AUDIO: Candy and Broken Glass and the time Amanda Palmer held my hand while I wept in public (Patreon)

Alternate Link to audio file: Private SoundCloud link to our interview, please do not repost. 

About a year and a half ago, I sat down in a professional recording booth with the rock star musician-author-performer Amanda Palmer and I wept in front of her and the sound technicians while she held my hand. 

Lord, that's a bit dramatic, isn't it? 

I mean, the crying part was at the end of the conversation. The beginning and middle are when we talked about the regular things I always cover in an interview: My career, why I make sex education comics, how I got my start in this world, what books I have coming out, etc., etc., etc.

We had an hour to record and then she had to run off to Storm Large's dress rehearsal, but around about the time we were supposed to start wrapping things up, that's when I got going. Amanda never mentioned the time, her eyes never even darted to the door and then back to me. 

She held my hand.
She listened to me.
She looked me in the eye as she told me it's going to be ok.

We recorded this while I was in the thick of drawing not just Drawn to Sex: Our Bodies and Health but simultaneously Let's Talk About It and, unbeknownst to any of us, I was just a month or two away from my psychiatrist giving me the "choice" of either enrolling in the Intensive Outpatient Program or just having me straight-up hospitalized because my brain was, as they say in professional circles, "a dumpster fire". 

I'm grateful to Amanda for having this conversation with me and I'm grateful to have it recorded and I'm grateful her team immediately sent me an advance copy of it so I could veto some of the too-dangerous-to-share-on-the-internet bits from it because in the following year and a half I listened and re-listened to those final 20 minutes of this talk more times than I can count. Re-listening to Amanda's compassion, understanding, and advice helped keep my head above water on many, many days.

I'm grateful to have this snapshot of where my mind was during this time. It's not like I've escaped it, it's still here with me, but... the mental health programs at the hospital that I wound up going through, they helped tone down the intensity. They lessened the degree of suffering. I'm grateful to have this "Before the hospital" snapshot with Amanda and I'm grateful to have this "After the hospital" snapshot with Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett at ComicLab later. Same brain, same problems, two very different stages of coping, of surviving. 

Amanda and me before I got all weepy at the Digital One recording studio, photographed by the engineer, Ryan Mauk. 

At my request, Amanda and I are sharing this conversation just with our patrons, but she has an entire season of these talks that she's been releasing publicly called The Art of Asking Everything and I've listened to them all, some multiple times. No surprise that my favorite interview was with the force of nature Storm Large, who once flashed Matt and me her breasts in my neighborhood coffee shop behind the back of the Very Important Business Person with whom Matt and I were having a Very Important Business Meeting 😂

Amanda has written up an enormously in-depth post to accompany our podcast episode over on her Patreon and if you have one single dollar to share you can read the entire thing over on her page. Thanks to Amanda's team, you can also read a transcript of our talk as a PDF attached to this post. 

CREDITS (copy-pasted from Amanda's post)

Thank you, obviously, to Erika....for the talk, for the winding road, for getting to NOW.

The engineer for this interview was Ryan Mauk and was recorded at Digital One studios in Portland, OR, on June 11, 2019.

The podcast was produced by the amazing FannieCo.

For all of the music you heard in this episode, you can go to amandapalmer.net/podcast

Many, many thanks to my incredible team: Hayley and Michael in NYC, Jordan in Sydney, Alex and Kelly in the UK, and Fannie, who's in Pennsylvania.

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--------------------COMMENT REQUEST--------------------

-----Please only comment to tell me about a good or beautiful or positive moment you've experienced during quarantine.

-----Which is to say, please do not comment on Amanda Palmer or me or our talk. I want to share this with you, but I do not have the mental and emotional strength to process other people's reactions to this very vulnerable, intimate conversation we had. I do want to hear from you though! I want to hear about a good moment you felt during this utterly upside-down year we've all gone through and are continuing to go through.

Thank you so, so much for honoring my request, I really appreciate it and it's more helpful to my mental health than will make sense to most folks, but trust me, it helps me /:)

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Thank you for reading this, thank you for listening, thank you to Amanda's team for making this happen and going above and beyond to accommodate my needs, and most of all, thank you to Amanda. For everything.