that, I brought a birthday present.
It's just a small card game, but it's sort of my way to proactively atone for the transgression I'm about to commit. So with the plan all worked out, I step into the hotel. I figure I'll first do a walk by of the room to assess the situation. So after a long winding hallway, I see a large set of double doors. As I walk past, time slows down. I see five round tables.
The one at 10 o'clock is populated with teen boys. I figure that's where my target is sitting. The room is brightly lit. Everyone is just sitting there quietly eating their dinners. Holy crap, there's no music, no dancing, no limbo contest, totally unlike the bar mitzvahs I've been to in the past legally. There's no way I can pull this off because if I walk in the door, all eyes will be on me.
Everyone will hear what I have to say. And I'll be instantly exposed. Abort mission, abort mission. I speedwalk back toward the hotel entrance, and it took everything in me now to run out the door in that moment. Instead, I plop into a large couch in the lobby, whip out my cell phone, and pretend to be texting. Why am I doing this? I have no idea. Well, I take some deep yoga breath.
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Chapter 4: How did Morgan Givens follow in his grandmother’s footsteps?
Oh, this is just a dinner for all of our out of town guests. The actual party is tomorrow. What? Now you're telling me I came on the wrong date and crashing the dinner before the bar mitzvah? All right, let's just get this over with. Think again. Where I'm from, if you take a picture with someone who's about to celebrate their birthday, it brings you good luck. I can't believe I just said that.
It doesn't even make any sense. I cringe so hard. I'm just gonna go home now, pay everyone back for their charity donations out of my own pocket. I don't even care. But that's when I hear her say, um, sure, of course. And I hand over my cell phone for the photo. On the car ride home, I'm flooded with a sense of euphoria. It's like I just escaped a near-death experience.
By December of 2014, I've walked across Massachusetts. I've spoken Shakespearean English for a week. And I've also built that boat out of two pieces of plywood. And my maiden voyage only lasted 10 minutes because it started leaking. And after a whole year of monthly shenanigans, my emotional bank is magically full again. And I can't believe that I'm happier than I've ever been. Thank you.
That was Anne Guo. She's a career coach and creator of Passion Analytics, a coaching chat bot. When Anne is not geeking out on career design or storytelling, she continues to go on adventures. She invites you to hit her up, or maybe even join her, if you have any great ideas. And I think she means it.
To see a photo of Anne with her makeshift boat and smiling at the Goldberg Bat Mitzvah, visit themoth.org, where you can also download the story. Regarding the pursuit of happiness, my family, friends, trees all bring me joy. But I do have a peculiar source. It's a little weird. I like to give my dog haircuts. He's a Shih Tzu rescue, and his hair grows insanely fast.
Professional cuts look great, but cost more than my haircuts. So I invested in a buzzer. And I found out that the way the hair falls away is so satisfying. He's my own furry little zen garden. And unlike my kids, who get all bent out of shape if their bangs come out a little short or crooked or whatever, there are no complaints from Roscoe. He mostly loves the attention.
Sometimes he grows impatient, so the second half of the haircut has to wait. No problem. No complaints. Mohawks, fades, the shag, I do it all. The lack of precision in my cuts sometimes makes strangers ask, what kind of dog is that? But the happiness circles back around because it's so fun to pet him when he's freshly buzzed, so he gets a lot of extra love. Find your joy, people.
In a moment, a rookie cop with a secret, when the Moth Radio Hour continues.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Morgan Givens face as a trans police recruit?
And her friends, the people who would show up at our house for backyard barbecues and cookouts, the ones who would help us move loading boxes into the backs of pickup trucks, well, they were the police too. And as a kid, I didn't really understand. Because in my mind at the time, cops were heroes. And I was being taught to fear them.
And my grandma is one of them black women they write inspirational novels and movies about. Because she was one of the first black women through the Charlotte Police Academy. And she was excellent. She was exceptional. She was perfection because she had no choice. She knew they were going to judge every black woman that came up behind her by the standards she set.
And in the inspirational movie of my grandmother's life, some well-assuming white person shows up at the end and takes all the credit. But if I'm keeping it completely 100 with y'all, white folks weren't checking for my grandma like that back then. She had to sue to get the job she had already earned when she graduated from the academy.
As if she didn't have the highest academic marks in her class. As if she weren't running laps around her training instructors. But in the end, she prevailed, and her life turned out a bit like a fairy tale, although one with some baggage, particularly for me.
Because it's already hard enough to live up to the expectations of our parents and our grandparents, but when your grandmother is literally Superwoman, it gets just a little bit harder. And I ain't going to stand up here in front like I don't appreciate everything she did on her path to success.
As if I can't appreciate how I can trace it like a thread of hope from her to my mother right down to me. She spent 30 years on that department. And when she retired, we had to rent a banquet hall because of how respected she was. The chief of police showed up himself.
But I still didn't understand how some cops could turn out like my grandma and others could turn out like the ones we read about in history books, still read about today and still see on TV. The ones who are so clearly on the wrong side of history. And I never thought I'd get an answer to that question. But then I graduated into the middle of the worst recession in recent memory.
And I needed a job. So I looked at grandma. You know what? If grandma can be a cop and be successful, maybe I can too. And could I have gone to the Charlotte Police Academy? I could have. But my grandma cast a long shadow. And the last thing I needed was for some snitching instructor to call her up and let her know I could not do a single doggone push-up. I ain't proud of it, but it is the truth.
So that's how I ended up at the Washington DC Police Academy. along with 30 other recruits, willing to do anything and everything we could to become officers in the nation's capital. But things were kind of weird when we got there. Everyone was always staring at us, watching us when we walked down the hallway, peering into the doorway of our classroom. We could not figure out what was going on.
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Chapter 6: How did Morgan Givens contribute to police training?
And I rewrote the hell out of that thing. Learning about unconscious bias and intersectionality. Oh, they got that. Learning how not to be a homophobe, a transphobe, or a misogynist. I wrote that down too. Because one of the things that happens when officers get in trouble is courts pull their training records. And one of the common refrains in defense was, I didn't know. Nobody told me.
I wasn't trained. At the very least, they can't say that no more. And if they try. Most of the officers I know will put that lie to rest, because the heart of the officer does matter. And I had seen their hearts, and they had also seen mine.
That was Morgan Givens. He's based in Washington, D.C., and is the creator, producer, and host of the critically acclaimed Hope Punk podcast, Flyest Fables. Morgan has been featured in the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and on NPR's Invisibilia. He began telling stories on stage in the summer of 2015 and is so glad he did.
The woman who would eventually become his wife happened to be in the audience for his very first story on stage. Now that's the power of storytelling. Do you have a story to tell us? Did you have to try to live up to your grandma's impossible standards? Call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. The best pitches are developed for moth shows all around the world. There are moth events year-round.
Find a show near you and come out to tell a story. And find us on social media. Just search for The Moth. In a moment, a mother who loves her son so much, she's almost willing to break the law. When the Moth Radio Hour continues.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Higson, and we're hearing stories about the pursuit of happiness. Our final story was told at the Vic Theater, where we partner with public radio station WBEZ Chicago. I want to note that this story makes mention of sex a few times, just in case that doesn't feel appropriate for you or whomever you're listening with. Here's Ruby Cooper.
After a year of him badgering me, I gave in. Parked on a dark country road in my mom's 1959 Dodge with a push-button transmission and a back seat as big as a double bed, I had sex with my boyfriend. He was happy. Me, not so much.
I wasn't going to do it again.
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