The Moth Radio Hour: Cringeworthy

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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Meg Bowles.

I'm a blusher, and if someone says, are you blushing?

It accelerates to full-on magenta.

I chalk it up to my Scottish roots, but let's just say, it's hard to hide my embarrassment.

There are all kinds of situations that cause us embarrassment.

Like the time you enthusiastically waved at someone waving in your direction only to realize they were actually waving at someone behind you.

Or you're in that awkward situation where you absolutely know the person but you cannot for the life of you remember their name and they're waiting for you to introduce them.

Or perhaps you're a teenager and in that case it's probably anything and everything your parents do in public.

We all have our moments.

Situations that looking back make us cringe.

Our first story is easily a 9.1 on the embarrassment Richter scale.

So much so, in order to spare her mother's blushes, this storyteller chooses to only be identified by her first name.

She shared it at one of our Open Mic Story Slams in New Orleans, where we partner with New Orleans Public Radio.

Live from Cafe Istanbul, here's Marissa.

One year, eight months, and 11 days ago was the biggest day of my life to that point.

It was the day that I would finally officially fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a scientist.

I'm obsessed with science.

I especially like worms, bugs, parasites, ants, mosquitoes.

I like mosquitoes so much that my husband saves them for me when he kills them so I can identify what species they are.

To become a scientist, you have to get a PhD.

And at that time, I had been working towards my PhD for five long, difficult years.

And at the culmination of this process, I have to give my dissertation defense, or defend my research, which is composed of an hour-long presentation to the general public, friends, family, whoever wants to come, and my dissertation committee, which was composed of five experts in my field.

And after I'm done with that presentation,

I sit for two hours and they question me on why I did, what I did, how I did.

And then they ultimately decide whether I pass or fail.

And if I fail, that is the end of the road for me as a scientist.

My life stream crushed.

The room where I was to give my defense was small, but it was packed with about 30 or so people, standing room only.

There were people out the door.

And my PowerPoint presentation was projected against a wall, and immediately to the left of it were video projections of people who were live video conferencing in.

And they were projected really big, their faces looking at the computer.

And I remember thinking to myself, I really hope that they know that their faces are being projected on this wall right next to my presentation.

And don't do anything embarrassing.

So here we are, March 29th, 2018, 12 o'clock noon.

Everything in my life had led up to this moment.

It's go time.

I start.

Hi, my name is Marissa.

Thank you for coming to my defense.

Today I will be speaking about the effects of SIV on adipose tissue when out of the corner of my eye, I see a notification pop up on that video conference wall.

It says someone has joined the meeting and it's my mom.

And I'm so excited because my mom was able to watch my defense from where she lives in Florida.

Well, I was excited until her video clicks on.

And suddenly, all you see is my mom,

fresh from the shower,

wearing nothing but a towel

from the waist down.

I scream bloody murder.

Oh, God, Mom, no!

And I run to the front of the room.

I smash myself against the wall to cover her naked body,

failing to realize that she is now being projected directly on my back.

I also don't realize because I can't see, but everyone else can see that she hears me scream and army style drops to the floor and rolls slowly out of the frame.

Still here, yeah.

So I'm staring at the audience in horror.

No one says a word.

And finally,

I plead.

Can somebody please help me?

And after what feels like the longest 60 seconds of my life, IT cuts the feed.

I walk back to the podium, slowly processing the situation, struggling to breathe,

and I look up and I make eye contact with my fiancé who has just seen my mother's tits.

Then I make eye contact with my dad,

who has just seen my mom and his recent ex-wife expose herself to an entire room full of strangers.

Then I make eye contact with my dissertation committee, all five of them who are sitting front and center, who have all just seen my mother's breasts.

I have no choice.

I have to continue.

And so I take a deep breath, I gather myself, and I proceed one more time into my presentation.

So after the presentation's over, I sit down for the two hours of questioning.

I also found out after the fact that everything happened so fast that half of the room thought I was just losing my mind

and that this was all part of my presentation.

By the way, I passed.

Love you, mom.

Marissa is a scientist in immunology and specializes in infectious disease.

And she says she's loving every minute of it.

I asked Marissa how the conversation went when she finally talked to her mother that day.

That day, I called my mom probably eight times before she finally answered around dinner time.

So it was like all day.

And when she finally answered, she was just like, I'm sorry

in the tiniest voice.

And I just laughed and I told her it was okay and that I passed.

And every time my mom comes to a talk, we confirm that she's planning to attend fully clothed

and it just never gets old.

Words of wisdom for Marissa.

Be grateful for those embarrassing moments because it makes other things, and in her case, other presentations, feel like a breeze.

Embarrassing situations come in all shapes and sizes.

I've heard so many stories of people who've accidentally shared something in the family group chat that caused generational chaos, or sent a message intended for one person but accidentally shared their thoughts on the movie they saw last night to all in attendance for the legal seminar over Zoom.

Our next storyteller, Azhar Bandeali, can relate.

Uzzer told this story at the Bell House in Brooklyn, where WNYC is a media partner of the moth.

Here's Uzzer.

I have a weird relationship with self-doubt.

Like, I was sitting down there and I was fine, and then I got to the stairs, and I'm like, freaking out.

That wasn't for sympathy to lead into the next part.

Like, when I look in the mirror, I don't see see a happy, healthy, somewhat intelligent man who's loved unconditionally by everybody.

I see this Indian dude that tries too hard and smiles too much.

I am my therapist's retirement plan.

But all of that stopped one day on a summer morning in the park in Atlanta when my friend took the best picture of me ever.

I was 23 years old.

I had just lost some weight and I looked good.

I was

resting on my elbows, leaning back.

the sun in my face and I looked like a baseball player that's like sliding in into base

just casually.

My face was tilted just the right way so that the profile that looked at the camera, I decided was going to be the only profile that any camera would ever see for the rest of my life.

It was a good photo.

It's the best photo I've ever taken.

I saw it when my friend posted it on Facebook the following Monday morning and I got to work and I saw it and I copied the link and I sent it to all my friends and

I sent it to my mom and I said, Mom, I'm cute.

And then I

went back to work.

I sent some emails and I went to a meeting and I came back to my desk and I had 75 unread emails.

That doesn't happen.

So

turns out, before I went to my meeting, I'd sent an email to a thread with 400 people

in America, Europe, and India.

The self-doubt came back.

Uh-oh,

you're about to get fired.

I sat down and I started going through the email, and I

kept scrolling, and one after another, again and again and again, I found Photoshop images.

Somebody had plopped me or pulled me out of the park and plopped me

on a door in the middle of an ocean at the end of Titanic.

I was in the arms of Rafiki at the top of a rock in Lion King and I

somebody cropped my face and put it on Miley Cyrus in the wrecking ball video and then

and then my face was on the wrecking ball.

It's the most creative shit I've ever seen.

It was hilarious.

Eventually people made t-shirts of my face.

People started coming to my office and asking for the email guy.

And

I realized I looked good in those pictures.

I killed the productivity of an entire office for weeks.

I didn't get fired.

I eventually got promoted, which was nice.

And life went back to normal.

Next year I decided I was going to run the New York City Marathon

as a charity runner, and I needed to raise $5,000.

I got to $2,500 and then I hit a wall.

No money was coming in.

I was training more and more every day, and I was more and more exhausted, and I couldn't keep doing the fundraisers.

It was stressful, and I used to have these nightmares of 5,000 kids lining up to get food, and I would get to the 2,500th kid and look down, and I would have no more food, and I would have to, like, turn away each one of those kids, one after another.

And I would wake up in the embrace of self-doubt.

Ooh, I'm not cut out for this.

Ooh, I'm disappointing a lot of people.

What if I don't get to run?

And then it hit me.

I woke up one day and I drafted a Facebook post

that sounded like

a Ponzi scheme invite combined with

a kidnapper note.

And it said, I have 50 more of these pictures.

I will post the next one when I get $200 donated to my fundraiser.

And I tacked on

the Lion King picture to it and I uploaded it to Facebook.

Within 30 minutes, I had $200.

Then I did the Titanic one for $500.

And then I did

Miley Cyrus for $500.

Within 48 hours, I had $2,500 and I reached my goal.

I had an OnlyFans before there was an OnlyFans.

Who's cute now?

We raised, we gave the money to charity.

I crushed the marathon.

And

you'll be happy to know my self-doubt has cured.

Nah, I'm kidding.

I doubt myself every day.

But what I do now is I doubt the doubt.

If I can survive being memed,

and if I can raise $5,000 on a whim,

and I can run a fucking marathon,

then what's there to doubt about the 20-page presentation that I have to do this week?

That shit's easy, yo.

Azer Bundi Ali still still works in tech, but also had the honor of being an artist in residence at the Keepsake House, where he developed a solo show called Curry and Catharsis.

Everyone who attended got a t-shirt with his face on it.

You can find out more about that story.

And yes, we have pictures of those hilarious memes.

That's on our website, themoth.org.

Coming up, being stuck between a rock and a mortifyingly hard place when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Meg Bowles.

So often people will keep their secret humiliations all to themselves.

You know the ones, the thing you did that no one saw that you can absolutely never repeat or admit to.

But if working at the Moth has taught me anything, it's that your most embarrassing moment has the makings to be a good story.

You may know our next storyteller, Banga Akinabe, from his countless stage, TV, and film roles.

But what you may not know is while other celebrities insist on a car and driver, Benga prefers his trusty bike.

From a main stage we produced in New York City, here's Banga Akinabe live at the moth.

I love my bike.

I love my bike.

I take my bike with me everywhere.

I live in Brooklyn.

It's the best way to get around the city.

I love my bike so much, I travel with it.

I have a bike case.

I put my bike in the bike case.

I check it in like luggage.

It is luggage.

And on this particular day, I'm in Los Angeles for a week of meetings.

And I have a meeting at Warner Brothers Studios that I'm very excited about.

And I check my GPS, and it says 40 minutes to get there.

No problem.

I jump on my bike and I head out.

My GPS then tells me I need to turn off-road to get to where I'm going.

I get off my bike, I start to walk it onto the dirt path, and the moment I step onto the dirt path, my GPS goes out.

No problem.

I know the direction in which I need to go.

I'll eventually get to Warner Brothers, right?

So I keep going.

The path starts meandering, disappearing, reappearing, and it occurs to me that this path is not actually a path, but a dried creekbed.

And I've been following it for about five minutes.

And I'm like, well, okay,

this is a little bump in the road, but I'll just keep going.

Eventually, the ground in front of me starts to incline into a little hill, and I'm walking my bike up this hill.

The hill gets more and more steep, and I find that I have to start to use my hands to climb this hill.

And I'm like, that's cool, that's cool.

I'm pretty rugged.

I can do this.

I can use my hands to climb this hill and take my bike with me, no problem.

And as I continue on, I find that I have to now use my entire body to climb this hill.

The sun is baking down on me.

I'm higher and higher on this hill.

And for a second, I consider going back until I turn around and I look down and I'm struck with just how high I am right now on this hill.

I realize it's more dangerous to go down than it is to go up.

So I decide that I should probably stop and rest because I'm getting more and more tired.

So I take my bike and I wedge it between some bushes and I grab one bush and it comes right out of the ground.

I start to laugh at how ridiculous this all is because I got up this morning thinking I'm going to a meeting at Warner Brothers.

And it occurs to me that it's time I should be honest with myself and that this is not a hill but a mountain.

And for some reason I've accidentally started to climb this mountain.

And then I start to think like there's a very good chance I'm not going to make it out of here.

And I start to think, like, I probably might need to get help because I don't know where I am.

I don't have water.

I'm very tired.

And the sun is getting stronger.

And so I take out my cell phone.

And of course, my cell phone has like one bar.

And I'm thinking, well, who am I going to text?

Everyone in New York, well, they're in New York.

And everyone in LA that I know, like, it's like, I can't even get my friends in LA to come pick me up at the airport, let alone find me on some random mountain in Los Angeles.

So I was like, I'm not even going to try.

And just then, I look up, and across from me, on the other mountain facing the mountain I am on, is a ridge.

And I see a man.

And he's just been staring at me.

And his dogs are just running around playing.

It was such a beautiful picture.

And I felt such tragedy and fear.

And all I wanted to do was scream out to this guy for help.

And I knew that, one, he would not hear me.

And two, there was very little he could do to help me.

And so I decided I might have to just go on.

And because I have a book bag, I can't just put my bike on my back.

I have to...

I have to crawl about two feet at a time, then reach back and pull my bike.

I'm dragging my bike up the mountain across bushes and rocks, watching my beautiful machine get beat up, but I will not leave my bike behind.

And so I continue up and I see something above me, and it looks like an antenna.

And I know that antennas are usually on some sort of platform, some sort of firm ground, and maybe if I get up there, I might be able to save myself.

I don't know what's up there, but at least right now I have hope.

So I keep climbing, I keep climbing, and I crawl over the edge of this mountain onto where this antenna is and right by the antenna is a path and I am shaking.

I'm so excited.

My face is covered in dust, my eyes, the sweat all over, my helmet's askew.

I'm like, I look very disheveled.

And I look up and there is

a woman walking towards me and I'm thinking, I don't want to scare this woman, but I really need her help.

And so I walk towards her, and she's approaching me.

I'm approaching her.

We're about 10 feet from each other when at the same time, we say to each other,

do you know how to get off of this mountain?

I'm like, no, no, I thought you would tell me.

I don't know where I am.

I'm so lost.

Please help me.

She's like, well, what about the way you just came, that path?

I said, I didn't come from that path.

I climbed off this mountainside.

I don't know what's going on.

I was like, what about you?

What's back where you came from?

She's like, well, we can go back where I came from and see if we can find our way.

So she turns around and we walk back to where she came and we run into a group of hikers.

Now, they were real hikers.

The two of us, we were just like lost people in the wilderness on the edge of life and death.

And so they help her.

They tell her, they point her in the direction in which she needs to go and they tell me in the direction I need to go.

So we start walking, me and the hikers.

I'm just thinking in my head, oh my God, I can't, how ridiculous my life is this morning.

And then all of a sudden I hear someone say, are you the guy from the wire?

Yes, yes,

I was very fortunate to be part of that show.

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can watch it several times and you get something different from it every time.

You were right, yes, yes.

And then his friend says, do you have any acting advice?

I was like, oh,

I mean, well, theater is good.

I like theater.

I do theater.

And then in my mind, I'm just thinking, I just need to get to this meeting.

I just need to get off this mountain.

And they get me to a road, and I ride my bike down this road, and I hit Barham Boulevard.

And I know Barham Boulevard.

Warner Brothers is on Barham Boulevard.

And it's three blocks ahead of me.

And I see it.

And I get a phone call.

And it's the assistant,

my manager's office, who's telling me that they want to cancel the meeting for the day

and reschedule to have it later that afternoon in Hollywood back on the other side of the mountain.

I lose it.

I start laughing uncontrollably.

I'm just that guy on the side of the road in LA sunbaked just laughing at the sun.

And to this day, I'm not quite sure how I ended up on that mountain or what mountain it was.

But I do know that I pay attention to the little things now.

All the little things, like GPS instructions,

whether they're the walking GPS instructions or the biking GPS instructions.

I pay attention to how much weight is in my book bag before I head out on the day, whether I have water.

I pay so much attention, I probably pay too much attention because you never know when the wrong choice might just end you up making life or death decisions on the side of a mountain.

Thank you.

Banga Akenabe is a successful actor of both stage and screen.

He said, being an actor, you routinely have to put yourself in embarrassing situations.

You have to be willing to fall on your face in front of people.

The worst thing you can be is a safe actor.

As for the getting stuck on the side of a mountain incident, he said he wasn't as embarrassed as he was thankful he survived.

You could see a picture of Banga and his bike on our website, themoth.org.

Next up, a different type of situation that leads to mortification.

You know, agreeing to something in order to be polite that ends up making you uncomfortable.

Like that double date you went on to help your sister out only to discover your date is your boss's son.

The I had the best intention type of embarrassment, which is exactly the term I would use to describe our next story from Joe Richards.

She told it at an open mic story slam competition at Howler in Melbourne, Australia, where we partner with the Australian Broadcast Corporation, ABCRN.

Here's Joe Richards.

I volunteered at an ashram in Lesbos in exchange for accommodation.

And the only other volunteer was this very tall Israeli man and it seemed very natural that we should just have an affair over chopping vegetables and

meditation.

I left to go to Rome, and he hinted that he wanted to come with me, and I said no because I was meeting a friend.

A week later, I went to an internet cafe, and I received an email from him suggesting that he should come for a week, and my immediate response was no.

It felt like that affair had existed in a time of sun and vegetables and Grecian stones and olive trees and it was best to just leave it in that time and place.

He replied and asked, why wouldn't I be open to the possibility?

And now if I received that reply, I would run because why was he questioning my no?

But back then,

being younger, I thought, oh yeah,

I don't want to be closed to possibility.

Yeah, I want to be that person that's open and adventurous.

And yeah, sure, he should come.

So we arranged to meet at Florence train station.

And I so distinctly remember standing beneath this big electronic dashboard looking down the line of the railway track and all of these very polished, well-dressed Italians in white white and beige coursing past me.

And off in the distance, I saw this man get off the train and my whole body went, oh no.

And as he walked towards me,

The no got louder and louder

and he got closer and closer and he went to kiss me and I hugged him instead

and so began this torturous few days

because there was nothing in me at the time and I have so much compassion for her that that even could conceive that I could be honest and just say actually hey this isn't working for me.

Instead, I made my feeling wrong

and I just really struggled with it.

And how could I feel this after he'd flown all this way for me?

And he kept telling me to relax.

And of course, that just made everything so much worse.

And over the days, I just got more contorted and twisted as I completely invalidated my own experience.

And it kind of culminated in this fight at another train station in Vanatsa and

he said he was leaving because he'd flown all of this way and I was cold and I was like yeah

and so I went to wait with him for his train at the train station because at the time I thought that was the polite thing to do.

And we were waiting there and there was all this tension and turmoil as if we'd been lovers for years, but we just kind of met a couple of weeks ago.

And he was berating me and asking me why I was having this feeling.

And I was like, I don't know.

And I just kept looking down this tunnel, this train tunnel, and just waiting for the train to come.

And the train just kept getting delayed

and delayed

and delayed.

But I sat there politely with him.

And finally it came and I can't tell you the giddiness

that he might actually go and this whole experience might soon be over.

And he got up and picked up his backpack.

And he walked towards the door and I played my solemn, I'm sorry, role.

And then he turned around, and I thought, Oh no,

and he said, I could have loved you.

And the doors closed behind him,

And it was kind of like

that moment when you say goodbye, but then you go in the same direction.

He came back and sat next to me, and we waited another two hours

for this train to come.

And he did finally get on the train and

the liberation,

the absolute joy that I felt, I so relished that experience.

It was such a contrast of this bow being pulled back and then just this release of this feeling of freedom that I was just free of this whole situation.

And now that I'm grown,

what I love most about being grown is that

how I feel is valid

and I don't owe anyone my politeness

and I can change my mind at any time

and I now know that

being honest about where I stand is often the kindest thing.

And what I love most

so much is that my yes

is a yes

and my no

is a no.

Thank you.

Joe Richards is a public speaking coach, speechwriter, and a sovereignty mentor who coaches and educates on boundaries and personal clarity.

She told me that in her early 20s, she couldn't conceive of saying anything that might hurt someone's feelings.

She said, I had to learn that it's okay for others to be disappointed.

Being polite over being honest can create a lot of confusion.

The story would have been so different if I had simply been able to say, this isn't working for me, and we could both go our separate ways.

Coming up, a neuroscientist confronts her discomfort with emotion when the moth radio hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Meg Bulls, and our final story in this hour comes from neuroscientist Dr.

Wendy Suzuki, an expert on the brain, where our emotions take hold.

And no, understanding the brain doesn't always help with the feelings.

Live from St.

Anne's in Brooklyn, here's Dr.

Wendy Suzuki.

In my family, real emotions were something to be hidden, to be tamped down.

I often like to say that you can think of my family kind of like a Japanese-American version of Downton Abbey without the money, the real estate, or the servants.

Growing up, showing emotion would call too much attention to yourself.

It would embarrass the family.

So, no emotions in public, good or bad.

But as a neuroscientist, I've always been fascinated with the study of the neurobiology of emotion, even though personally my own personal relationship with emotions can be described as a struggle for control.

So,

growing up, this was always difficult.

And when I grew up, this was particularly difficult because I've always been somebody that cried at weddings.

Any and all weddings.

Even fake TV weddings, I would cry.

And so the struggle would happen all the time.

And growing up, and I would always try

to avoid these situations.

Weddings, graduations,

eulogies.

I couldn't even imagine having to give a eulogy.

So when my father passed away, I knew I couldn't participate in his eulogy.

And I remember being so grateful that my younger brother stepped up and he said, no problem,

I will do it.

And he gave the most beautiful eulogy for our father.

And I was filming him as he was telling this beautiful story that I'd never heard before.

And I could see the emotion welling up and I could see that struggle that was so familiar to me and I felt so uncomfortable I had to stop filming.

I couldn't put on film that intimate moment.

Well, about three months later I was having breakfast.

I was having,

it was 6.30 in the morning, early in the morning, in my Manhattan apartment.

And I wasn't having breakfast.

I was actually doing something I do every single morning, which is a tea meditation, which is a meditation over the brewing and savoring of tea.

I do this every morning.

It grounds me, it opens me up, it sparks creativity.

But that morning, the phone rang first thing at 6.30 a.m.

But it was a number from Shanghai, and my brother was living in Shanghai, so I picked it up.

But it wasn't my brother.

It was my brother's business partner.

who called to tell me

that my younger brother had had a massive heart attack and he didn't make it.

So only three months after we lost my father, my younger brother was suddenly and irretrievably gone.

Our original family of four were now down to only two.

And I remember hanging up that phone

and

time

stood still.

I could feel my heart beating.

I could feel the sweat on my palms.

And it got really quiet so that all the thoughts in my head got 10 times louder.

What do you do when you lose somebody that you thought was going to be there for the rest of your life?

And then at some moment, I realized that the only one that didn't know the news was my mother.

And I couldn't call her to tell her.

It was still early, so I immediately booked a flight from New York to California.

And I managed to get the most uncomfortable middle seat that any airline had to offer.

And not only that, the middle seat's video monitor was broken.

So I had six and a half hours there, and all I had to do was think about

what I was going to say to my mother.

And I was worried because her hearing isn't great.

I was really scared that I was going to scare her when I came into the house because I hadn't told her I was coming.

So I get home, I knock really loud, I open the door and I say, mom, I'm home, it's Wendy, I'm home.

And I scared her.

She came down, but we laughed about it.

And I'll never forget

that look she had on her face.

smiling when she said, what are you doing here?

And I had to tell her that I had the most terrible news, that David was gone.

And we stood there and cried together, and we sat down and we cried together some more.

But that crying was such a relief because it meant that I had done my job.

I had one job to do that day.

And only I could have done that job.

And that

cry cry that we had meant that I fulfilled my job.

I did it.

But I also knew that there was nobody in the world that my mother needed more

at that moment than me.

And there was nobody that I needed more in the world than my mother.

So the next week I stayed.

in California and we accepted all the condolence calls and visits and we never knew whether it was going to be crying or laughing and reminiscing.

But I could tell you that our favorite visit was when my cousin came over.

He walked right in, he opened his laptop, and immediately started showing my mother and I the most extensive set of vacation photos from his last two trips to Germany and Japan.

And my mom and I looked at each other and we said, show me more.

What's the next beer stein?

What other sushi did you eat because we needed that relief so much

we didn't talk about my brother once that afternoon we didn't have to we knew what we were feeling and that was such a wonderful relief

so after the end of that week I flew back to New York

and I felt like my life came to a screeching halt.

There were these waves of grief that would come over me and I couldn't control when, they would just suddenly come over me.

And to be sure, I know that I'm not the only person to have lost somebody, but I was shocked at how devastating these waves of grief could be and how much they colored every single moment of my life during that time.

And somewhere in the haze of that grief,

I realized it was a eulogy to give and that I was the only one that could do it.

So I knew I could write it, but could I actually get through this thing that I had essentially been fearing all of my life without doing the thing that scared me most?

Crying incoherently, publicly, in front of not only family, but all the friends that were going to come out to my brother's eulogy.

So a month and a half later,

I'm standing in front of 200 friends and family

at one of my brother's favorite golf clubs on what would have been his 51st birthday.

Behind me, beautiful greens, to my left, there was a beautiful portrait of my brother framed in flowers.

And in front of me, 200 faces around round tables looking up at me.

And so I started by telling them that my brother was a legend.

He was a legend for all the friends that he made.

He was that guy that you wanted to be friends with.

But then I got to that part that I was scared of, the part that I wanted to tell about how he loved

and how he was so proud of his family.

And I could feel the emotions coming up and I could feel the struggle that was so familiar coming up.

And you know what?

I just cried.

I just cried there and I let it out and I invited everybody to cry with me.

And after a lifetime, of damping that down and trying to control it and struggling,

it felt so good to let that emotion, let the grief and the sadness come out in those tears.

It actually felt good to just feel those emotions.

And it felt great to invite everybody in that room to feel them with me and cry with me.

And when I made that invitation, I could feel

the shift in the room.

Well,

I'm teaching a first-year seminar class right now called How to Build a Big Fat Fluffy Brain

and

we have talked about the power of human emotion and during that lecture one of my students said

I love all those positive emotions but I just want to skip over those negative ones.

And I thought that sounds familiar

But what I've learned is that

emotions are essential messages.

They tell us things about ourselves.

They tell us what we value, what we hold dear in our hearts.

That grief and sadness

I realized was an expression of my deep, deep love

for my brother.

I can't have that love without the grief and the sadness and the sorrow that comes when that person is no longer there.

I can't have one without the other.

I can't have the deep love without the grief.

I can't have the relief without the anxiety.

I can't have the joy without the fear.

So

I now have a different relationship with my own emotions.

Okay, I'm always going to be embarrassed that I cry at fake TV weddings.

But today,

even in public, I'm not embarrassed about showing my true emotions because I know that they are one of the most powerful tools that we have

to show

and to know

who we really are as human beings.

Thank you.

Dr.

Wendy Suzuki is an author, professor of neuroscience, and dean of the College of Arts and Science at New York University.

She says, these days, she finds herself crying in public on a somewhat regular basis.

It's still terribly uncomfortable, and she struggles with it every time, but she's learning to stay focused on the empowering part of showing your emotions.

You can find out more about Dr.

Suzuki and see pictures of her and her family on our website, themoth.org.

In this filtered Instagram world we're living in, everyone is so focused on being perfect and enviable.

But I argue that those embarrassing moments are actually gold.

We need to be able to laugh at ourselves.

No one is perfect, no one, and all you have to do is spend a little time coaxing folks into telling you about their most embarrassing moment and voila, instant connection.

That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour.

We hope you'll join us again next time.

This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Meg Bowles, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show.

Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch.

The rest of the Moths leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin Janess, Kate Tellertz, Marina Cluche, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza.

Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by The Drift.

Other music in this hour from Chet Atkins, Herbie Hancock, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Guthrie Trapp, and Yusuf Latif.

We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us, your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

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