Harker: How a podcast changed my life

This summer I spent a lot of time in my car, driving back and forth between jobs. It was the first summer ever I’d spent not living at home, so I was lonelier than I was used to, not having my four younger siblings around all the time. So I started listening to more podcasts.
That’s when I found a podcast titled Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink and I loved it immediately.
The story is about a woman who became a truck driver to scour the United States to try to find her wife who disappeared. Throughout the series the narrator has to try to figure out the story of a dangerous serial killer, the mysterious trucking company she now worked for and how Alice’s disappearance was connected to it all. The story itself is creepy yet captivating at every turn, and always keeps you guessing.
But the best part about the podcast isn’t the great LGBT representation, the amazingly inclusive and interesting plot or even the lack of commercials. The best thing about this podcast is that throughout this adventure she is on, the narrator talks openly and vividly about her anxiety and how it affects what she is doing.
As someone who has suffered from anxiety her entire life, this immediately struck me as strange. Talking about anxiety is not the norm; in fact I have spent most of my life actively trying to cover up my anxiety and convince everyone I’m OK. So to have someone talking openly about having anxiety attacks and how it felt to be so afraid — that it felt like your chest had a ton of bricks on it — made me continue to listen every day.
As the summer was nearing the end, I was having a hard time balancing my work and home life. I was feeling overwhelmed and with school right around the corner, it was starting to become too much for me. One day I was running late, and had to pull over in a parking lot on my way to work because I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
It was there, in my car once again, sobbing and gasping for breath as I felt completely overwhelmed by my anxiety that I first heard the final episode in the first season of that show called Thistle.
I won’t tell you what happens so as not to ruin it but the narrator does something very stupid and very brave. At some point she talks about how she is convinced she’s going to die and is about to give up, but then feels her anxiety come rushing back like electricity.
She uses her anxiety to fight off her attacker and she wins. This really spoke to me and it gave me the strength to pull myself together and get through the rest of my day. To hear someone talk about exactly what I was going through really helped me realize that I could overcome this obstacle as well.
Now whenever I’m feeling stressed out, or overwhelmed, I just pull out my headphones and start back at episode one.
Jessica Harker is a third-year communications student and the IC’s Editor-in-Chief.