Thoughts While Listening to StoryCorps Podcast Episodes

1. Hearing people get choked up when telling a story always makes my own eyes burn. I am at work, wanting to blame the fluorescent lighting for the tears are welling up. A mother who had a stroke three months into her pregnancy telling her now-adult son, “The world is better for having you in it”. (A Mother’s Work).
2. Is this AI generated? Or just edited strangely? The beat of this conversation feels just a little too fast. Am I imagining it? Check the episode release date. June 2026. Definitely could be AI generated. I’m not sure what trusting digital content looks like now (What We’re Made Of).
3. Tentative conversations between those who have different political backgrounds. Both have tattoos of honoring loved ones they’ve lost in the same place. Stories must me here to remind us that there are threads that connect all of us. (Brave Enough to Ask).
4. Habits form, absorbed from those around us in our community. A woman who delicately folds and stores plastic bags for reuse just like her aunt. I just asked my partner a question like this the other day- what’s a habit you know you’ve definitely picked up from someone else? The answer: “Washing my hair before my body in the shower, because of that one time you told me it makes more sense that way. The dirt and residue from your hair runs down your body when you rinse it, so you wash your body after”. Words have impact. We are mirrors for each other. (Plastic Bags and Music Boxes).
5. These snippets of stories remind me of my sophomore year in college, attending a campus event on a whim. A man I had never heard of, Frank Warren, gave a talk on a community art project he had been running for several years called PostSecret. People mail post cards to Frank sharing secrets they’ve never shared with anyone. (More than a million secrets shared now). I left this talk floating, musing on the power of these vignettes. The psychology major in me was fascinated by the contradiction of vulnerability and anonymity. What would the world look like if this kind of vulnerability was welcomed? What if folks had a place to go where they could build relationships where these things could be shared? I have not thought of PostSecret in years. I find it again, thinking about libraries and the power of stories.
   1. My favorite PostSecret secret from this week:

References

Esty-Kendall, J. (2026, June 2). What we’re made of. [Audio podcast episode]. In The StoryCorps Podcast. StoryCorps.

Esty-Kendall, J. (2026, May 5). A mother’s work. [Audio podcast episode]. In The StoryCorps Podcast. StoryCorps.

Esty-Kendall, J. (2024, November 5). Brave enough to ask. [Audio podcast episode]. In The StoryCorps Podcast. StoryCorps.

Esty-Kendall, J. (2024, November 26). 702-706-TALK: Plastic bags and music boxes. [Audio podcast episode]. In The StoryCorps Podcast. StoryCorps.

@staciwright