The Moth Radio Hour: Green
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This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon. My very first job at the Moth was as an assistant producer on the Story Slam team. Slams are our open mic storytelling competitions. They happen monthly in 28 cities in the U.S. and beyond.

At each event, ten storytellers are randomly selected to take the stage and tell a five-minute story on the night's theme. For a few years, I was in charge of choosing the slam themes for each season, along with my colleague Jody Powell. Twice a year, we'd hole up in a meeting room and come up with ideas for the next six months' worth of events. Slam themes are a delicate balance. You want them to be general enough to spark a wide range of stories, but specific enough to encourage a point of view.

Fun enough to inspire creativity, but rooted enough to offer depth. There were other considerations as well. For example, a question we found ourselves asking every time. How likely is it that people are going to interpret this solely as a sex thing? Sigh. Bye-bye ecstasy. Each time, we'd come up with themes that felt fruitful. Scandal. Aftermath. Dinner.

But we'd also try to throw in a curveball or two, ones that we were excited to see how the storytellers would interpret. Uniforms. Dirt. Doors. Those were my favorites, the ones that we flung out into the moth universe and sat waiting, listening for the answering calls, and wondering what shapes they would take. For this episode, I decided to pick one of those curveball themes from a recent season and feature some stories that came from it.

In April of 2024, the theme was green. So in praise of all of the storytellers who take a chance on a theme and put their names in the hat, stories of all shades of green. Starting us off is Istiar Chowdhury. He told this story at a slam in Philadelphia where the theme was, you guessed it, green. Here's Istiar live at the Moth. My wife really wanted to go scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef for our honeymoon.

She had actually gotten certified in diving. I literally could not swim to save my life. But it was going to be okay. I had nine months before this trip to learn how to swim. So I procrastinated for the first eight months. And the month before the trip, I had the brilliant idea. I was going to learn how to swim from YouTube. I was on a business trip at the time too, so I really needed a teacher that could travel with me.

I got back to my hotel room one night. I watched hours of videos on how to breathe, how to float, how to time your strokes with the breathing. I had my theory down. So the next morning at 6 a.m., I went up to that rooftop pool. I got in the water. I made eye contact with the lifeguards. And the lifeguards was a team of five pigeons sitting on the side of the pool. I took a deep breath. I let go of my fear.

and I descended under the water. And I exhaled. And I came back up. Breathe in, go down. Breathe out, come up. I practiced my breathing for a couple days. I progressed onto floating. By the end of two weeks, believe it or not, I was swimming. I could swim half the length of the Marriott pool. I was so ready for this scuba diving trip.

So we get on the boat, we get out there for our trip. We start easy. We're going to start with snorkeling first, right? And so I put on the gear, I jump off the boat. So proud of myself. I learned how to swim for this trip. I swim 10 feet from that boat and my brain finally clicks and says, you are going to die. This is how it all ends.

And I panic. I scramble. I get back on that boat. I climb up. I take everything off. I tell the crew. I tell my wife. I tell everyone else on the boat. I'm like, I'm good. I'm going to stay on this boat. I'm going to read my book for the next two days. We're here for my wife. She's happy. She's going to dive. I'm happy that she's happy. Let's do this. And the crew sits me down and really tries to convince me that scuba diving is actually better than snorkeling. And I'm going to love it. And I tell them, you're crazy. You're crazy.

And somehow 30 minutes later I'm standing on the edge of the boat again in a wetsuit with my scuba diving gear. And I take a deep breath, I let go of my fear, and I let myself be pushed off the side of the boat. I plunge into the coral sea, and I open my eyes, even myself out, and I'm okay. And it's a miracle. I can do whatever I want. I'm in this protective, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. The rest of the people come down, we descend,

And the guide is so kind, he's dragging me around to look at the different things. Because let's be honest, I can't swim. And sometimes he'll leave me to go guide the others, and I'm just floating there. Slowly turning upside down. I'm like an underwater astronaut, enchanted by the underwater marine life, the colors, the sound of peace under the ocean.

I go on another dive that afternoon, I hand over my money for the night dive, we go down and brush the sand and I see the little glowy glowy things like the movies. And if I hadn't taken that leap of faith, I would have missed out on an entire new world of wonder, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But I think back to that experience and ask myself what I was really afraid of as I was trying to learn how to swim, something that everyone around me seemed to have done when they were a child.

How could I overcome that embarrassment and go and learn something? I decided and convinced myself my time to properly learn how to swim had just passed. And so I waited for eight months and then went to YouTube and talked to the pigeons. I figured out it wasn't the danger that I was afraid of. The pigeons were watching over me. I was fine. So I got home from that trip. I took one more breath, and I finally let go of my truest fear.

and I signed up for Adult Swim lessons at the local Y. That was Istiar Chowdhury. His love of stories comes from working in college admissions, where every year he gets to learn about hundreds of students through the stories they tell while applying. He and his wife, Catherine, have been together for 15 years. And while their relationship doesn't depend on his swimming skills, he likes to think that his efforts helped.

When I asked Istiar what inspired him to tell his story that night at the slam, he said that the first thing that came to mind when thinking of Green was the experience of learning something new. And, you know, being new to Philadelphia, he said he quickly learned how many people in the audience associated Green with the Eagles.

He plans to tell more stories in the future, though he may have to wait a little while longer as he and Catherine just welcome twin baby girls to the world. Congratulations. I'm sure you'll have them in the pool as soon as you can. During a story slam, it's fun to see how widely the same theme is interpreted by the ten folks who take the stage. In this episode, you'll hear from four different cities: Philly, Denver, London, and New York City.

Our next story was told in Philadelphia on the same night that Issyar told his, though with a much different take on green. Here's Tanya Schreiber. So a few years ago, I got really, really into gardening. My husband had been injured and he was at home, but I was taking care of him and I was bored out of my mind and I was looking for a way to distract myself because everything the specialists and surgeons

were presenting as our future was just terrifying. And I needed to find something to distract myself besides the radio, who kept talking about this virus in China. And then they were talking about the virus in the cruise ships, and then Italy and Iran. And I decided to build these raised beds on my front yard.

And it had to be in my front yard because my backyard is an alleyway. And so there wasn't a lot of other space. And so I was just going to make something beautiful. I was going to get some physical exercise. It was February, but, you know, I could dig as soon as it started to get a little damp and I could start digging in it. So I...

Along the way between, I guess, the seed catalogs and looking at COVID and Zoloft, Facebook kind of created this algorithm and decided to feed me to the liberal preppers Facebook group, which did wonders for my anxiety. The raised beds were only, you know, I mean, they were the width of my yard, which is about 30 feet.

No, it's like a third of the size of this stage is my entire property. So I have not nearly enough land and had not been prepping. So these liberal preppers had nothing. All they could suggest was get seeds and learn something. At this point, the only thing I'd ever grown was some tomatoes and some pepper plants. But with nothing but time, I started to do research on how I can maximize this land and go vertical.

So by the time the world shut down, I had cabbage, I had Brussels sprouts, I had been, every time the weather got cold, I'd been throwing plastic tarps down to keep these things alive. My neighbors thought I was out of my mind. They were all just living their normal lives. They have no idea why I've been trapped in the house for the last few months. But by the end of March, I was the entertainment of the neighborhood.

Because nobody had anything else to do but walk their kids by my house where we were hanging out and had nothing to do but explain to them what little we knew from reading a few books. And so we got to teach little kids who their parents swore would never get to eat, would never eat vegetables. And we'd be like, I promise you, if I let your kid pick something, they'll put it in their mouth. Broccoli, cauliflower, the works.

And we felt very, very proud of ourselves. My mom, I would pick her up every day and bring her over and we'd sit on one side of the six foot, thank you God, raised bed and the people were on the other side and we would just hang. And I got to listen to people talk about their grandparents' farms and visiting them and growing up. People asked me how they could start their own stupid looking garden.

As we kept, kind of as the summer kind of hit, I realized that I'd learned a lot about kind of irrigation and making compost and amending the soil, but I hadn't read enough about pests.

And so the squash vine borers kind of came through and killed a lot of that stuff. And then the cabbage moths came and got the rest. But the beautiful thing was that during this time where nothing in my life was going the way I had thought, I mean, if you'd looked at me a year ago, I didn't expect to have my husband disabled. I didn't expect to be living through a global pandemic with my kids, learning how to garden. But all of a sudden I had this beautiful garden where I'd met so many neighbors.

And the wild thing was that even as things died, and almost everything I planted died, something else grew in its place. And my neighbors knew me as the chick with the corn, right? They, um, at the corner. And so my kids are getting all excited about researching new things to grow, and I'm getting to meet all these people. And we were pulling about 10 pounds of food every day out of this thing.

But it was almost all tomatoes. My friends got tomatoes, my family, the food banks, friends of family, family friends, everybody was getting tomatoes. And in all that time that I spent digging, all I kept thinking is, you might not get to choose what the world gives you, but if it gives you plenty and it gives you connections and it gives you joy, then just be grateful for it.

Tanya Schreiber is a Philly native who still lives in the area with her two boys and husband. When she's not gardening, she's working as a strategy consultant and career coach.

Tanya's garden is still going strong. The grapes, berries, and asparagus that she planted that first summer come back bigger and better every year. Her sons are both teenagers now, but still help out with harvesting from time to time. And some wonderful news. Tanya's husband recovered and is doing better than anyone imagined was possible.

And how did she come to be on stage that night? Her friends. They asked her to try her hand at telling a story, and when she saw the theme, she knew she wanted to talk about the greenery of her garden. Friends and gardens for the win. To see some photos of Tanya and her family in the garden, you can head on over to themoth.org.

In a moment, a personal chef meets her match and a broken-hearted man is left with an unusual memento. When the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Our bodies are constantly changing, but one thing is always true. When your metabolism is working well, you feel the benefits. Improved energy, better sleep and fitness results, and easier weight management.

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The new McCrispy Strip is here. Dip approved by ketchup, tangy barbecue, honey mustard, honey mustard, Sprite, McFlurry, Big Mac sauce, double dipped in buffalo and ranch, more ranch, and creamy chili McCrispy Strip dip. Now at McDonald's. I think you're on mute. Workday starting to sound the same. I think you're on mute. Find something that sounds better for your career on LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn Job Collections, you can browse curated collections by relevant industries and benefits, like FlexPTO or hybrid workplaces, so you can find the right job for you. Get started at LinkedIn.com slash jobs. Finding where you fit. LinkedIn knows how. This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon. In this episode, we're hearing tales that hail from story slams on the theme of green.

Elizabeth Fritzler told her story in Denver, where we partner with public radio station KUNC. Here's Elizabeth live at the Moth. So I work as a personal chef. And during the pandemic, I was still relatively green in my three-year-old business. And normally I cook in people's houses, but it turns out that nobody really wants you in your house when there's COVID afoot.

So one day I got an email from this lady asking if I could cook for her 80-year-old diabetic father and his live-in girlfriend. But she wanted me to cook the meals in my house and deliver them. Normally I would have turned this sort of thing down, but I was desperate for the business. We all know that desperation is the place from which all the best things come. So I agreed to it.

So on the first meal delivery day, I walk into this very nice house in the suburbs, and there's a gaunt man in a wheelchair waiting for me in the hallway. He introduces himself as Jim. Both of his legs have been amputated, so his thighs are wrapped heavily in bandages, and he has thick glasses and swollen purple infected fingers. So it's clear to me that the diabetes is very advanced, really taking a toll on his health. So he says, "What did you cook for us today?"

And I start listing off the meals, stuff that's healthy, I get to the word salmon, and he gets this like disgusted look on his face and he goes, "Ugh, that one's gonna be a loser. I don't like salmon." Now, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to feedback about my meals, okay? But saying "that one's gonna be a loser" right off the bat, it did seem a little harsh.

However, I realized that I probably needed to temper my expectations about this man's diet. He had probably been eating a diet of canned vegetables and meatloaf from the Black Eyed Pea for his whole life, and I needed to figure out what else I could cook for him. This also made me think of people like my 92-year-old grandpa, who will not eat my mom's Thanksgiving turkey because she uses herbs, and he, quote, doesn't want all that green shit on the turkey. laughter

So, spectacularly, they did not fire me. But Jim was impossible to please, extremely picky. I had an agonizing time trying to figure out what I was going to cook for him every week. But after a month, his daughter actually emailed me to tell me that the meal service was going quite well. Shocker. I stuck with it.

So one day I'm standing outside in the driveway with Jim and I ask him how he liked the fried rice that I had made for him the previous week. And he goes, "I don't like lima beans." I was like, "Lima beans? What are you talking about? I've never cooked lima beans in my life, let alone put them in a fried rice. What?" But then he said something that gave me pause. He said, "I don't like a lot of things, but it's okay. We'll get there."

And the phrase "we'll get there" threw me off, struck me as odd because I wasn't sure whether he meant "get there" in terms of getting to a perfect meal plan or if he meant "get there" in terms of getting physically well again. And then it occurred to me that maybe Jim didn't realize that he was dying, even though his daughter had basically told me as much. And then I thought about sitting with my grandma right before she passed.

and how I was sitting at the edge of her nursing home bed, and she looked me in the eyes, and she asked me if she was dying. And I said, "I don't know, Grandma. What do you think?" And she said, "I think I am." And I said, "Are you okay with that?" And she said, "Yes." And in that moment, I had the privilege of watching my grandma move from denial to acceptance about her death. It was the last conversation that I had with her.

And so there in the driveway with Jim, I was thinking about this dichotomy between denial and acceptance when it comes to love and to death. And I thought that maybe this meal service was more for Jim's daughter than for Jim. That maybe she thought that she could just prolong her dad's life a little bit longer by feeding him better food, and she wouldn't have to face his death quite so soon.

Because the hardest thing about love is that it will, in the end, be lost. And so a few weeks later, I was packing up the meals to deliver to Jim, and I texted his girlfriend to let her know that I was running late. But she texted back that Jim had actually passed away the day before. And I was in shock. I was standing there in my kitchen with all these ready-made meals and nowhere to put them.

And I really hoped in that moment that Jim's daughter had a chance to move to acceptance about her father's death, just like I had with my grandma. I haven't had any more difficult clients quite like Jim since then. But that man did tell me and teach me how to face criticism and how to stay grounded in the face of nonsensical comments about things like lima beans. But for whatever it's worth, those green things in the fried rice were edamame soybeans.

Not lima beans. Thank you. Elizabeth Fritzler is a personal chef and freelance copy editor from Denver. After several years of cooking, she's hanging up her apron to edit food writing and recipes. Her favorite meal to cook, one she knows the client will love. For Jim, that was a shrimp vegetable stir fry with brown rice and a sauce of toasted sesame oil, garlic, ginger, and coconut aminos to keep it low in sugar.

Elizabeth originally developed this story a few months before her grandpa passed away, when she was reflecting on what matters at the end of a life. She says seeing the way Jim's family showed up for him made her think about how she wants to show up for the people in her life every day. When she saw the theme of the story slam, her time with Jim and the lima beans he hated came to mind, and she decided to put her name in the hat. ♪

Our next story is told by Mark Fiddle, who shared it at a story slam in New York City, where WNYC is a media partner of The Moth. Here's Mark. So my husband and I were always very different people, right? We were like Monica and Chandler from Friends, but not funny. I'm like a Jersey loudmouth. He's a reserved southerner. I'm like clinically OCD, like very unnecessarily type A. He could end up on an episode of Hoarders if left to his own devices.

Like many couples, we sort of, our biggest problem was communication. We communicated very different styles. You kind of learn that from your family, your peers, your culture. I was raised by a bunch of children and grandchildren of loud immigrants from New York that basically told you to stand up for yourself, don't take shit from anyone. If you have a problem, address it right away, as loudly as possible. His family was all about keeping up appearances, making sure that you pretended like everything was okay, even if there was a problem. So you can imagine how this went.

So last summer, right after our one-year wedding anniversary, he told me that he wanted to sleep with other people.

And I was just taken aback because we had been together for years and had never come up. And so, you know, he sort of gave it to me as an old medium. He was like, you know, I'm really nervous that if you don't allow me to do that, then I'm going to go behind your back and do it anyways. And I was like, all right, well, I mean, I guess I'll do it. I was like crying. So I agreed to an open marriage with certain rules and restrictions, obviously. But I was not happy about it. And he consoled me because I was very upset. He said, you know, you're the person I love. I want to have children with you. Like, I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

And two weeks later, after I cried for two weeks, he told me that he was leaving me. So we agreed to a six-month trial separation and that he would move out of my apartment at the end of the month. So it was three weeks later of purgatory where he was basically sleeping on the couch because I'm not sleeping on the couch. And so finally the day comes, right, that he's going to finally leave and move out.

And my best friend from home took the train in from Jersey, and he was the best man at our wedding. And we went to the Met to see an exhibit. We sat on the top of the steps at the Met like we were Blair and Serena in Gossip Girl, because I was a Blair even though I always wanted to be a Serena.

We went to brunch, I got really drunk, we went to Washington Square Park, we ate CBD brownies 'cause I needed to get fucked up. And I went home to a much emptier apartment and there was, obviously there was a mess. He was a tornado on a path to self-destruction leaving like a trail of tears behind him. So I stripped naked because I was like, you know what, I'm a single lady, I'm gonna clean up this apartment naked.

And as I'm walking around, I see a green leather book on the TV stand. And I was like, "Well, that's deliberate. Like, what is this book?" I open it up, and it's his journal. So I sat there, and I sat down cross-legged, naked, in the middle of my broken home in my living room, and I read every single journal entry that he had written.

And, you know, most people think it would be traumatic, but it was actually this, like, huge relief because it was all the truths that he had never told me for six years. It was all the worst things you could ever hear about yourself or about your relationship that you could possibly imagine written by who I thought was the love of my life.

But it was like this green little book gave me like freedom because I finally had gotten answers that I'd asked for first the past six years and I never got it. And I was broken, but I wasn't shattered. And I, you know, I realized a few years ago that I deserved to have a happy life. And I realized this year that I deserve love, just not from him. That was Mark Fidelity, a New Jersey native who spent his adult life in New York. He recently moved to the U.K.,

Dedicating his career to nonprofit and charity work, Mark has worked for a labor union, a girls' rights organization, a community foundation, and LGBTQ rights organizations. In his spare time, he runs, bakes, and explores the world with his partner. I had a chance to chat with Mark about his story. So what inspired you to tell your story at the Greenslam? Did it come to you right away? Did you have to kind of think of it and find it?

So when I saw that that theme was coming up, it was right around the time that I had, you know, started my separation and divorce proceedings. And it just, there was no pause. It jumped right into my head. I was like the one green thing that like, you know, affects did me so much at that time was this journal of my ex-husbands. And it just, I knew immediately that would be my story. Yeah. Did you, had you known that he had a journal? Was it something that he used regularly? Yeah.

I saw the show and I was like, what the hell is this? And I opened it up and it said the like sort of starting date on it. It was only a few weeks prior. And I was just shocked that it was, you know, not only did I have no idea, but it also had all these secrets and things in it. So, um, and I think that it, you know, just for the fact that he needed to say those things and he couldn't say them to my face. So he let the words left behind without him there to not deal with the consequences. Yeah.

And you said when you were reading the journal, you're getting these answers to these questions that you had and you felt something kind of like relief, which is I think maybe like a surprising thing to feel in that moment. I'm sure you felt other things as well. But were you surprised at feeling relieved reading it?

Yeah, I mean, especially considering the, like, content of it was, you know, so traumatic to read. But the relief was shocking and felt so good at that moment because it had been such a tumultuous and terrible time for me. And to finally feel some form of, you know, for lack of a better term, closure, right?

on something that was still a very like open wound at the moment just I don't know it felt good it felt like someone pouring water on a fire at that moment you know it wasn't completely out but it was it was steaming a little

That was Mark Fidelity. For anyone wondering if he ever confronted his ex about the journal, he did not. Decided to take the high road instead. Although, when boxing up the last of his ex's belongings to drop off before moving to a new apartment, Mark made sure to place the journal at the very top. Did Mark's Little Green Book or any of our other green stories so far remind you of your own story you'd like to tell?

If so, you can pitch us a story right on our site, themoth.org, or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. When I was a kid in the Philly suburbs, my brother and I were just allowed to try about anything with almost no supervision. Although the home was loving and supportive, we had hobbies that bordered on the dangerous and were always nonconventional.

Unusual pets were a normal thing at our house. One of my favorites was my green iguana, Iggy. He was almost 36 inches tip to tail, but was a terrible pet as he regularly bit us while feeding and frequently ran away. After seeing a wildlife show depicting marine iguanas swimming around the Galapagos Islands, I wondered if my iguana would like to swim in our neighborhood pool.

I transported him there by putting him on my head full of longish curly hair and riding the two blocks on my bike. I snuck him in early in the morning and the swimming went very well until we were kicked out by the lifeguards. Fast forward to 1970 and I was married to a wonderful girl from the neighborhood and planning our first life adventure of a new job in western Maryland.

During a family dinner at my parents' home, the talk turned to describing the weirdest person you ever saw. My new wife described a kid with a big lizard on his head riding his bike past her home near the pool. The family almost died laughing at her shock, being told that she had married that weird kid.

Remember, you can pitch us at 877-799-MOTH or online at themoth.org, where you can also share these stories and others from the Moth Archive. The best pitches are developed for Moth shows all around the world. When we return, a girl prepares for her first kiss and a writer has to pen his first rejection letter. When the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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Risk is the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. A podcast all about human connection and radical honesty. All through June for Pride Month, Risk will be featuring the stories of LGBTQ folks from all walks of life. You'll laugh, cry, and maybe even end up feeling a little bit better. Go get Risk on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon, and in this episode, we're hearing stories on the theme of green from a constellation of our live Story Slam events. Our final two stories were told across the pond at one of our London Story Slams. First up is Rosalind Crode, whose take on green concerns a trial we all brave differently, a first kiss. Here's Rosalind live at the Moth. Thanks. Thanks.

So, I'm sitting in class when I feel a tap on my shoulder. So I turn and I see that somebody is passing me a note. So I take it and I open it and inside is a question that I've never been asked before. It reads, "Will you be my girlfriend?"

And then down below I saw two of the most beautiful words that I could imagine ever side by side because this note was from Matthew. Now Matthew was gorgeous. He had dark skin and moldy features and he used to tough his hair up straight like this with Daxwex just like the Backstreet Boys. And at 12 years old I had never had a boyfriend before so I was elated.

However, my delight was short-lived because I soon realized that I had a big problem on my hands. Now that I was Matthew's girlfriend, he might ask to 'pash' me. Now 'pash' in New Zealand is the word that we use for something I believe here you know as a 'snog' or some may know as a French kiss.

And at 12 years old, I did not know how to kiss. In fact, at 12 years old, basically none of us kids knew how to kiss. And the way that we were trying to figure it out is that we would entrap young couples in a pash circle and demand to watch the deed.

What would happen is some kid would shout out across the field, "They're going to Pash!" And then a hundred kids would run like a tsunami encasing them, insisting on seeing what we came for. We would oogle and start to chant, "Pash! Pash! Pash! Pash! Pash!" Now the thought of being entrapped in a Pash circle and not knowing what to do utterly terrified me.

So, I tried to practice. I would take my toy trolls and try and make them kiss to see if I could understand the mechanics. "I love you Rose, I love you Jack, I'm sorry about the boat." But it wasn't very helpful. I passionately made out with my mirror to see if I could see from a 3D view if this helped me. And then to try and understand the sensations better, I had make-out sessions with my pillow. But I still didn't feel prepared.

And then one day after school, as I was about to leave to go towards the gate, Matthew approached me and he said, "Would you like to hold my hand?" And inside I was thinking, "Oh my God, yes! I want to hold your hand!" So I put my hand out and he took my hand and we started to walk together towards the gate. One, two, three, four,

Inside, I am feeling amazing. I have never had these romantic feelings before. There are butterflies doing parkour and acrobats inside of my stomach. So I look down at him. We're 12, so he only comes up to my shoulder. I look down at him, and he's looking up at me, and I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

And then I start to notice around me that some of the kids are also noticing us. And I see some of them pointing and whispering. And it dawns on me that at any moment, one of them may call a Pash Circle on us now. 9, 10, 11, 12...

I start to panic. My heart is beating hard and I'm going into protection mode. I am thinking I need to prevent myself being stuck in a patch circle by any means possible. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20...

Pash dash away from Matthew like Usain Bolt without explaining anything. I sprint through the gate. I'm running down the streets. I'm running so hard I can feel my backpack banging on my back with my lunch flying all over my homework. I run and I run and I run until I'm streets away from the school and I slow down. I can feel hot, frustrated tears running down my face and in that moment I am mortified. I'm so angry at myself and honestly right then I hate myself.

Things for Matthew and I went downhill pretty quickly from there. I pash dashed away from him again at the school disco mid-macarena because I again thought that he was going to try and kiss me. He called me one day and said he was breaking up with me. I seemed, I guess, a bit too committed to my cross-country training and I didn't have the courage to tell him what was actually going on for me.

So at that time I decided I am not one of those people that can figure out how to kiss. I'm writing this off, bring it on nuns and cats, I am done with boyfriends and I put boyfriends out of my mind. Fast forward four years and I'm 16 and I still haven't kissed anyone. Except one day I am sitting in a park on a bench with a new boy who is my new boyfriend, my first boyfriend since Matthew.

And we're not surrounded by a bunch of kids. The only thing surrounding us is trees and the roses. And it's the evening, so the moonlight is shining down and it's lighting up his face, and I see that he's looking at me, and then he leans in and he stops, and I realize that he's indicating he would like to kiss me. And then I feel myself lean in because I realize I would also like to kiss him. And then we kiss. I have my first kiss.

And luckily, he's a much better kisser than my exes to that point, a mirror and a pillow. It was amazing. It was wonderful. And I found out that I knew exactly what to do. And I was going from one period of life to another. I was pushing myself so hard, expecting that I would know exactly what to do. But if I could be patient and wait for the soil and the conditions to be right, I would bloom when the time was right. Thank you.

That was Rosalind Krohn, a curious Kiwi whose life decisions have always been motivated by what will create the most adventures. After many years working as a film and event producer around the world, her latest adventure has taken her to a coffee farm in Colombia, where she's perfecting her Spanish and listening to the moth while sorting coffee beans.

When thinking of a story to tell that night, Rosalind ran into a common problem. Her first ideas were more along the lines of anecdotes or punchlines. She dug deeper, trying to think of times in her life where she attempted to do something she had no idea how to. And then it came to her, her first kiss. An experience that still causes her some embarrassment to recall, but in that juicy vulnerability, as she puts it, she knew she'd find the best kind of story.

Though, if she could go back in time, she'd offer this advice to her 12-year-old self: Sweetheart, practice on an ice cream, not a mirror. In case you were wondering, Rosalind did eventually pash Matthew, even if it took a few more years. She says he never asked her to explain the running. Good man. Our final story comes to us from Akshay Gaudreia, who took the stage just before Rosalind told her story that night in London.

See if you can spot the green. Here's Akshay. I'm obsessed with organizing my inboxes and there's one folder that I have which is tagged green which I keep at the very bottom of my inbox so that it's just hidden and out of sight. It's called rejections and it contains all the rejection letters that I've received from all the years of writing stories and trying to get them published.

I've submitted it to all the magazines that you can think of from Grantham, Glimmer Train, Shimmer. You name a magazine, I've got a rejection from them. Every rejection that comes your way, it feels like it's a sting. It's almost like the words are saying, "You're not ready. Stop pretending to be a writer." And the worst one is, "Your work is really worthless."

That's not what they say, but that's what it feels like. But through some twist of fate, I became an editor for a magazine. I had posted a photo on Twitter about editing my story with green ink and one of my editor friends who had published a small piece of mine online, he said that, "Hey, do you want to be an editor for the magazine?" I was like, "Yes, definitely!"

And I got in and initially I just started to subtly correct a few typos here and there, leave a small suggestion, "Hey, this word could be changed around, maybe correct a little bit of the grammar." But I didn't do much. My editor, Srinath, he had a master plan in mind. He's an engineer, he is Indian, he is going bald, we had everything in common.

We became really good friends and he's like, "Hey, I want to take a backseat from this. Do you want to take over?" Suddenly, I had the role of accepting and rejecting stories. Like Spider-Man said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Initially, I was hesitant to reject stories. I accepted most of them. I was very happy to read all the stories. Most of them were really good. But then one day this one story came in that... The grammar was all over the place. The language was just not good while I was reading it. I kept stumbling over the words. The story was very nascent. It wasn't eked out yet.

I had to reject this piece. But I couldn't. I just... I didn't send out the rejection email. Ten days it sat in my inbox and then later I just like, okay, I need to write this email and I thought, I started. Hi. The story you've written is crap. Backspace. Hi. This is not up to our standards. No, this doesn't feel right.

I left it again and I just, I didn't look at the email for a while and until the writer followed up with me saying, "Hey, what happened to my story?" I picked up one of the rejections that I had received, copy-paste, send. It crushed me. I had taken the hopes of one writer and thrown it down the drain. I knew how that felt like. How could I do this?

And then one more piece came in that had to be rejected. Another copy paste, another send, another sinking feeling in my stomach. I confessed to my friend, Alisha. She's kind and wise. I told her that this is too hard. I can't reject stories like this. I know how it feels. She said, "Look at all the rejections that you have received."

You work hard on your stories because of those rejections, those conversations that you have with yourself thinking you're having a conversation with the editor to convince that hey your story is really good has helped you. What you're doing by sending them rejections is helping them and you're playing a very small but significant part in their journey. I agreed with her.

That's when I started writing those emails myself. I tried to not just read the story but go into the depth of it, understand what the writer was trying to say, leave a line, one line of criticism with one line of encouragement. I distilled all the hope and encouragement I could into those emails and sent them out.

That's when I started reading my own rejections. And suddenly I realized all the editors on the other side have been distilling all their hope and encouragement in them. And now when I look at that entire folder of rejections that I have, I don't think of them as something as people saying that I'm worthless. It's just a band of cheerleaders cheering me on. Thank you.

Akshay Gajdria is a London-based storyteller, writer, and writing coach. His work has appeared in Tamarind Literary Magazine, Constellations, Futura Magazine, and more. His advice for anyone writing their own rejection letter? Keep it short and simple. If there's a possibility of adding a reason, do so. It's a short, sharp sting, and there's no point in elongating it by writing too much or, worse, apologizing.

Akshay hadn't actually planned to tell the story at the slam that evening. He was going through a tough time, being battered by a stream of rejections while searching for a new job. And while writing yet another cover letter, saw a call for volunteers for the Moss Story Slam that night. So he signed up.

He hadn't told a story on stage since moving to London in 2022, but decided to put his name in the hat. And when he was called, he says the only green thing he could think of was the tag he placed on that folder of rejections, a folder that had doubled in size over the years. The confidence he felt after leaving the stage surprised him. As Akshay puts it, "Turns out he was the person who needed to hear that story the most that night."

That's it for this very green episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We have monthly story slams in 28 cities in the U.S. and beyond. I hope that these stories have inspired you to check out one in your area. You can find out more at themoth.org. Thank you to our storytellers for sharing with us and to you for listening. We hope you'll join us next time. This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Chloe Salmon, who also hosted the show.

Co-producer is Vicki Merrick. Associate producer, Emily Couch. The rest of the Moss leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin-Ginnaz, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Ureña.

Special thanks to the producers of The Slam Cities featured in this episode, Amon Goyle and the wonderful team in Philly, Rhonda Williams in Denver, Chloe Munoz in New York City, and Adam Cohn, Jack Ranz, and Charlie Morgan in London, as well as all the rest of our Story Slam producers who tend to the communities that bring us stories from all walks of life.

Our pitch came from J. Bellinger Temple of Philadelphia. Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Hadouk Trio, Caribou, Bitters from Blue Dot Sessions, Charles Berthoud, Ry Kuder, and Ronan Osnodek.

We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and to learn more about The Moth, go to our website, themoth.org.