Finding Unexpected Purpose

Aug 29, 2024

It was 8 AM and I was bellied up at the dive bar with a friend. All the TVs were playing The Price is Right. During the Showcase Showdowns, if The Big Wheel landed on $1, our next drink was $1. 

Clickclickclickclick…click..click…..click…………..click...

Then either a collective groan or an eruption of cheers. 

Most of us were drunk by 11:00. It was 2013 and I was in the middle of a 6-week program led by the folks at Transom.org, an online platform that teaches people how to record and produce their own stories.

The U.S. postal workers had just gotten off their night shifts. They were grouped on the other side of the bar, in full winter uniforms, having an after-work pint. I noted one guy in particular: a middle-aged man with greying hair and a big mustache. He looked friendly enough so I grabbed my drink, opened the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, hit record, and approached him. I asked if I could interview him for a storytelling project I was working on. He agreed, so I asked him the same question I’d been asking seven strangers each week: “What are you afraid of?”

For these weekly assignments, half of the people I approached would decline. The people who did participate mostly gave me surface answers like “I’m afraid of my wife when she doesn’t have coffee in the morning.” Four weeks and 28 people later, I had gotten two great interviews. One of them was from the postal worker. His name was Mike. He told me that his wife had recently died and that he was afraid for his daughter who was in her 20s.

“How’s she gonna live without her mom?” Mike said. He went on to tell me details of his wife’s final days in the hospital. How sick she was and how she looked as she was dying. We talked for about a half hour. His friends came over to tease him for talking to me for so long and, Mike told them, “No, this is good. It’s like therapy.” As we said goodbye, he hugged me. 

I went back to my seat at the bar, gathered my things, and left. I knew I had something and I couldn’t wait to work on it. In my 20-year drinking career, I don’t know of any other time I left the bar because I had something better to do.

It had been six years since I'd dropped out of audio engineering school. Sexism and anti-queerness were commonplace among teachers, students, and staff. The final straw was when I asked for help because I suspected I had a learning disability. My counselor suggested I switch careers. I felt like a failure.

Transom featured my piece on Mike on their website along with the second good interview I got. The teachers there took notice of my work and spent extra time with me and helped me craft my pieces. My feelings of failure about being an audio school dropout began to heal. I was moving away from thinking I was a failure to being able to see my talents and potential. When I had signed up for the program I was excited to use the audio training I’d developed in school and to also just nerd out about audio.

But something bigger and unexpected happened: I realized that people need to be listened to. Those 30-minute conversations with strangers made them feel seen. Someone cared enough to listen to them, record them, and make pieces around their stories.

I also learned that asking good questions is the way I show people that I care. I didn’t know it then, but I’d been doing that my whole life. The importance of amplifying others, as it turned out, was my biggest takeaway from the experience. I had a new direction and had rounded out my passion. It wasn’t just about audio and storytelling anymore. 

 The second you hit record you have purpose. A transducer is a device that transforms one form of energy into another corresponding form of energy. A microphone transforms sound into an audio signal. In a way, audio makers are a kind of transducer too. We transform audio into stories and that is nothing short of magic.

 

Update: After the Transom workshop, I started a blog and kept recording sounds and interviewing people. A few months later I got an internship with the production team at the Peabody Award-winning radio show and podcast On Being with Krista Tippett. After that I began a career as a freelance podcast editor and then became a senior trainer at Hindenburg. Now I teach folx about audio and audio editing through social media and online courses.

My newest endeavor is inspired by the Transom workshop I took 11 years ago. It's an online community called Loud & Queer where queer folx make and share audio stories.