This American Life - 856: You’ve Come to the Right Person

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

Sometimes, life’s biggest mysteries require one very specific person to answer them. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: 7-year-old Miles has lots of questions. More specifically, he has questions about the famous car chase from “The Blues Brothers” movie. We arrange for him to talk to stunt coordinator Gary Powell so he can get the answers he so desperately wants. (9 minutes)Act One: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld looks into why comedian Daniel Sloss’s comedy special has been responsible for so many couples breaking up. (17 minutes)Act Two: We hear from Kwaneta Harris, a former nurse incarcerated in Texas, who is constantly asked for medical advice by her neighbors. (17 minutes)Act Three: Producer Diane Wu talks to Juna, a young woman who is getting advice from someone uniquely equipped to guide her to the love life she wants. (12 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Support for NPR and the following message come from American Jewish World Service committed to the fight for human rights supporting advocates and grassroots organizations worldwide working towards democracy equity and justice at ajws.org A quick warning there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show if you prefer a beeped version You can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm David Kestenbaum sitting in for hourglass. And I'm just going to let my first two guests today introduce themselves. My name's Gary Powell. I'm a stunt coordinator, second unit director in motion films.

Name a couple movies. Ooh, Titanic, James Bond, Mission Impossible. Okay, Miles, your turn. I don't have a job. You could say your name, though. Miles. Miles is seven. Well, almost seven.

And we arranged for him to talk to Gary because he had some urgent questions about car chases from movies. And Gary, that's his particular set of skills. I drove the Crane in Terminator, the bus in Harry Potter. Wait, you drove the bus in Harry Potter? I did. A little background.

Miles loves cars. His mom says that before he could read, he could tell you make and model and sometimes year of any of their friends' cars. He draws cars, makes cars out of Legos. He brought one with him, actually. And he and Gary quickly got down to talking shop. I do car chases with my, like, seven and eight cars. Right, so do you choreograph little car chases

for yourself, then? Yeah. That's cool. You know what you should do? Before this conversation with Gary, Miles showed me this one kind of amazing drawing he'd done. It's a scene from a particular movie. He's drawn what looks like a black police car in the air,

flying backward over a second car. Miles would tell you the second car is a Ford Pinto. Miles hasn't seen the actual movie this is from, just this scene, over and over. Have you watched the Blues Brothers car chase that's eight minutes long? Yes, I have. Have you seen the backwards flip? The one at the end?

Yeah. Yeah. That's a picture of it. This is the thing he had questions about. The famous car chase at the end of the Blues Brothers. The whole thing is actually 11 minutes long. I remember the first time I saw it. I fell over.

Cause it was so amazing. I mean like, are those people billionaires if they can buy 150 Dodge police cars only to crash them? If you haven't seen the movie, it's a ridiculous massive smash up of cars. Miles had questions about how it was all done. And Gary Powell, world expert on car chases, said he was happy to help.

Hey Miles, should we just play through it and whenever you have a question, you just say stop. All right. All right, here we are, the final car chase scene in the Blues Brothers. Let's go. I'll marry it for you. It starts with the Blues Brothers, sunglasses, black suits, driving an old beat up black cop car that they bought used.

It's their single car being pursued on the highway by a long line of police cars. Officers are in pursuit, a black and white 1974 Dodge sedan. Paz. Paz. Officers are in pursuit. A black and white 1974 Dodge sedan. Paz. Paz. Are those Nazis real Nazis? He's talking here about members of the Illinois Nazi Party, who joined the car chase in an orange Ford Pinto. Are those Nazis real Nazis? Uh, no. They'll be actors playing those parts. Ah.

Miles is like, good to know. We move on to the action. Chase continues. I gotta pull over. Dan Aykroyd drives right through a highway barrier and down the embankment. They continue okay, but the cop car behind them crashes, followed by the one behind them and the next one,

some upside down. It goes on quite a while. Pause. one behind them and the next one some upside down. It goes on quite a while. Pause! Pause! Do they actually, um, are the people okay in the cars when they crash? Like, are there people in there like real people who are? Yes, there is. There'll be stumped people in those cars. They'll all be strapped in. They'll have roll cages inside the cars, probably wearing crash helmets, some of them.

So, yeah, they'd be safe. Almost all of Miles's questions were like this, about safety. Some version of, are those people I'm seeing in the movie OK? Like in this one scene where the Blues Brothers in the car go plowing through a mall, and all these people have to jump out of the way at the very last second. They're all stump people that have been trained, and they all move on a cue. They're really good because you can see they leave it right to the last second before they

move, but that was lots of stump people, lots of rehearsals. We continue. Miles shouts, pause, a couple more times. Wants to ask if Dan Aykroyd had to take special driving lessons. Answer probably yes. Another time to ask if that car that goes flying through the air and sticks into the side of a truck is real. Answer yes. And then we're at the climax of the chase. The one that Miles had drawn a picture of. The Blues Brothers are now being chased by just the Nazis, who are pursuing them ridiculously, in the orange Ford Pinto.

Blues Brothers gun it up an on-ramp to a highway. But oh wait, the highway hasn't been built yet. It's just a ramp into the air. Blues Brothers hit reverse, somehow flipped backward over the Nazi car behind them. But the Nazi car keeps going, off the ramp and into the air. It flies through the air, impossibly and comically far and then there's a shot of it falling straight down a really long way. You see the Chicago skyline in the background and the car smashes into the ground.

Wait pause pause pause. This is where I had the question how do they film that part? Gary explains that they actually dropped the Ford Pinto from a helicopter. And then they're just dropping it and then obviously when the wide shot we see the car dropping again that could be filmed from a helicopter or a building and you're just seeing it dropping all the way down. But like the question I have for that part, like, are they okay once the car lands because you don't see it after it lands. So in the car when it's dropping, when the physical car is dropping,

they've probably got two dummies sitting in there, no real people. But how do they get out? Gary explains that the interior shot of the two people in the car while it's falling, that was done separately, safely on the ground. Miles nods. Miles is actually the son of one of our co-workers here at the show, Alyssa. She has a theory about Miles' interest in the Blues Brothers chase and all those questions about are the people safe?

Which is that some of it has to do with the thing that happened last summer. A girl Miles knows was in a pretty serious car accident. Miles told Gary about it. I have a friend. Her and her dad were driving in their old Subaru outback and they were at an intersection and they stopped. There was a key of soul coming. There was a lady, a 95 year old lady in the car asleep at the wheel. Oh dear. And she rammed them into a tree. Oh, was they okay? Yeah, because my friend was trapped tightly

into the back seat. Oh, that's why you have to wear your seat belts and all that, so that was lucky. Hey Gary, how often when you're shooting like a car chase does somebody get hurt in the making of it? It's rare. I've unfortunately been involved in one car chase where someone got seriously hurt because the special effects rig failed and that is obviously not a nice experience, but I think it's, you know, out of the 35 years

that I've doing it, I've only had one serious accident in a car chase. Other than that, you might get a bit of like whiplash or something like that, but that's, you know, for us, that's nothing. Miles, can I ask you a question? What? Now that you know how this stuff is done,

do you think it's better to know how they did the stunts or better not to know? Better. It's good to know how they do that. So you know that none of the people are just random people who have a chance of dying in the film or something. That's the reason it's good to know. It's nice when you get to talk to the exact right person. You get answers to the questions that have been circling in your head.

And sometimes reassurances you didn't even realize you were asking for. Nice to meet you, Miles. Hope it makes things better for you. Probably will. Well, today we have stories of very idiosyncratic experts, all of them with super specialized knowledge, giving life advice.

We have one story about a comedian whose jokes have a strange power to change people's lives. Another story about a woman in prison who uses the skills she learned outside prison to MacGyver solutions to all kinds of impossible problems. And another where the expert's expertise includes the fact that she successfully had an affair. In each of these, you really think, who else could have helped them?

From WBZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us. This message comes from Wyse, the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending or spending money abroad, hidden fees may be taking a cut. With Wyse, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit WISE.com. TNCs apply. It's This American Life, Act 1, Ask Daniel.

This one starts with someone who gets some advice, though, interestingly, when it begins, they're not looking for advice. Aviva De Kornfeld has this one. David was in a situation that so many people find themselves in at one point or another. He was in a relationship that, by every metric, was pretty good. And yet, somewhere in the back of his mind, he found himself wondering if it was good enough. David was 24 and had been dating his girlfriend for three years at that point. I don't know if you've ever went through this yourself where you just have this

like a niggle, you know, and you go I don't know what the niggle is because everything's perfect. And the niggle being like a little hint of doubt? Is that what that is? Yeah, yeah. A slight doubt, slight confusion. It just didn't have that oomph. I'd say we were vanilla beige but lovely. What does that mean? So, I mean, you wouldn't be thinking that we were maybe flying off to France and having a romantic getaway together. There was nothing wrong, but no, no... Passion.

Yeah, yeah. There was zero French in any of the relationships. It was a very British relationship. One night, David's at a party without his girlfriend, talking with some people, and his friend Daniel, who's newly single and thrilled about it, starts telling everyone about his grand theory of love. He'd just come up with it. The theory went like this. Our life is like a jigsaw puzzle.

And as we grow up, we slowly piece the puzzle together, bit by bit. But the thing is, we've all lost the box to our individual jigsaws. So none of us know what image we're trying to make. So we start with the four sides, our family, friends, job, hobbies. And then we're all taught that the piece

at the very center of the jigsaw, the one we need to complete the puzzle, is our partner. And this is the important part. People are so desperate to find their missing puzzle piece that sometimes they try to cram a piece that obviously doesn't fit or strip out other parts in order to make room for that centerpiece because they believe that to be better than being alone. David is listening to all of this. I just had that holy shit moment of this is my life you're describing right now and I didn't realize it. David hadn't ever considered breaking up with his

girlfriend because there was nothing to break up over. But hearing Daniel talk about this jigsaw analogy, David begins to panic. And then I had this moment and I was like, what do I do? Like, what do I do now with this information? And he's like, well, I think you know what you need to do in this situation. Oh, you literally asked him that. What do I do? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was really taken back. Daniel's analogy worms its way into David's brain. And once it's there, he can't shake

it. So he breaks up with his girlfriend. And he actually explained the jigsaw analogy to her, as if anyone wants to hear that they're a misshapen puzzle piece, which he tells Daniel the next time he sees him. How did it feel when he told you that they'd broken up because of what you'd said? Um, I mean, he was happy. Yeah. So it felt good. And you know, I never thought that they were the perfect couple.

I never thought that they would be together forever. Like when they were together, I was like, oh, this ain't, this ain't it. She's great. You're great. But you together ain't great. This is Daniel, David's friend. Another friend of theirs, who also heard Daniel's analogy. He broke up with his partner too. Daniel had hit on something. He's a comedian, Daniel Soss, maybe you've heard of him. And feeling the wind of his friend's breakup

under his sails, Daniel starts trying out this bit in bigger venues. He told it on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, performed it for a month straight. Imagine all of our lives are like our own individual jigsaw puzzles. And as we're going through life, we're just slowly piecing it together bit by bit. And one night, after the show. I was at a nightclub and a girl came up to me and she was like, I saw your show a week ago and I broke up with my partner. Uh, and I was like, oh, cool. Awesome. Like, are you better for it?

She was like, yeah, I'm way better for it. I'm much happier. That's why I'm out. Daniel felt like, oh, this little party trick works with strangers too. He started touring with it, performing all around Scotland. Some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece and just fucking jam them into our jigsaws anyway. And after a show up in Dundee. This, he must have been about 50, 52 years old,

guy came up to me and he went, hey man, just wanted to let you know, I saw the show and I finally got these through and he showed me the first divorce papers. And I remember being like, oh, this is, this is something. How long have they been married, do you know? 20, 20 years, I think. Oh my god.

Yeah. Then, there was the 19-year-old girl who brought her parents to the show in an attempt to make them realize they were miserable together. It worked. She asked him to autograph their divorce papers, which he did, happily. Then, Daniel started taking the show abroad. We're in Hungary and a guy had driven, I'm going to say like 800 miles from somewhere like in Russia with his divorce papers just to see the show. So funny that people want to show you their divorce papers. It's like a cat bringing a dead, you know, bird to your doorstep. I made it for you.

That's such a great way of describing it. Daniel eventually turned this analogy into an hour-long special called Jigsaw. It's on Netflix. And the part in the special where he talks about love and couples stuck in bad relationships honestly feels more like a TED talk than traditional stand-up. You can spend five or more years with someone and only then, after all the fun you had, be looking at the jigsaw and realize you're both working towards very different images. Only then realize that you want different things.

And in that moment you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. One, do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Two, do I waste the rest of my life have been a waste. Two, do I waste the rest of my life? My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they're willing to give up

the one they are currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance and it is cancerous. I am very aware that this is not a particularly funny bit of the show. Audience laughs. Toward the end of the special, Daniel says, if you break up with someone after watching this,

please let me know. He's been keeping a rough tally of his breakup stats ever since. To date, between the people who come up to him in person, the tweets he's tagged in, the DMs he gets on Instagram, he estimates that as many as 30,000 couples have split up after seeing his show. The thing I don't understand is the stuff Daniel says in a special.

Most of it is not particularly novel. His jigsaw analogy isn't that far from a lot of the stuff you might find in a self-help book. Like the idea that you should be happy and whole on your own and you shouldn't settle. That's the thing people tell you about love. So what is it about this guy and the way that he delivers this familiar message? Why is it so effective? I wanted to talk to some of the people who broke up after watching Jigsaw. And let me tell you, they were not very hard to find. I heard from over 50 people from all over, the US, the UK, Australia, Italy, Kazakhstan,

the United Arab Emirates. I spoke with eight of them. And there is a real fervor to Daniel's fandom. People speak about him breathlessly, with a kind of them. And there is a real fervor to Daniel's fandom. People speak about him breathlessly with a kind of awe. They'll quote lines from his special like it's scripture or something. One person said she and her friends say, in sloths we trust, as their motto. And there are a lot of people out there walking around with puzzle piece tattoos. Most of the people I spoke with have watched a special over and over to fully absorb the teachings.

Some return to it in moments of doubt after breaking up with their partner. And what's crazy to me is that no one I talked to had had any immediate plans to break up with their partner when they first sat down to watch it. I came away from those conversations with a couple of theories as to why Daniel's message hit so hard. And I want to tell you about one person in particular, Charlotte, because her story encompasses all of them. Charlotte watched Jigsaw back in 2018, shortly after it came out.

She's from East London and, like everyone I spoke with, got together with her husband when she was super young. She was 20, still figuring out who she was. And Charlotte, like the others, just kind of thought, I guess this is what it feels like to be in a long-term relationship. It was flat, just flat. Charlotte had been with her husband for six years when she sat down one night to watch a special alone. I can remember sitting there and actually not touching my phone, not scroll on anything. I was absolutely hooked on what he was saying

because it felt like he was talking to me in a weird way. There's a part in the show where he said, you think that you're so special, you think you found your soulmate 30 minutes down the road. And I was like, oh no. There are 7.5 billion people on this planet and you found your soulmate 20 miles from where you live. You found your soul mate 20 miles from where you live. It was one of those things that just dawned on me that I've settled and I, it's like settling into a bad job. You're still getting paid, you're still going through the motions, there's somebody there,

you go on holiday. It's not like you're overly happy, but you're not overly sad. Right after watching the special, Charlotte tells her husband, you need to see this. Which interestingly was another thing so many of the people I spoke with did. Charlotte told me she hoped it would prompt her husband to take a hard look at their relationship, like it had for her.

No such luck. He spent the whole hour on his phone scrolling, not listening at all. Even after I started following the breakup tally on Twitter, he still wasn't kind of getting how much it really had resonated with me. Wait, you showed him how many people had broken up as a result of the special? As like a nudge? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god. And what'd he say?

Oh. OK. It sounds like you were kind of trying to tee him up to break up with you. Is that right? Yeah. But he was not paying attention. No.

He fussed off. In the end, she had to do it. So how did Daniel manage to break through to Charlotte? She says part of it was that she was just caught completely off guard. She had no idea what she was getting into when she decided to watch Jigsaw. Everyone I spoke with said something like this. That the fact that the advice came in the form of a comedy special made it easier to hear. Like wrapping a pill in cheese for an unsuspecting dog.

I didn't go into watching Jigsaw thinking that I was going to be thinking about breaking up my marriage. I was there for a laugh. Another thing about Daniel, he's super prescriptive. Charlotte wasn't happy, but that low hum of dissatisfaction she felt it never quite seemed like enough to blow her life up over. But in his special, it's like Daniel reached out of the screen and grabbed Charlotte by the shoulders and told her, actually that is enough. And that is enough. It felt like he was saying, well, Charlotte, just because you don't love him anymore doesn't

mean you can't break up with him. It's like you can break up with him. Breaking up with someone because you've grown as a person is a valid reason. You should break up with someone whenever. And you had never had a friend or a family member say it that directly to you? No. Not at all. Charlotte's younger sister hated how different Charlotte was whenever her husband was around,

but her sister never told her outright to break up. Her mom understood that she was unhappy, making a lot of sacrifices in her marriage, but would also say things like, I'm not gonna tell you what to do. Whenever Charlotte's family and friends observed that she didn't seem particularly happy with her husband. But I would defend him. I would say, oh, well, he's tired, you know, he works nights and we'd always defend his behavior,

even though he would embarrass me and the fact that I could tell that my family didn't like him and they didn't think that he was, he wasn't right for me hurt more because I'd made that choice. Do you think it was easier to hear the message from Daniel because he was a stranger? Yeah. People take advice from strangers sometimes more than they do the people closest to them because they don't care in the sense that if I see someone on the tube or whatever and they've got lipstick on their teeth and I literally I make eye contact with them and I do that, the motion of like wipe their teeth. Your friend is going to worry about how to say that to you. I don't

care. Like you got lipstick on your teeth. You got egg on your face. Daniel's a stranger. This I think is another reason why he's able to cut through. Because there's no embarrassment when you hear what he thinks about your bad choices the way you might feel with a friend. Daniel is a neutral party who can point out a problem on his way out the door entirely uninvested in what happens next. I think there's one more reason so many people split up after watching Jigsaw. Maybe the most important factor in all this. I first heard about Jigsaw when it came out in 2018.

At the time, I was in a relationship with someone who was pretty clearly not a good match for me long term. And so when I heard how many couples this special was breaking up, I thought, no way am I watching that. I know it'll happen. My relationship will never survive this. I'm not in that situation anymore. So recently, I decided it was finally safe to see the show.

And I have to say, I was totally right to be scared of it. There are moments in there that I know would have gotten me back then. Like this terrible thought about being in a relationship that you don't know how to leave. But you just sit there and you wait, you wait looking for an excuse to get out. Just waiting for them to do something unforgivable so that you can actually break up with them with a real excuse and leave with your head held high. But because unlike you, they're not a piece of shit, they won't do that. So you have to start lowering your standards

for what unforgivable is. One weekend you're like, if they cheat on me, this is perfect. I can leave them a head held high and I will not look like a dick. Nine weeks later, they're faithful and you're like, man, if they buy orange juice with pulp in it, that is. I can't live like that.

All I'm asking is, if you've ever been in a situation like that, in a relationship where you felt trapped, like you couldn't get out of it and it was just easier to stay in it, all I'm asking is if even for the briefest of seconds, have you ever accidentally caught yourself thinking how much easier life would be If they were to just die And not because you want them to die

But just because they're dying is like the easiest way for you to get out of that relationship. And it doesn't involve either one of you getting hurt emotionally. I have to say, I totally had that thought in my 2018 relationship. And it's not even that you want the other person to die so much as you just kind of want them to evaporate. Because breaking up with them just feels impossible. I had never said this thought out loud before watching the special. I didn't even know this was the thought other people had. And hearing it laid out in such a bare way, I know it would have been impossible to ignore.

That's the thing about this show. The jigsaw analogy is a sound that only people in quietly unhappy relationships can hear. If what Daniel is saying reaches you, it's because there's a little radio tower in your head, tuned to receive his message. Aviva De Kornfeld is a producer on our show. Daniel Sloss's specials, including the one you just heard about, are at danuelsloss.com slash streaming. Watch it if you dare. Coming up, let's do this one Jeopardy-style.

The answer is, combine No more tears, baby shampoo, and Vaseline into a paste. The question, that's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm David Kestinbaum and for Ira Glass. Our show today, You've Come to the Right Person, stories about people finding very specific guides

through life's great mysteries. We've arrived at Act Two, Ask Quineda. So this story is about someone with very specialized knowledge giving advice in a very specific place. I'll just note, if you're listening with kids, this story includes some adult topics. It's an essay by Quineda Harris. And to introduce it, one of our coworkers here, Diane Wu,

called her up. So Quineda, can you say where you are right now? I am in myself, in Texas, in a woman's prison. And before you were incarcerated, what was your job? What was your special expertise? Oh, I was a nurse. I was a nurse who floated from the emergency room, oncology, geriatric care, home health care. Can you hear me okay here or should I stand somewhere else? Am I okay? Yeah. Where is that? Where are you

standing? On top of the toilet seat. Really? Holding my tablet in the air like Lady Liberty. Like the Statue of Liberty? Yes. And I have the other hand on the wall to hold on. So you and I have been working on this story for a while now, right? Yes. It's been a minute. Yeah, and we were hoping to record you

to come to the prison and record you, but they denied our request. And since the phone line is bad and we don't want you to have to read the story standing on top of your toilet, we decided to bring in an actor to read the essay instead. Oh, thank God. Could you read the first couple of lines of the story to get us started, and then we'll cross-fade to the actor?

Sure. The first thing that happened was I lost everything. I remember exactly the moment I realized it. It was in 2009, just a couple weeks after I had been transferred from the county jail to prison. I'd injured my shoulder working in the kitchen, stirring pots with canoe-sized paddles, so I went to medical. I entered a crowded waiting room, interrupting a lecture by a med tech and a guard, when they asked me what did I want. With all eyes on me, I said, I need some ibuprofen for my shoulder. The med tech launched into a sermon. Stop looking for a quick fix.

Stop popping pills. Try to stay clean. Pray on it. Drink more water and lose weight. All that for a few motrin. As she talked, I noticed she was wearing the exact same scrubs I had in my bedroom closet at home. Light blue ones with the pink breast cancer awareness ribbon all over them.

It hit me like a body punch to see her in those scrubs, talking to me in such dehumanizing language. Before, she would have been one of my colleagues. Now I was on this other side, and there was no way back. But then, a window back to my old life appeared. I started to get medical questions from the women incarcerated with me. It took a few years. Word got out early on that I was a nurse, but there are

many nurses in prison. Some of them are in prison because they were doing nefarious things as a nurse, so people didn't want to ask them for help. But once it was cleared up that I wasn't one of the nurses that hurt their patients, I slowly started getting questions. People would come and talk to me in the yard or in the shower, or when people were too ashamed to ask out loud, they would write it down on a tiny slip of paper and get it to me. First it was just the girls in my dorm. Then they started asking for their friends, who told their friends.

Now, over a decade later, I get notes from almost every women's prison in Texas. These notes are surreptitiously passed during meal time or laundry exchange, tucked into dirty socks or folded under a tray, passed between women from different prisons on the bus to the prison hospital. Many are from strangers who have just heard that they can write to Mama Detroit.

That's me. They're folded up in a square with tiny writing on white or colored pieces of paper. On the inside of candy wrappers. The thin plastic from cotex pads. I even get questions on squares of toilet paper. One reads, My roommate uses her inhaler all the time. I think she's addicted to it.

Is that possible? Another girl who's in a church choir here wrote about someone she sings with. When she sings, her breath smells up the whole choir. Her teeth are all rotten and peppermints are not helping. What can we do? The range of questions people ask is very wide. Anything from, what's this medicine for, to which homemade dildo is safest?

None of them. ["The Note"] Everyone involved in passing the notes is taking a risk. The writer, the person delivering the note, me. If you're caught with a note on you, it can be a disciplinary infraction, possession of contraband. If you have three or more of these infractions in 30 days, that can get upgraded to a major case, which can be used to justify a parole denial.

I deliberately store all my unwritten notes in a brown paper bag in the corner of my cell, so I can always claim it's trash. Lou wrote to me about her friend Prissy, who bought contraband eyeshadow from someone working in the prison print shop. The print shop has pretty bright powdered ink that people steal for makeup. Lou wrote that Prissy couldn't get the blue eyeshadow off. She tried toothpaste. It's stained.

She looking like a fat ass smurf. I wrote back. Mix No More Tears baby shampoo and Vaseline into a paste. Apply to your eyelid overnight, then wipe rubbing alcohol repeatedly to the area. It will slowly fade to green and then eventually disappear. I know this won't be the last time someone accidentally cosplays a cartoon character though. We all miss feeling human, you know?

Like our old selves. For me, answering these questions, it made me feel like my old self. It was a way for me to still be a caregiver. I felt needed. I was needed in a very particular way I hadn't been on the outside. Because first, the medical care that exists in our prison is extremely lacking. There are only a handful of medical providers for the 1,200 people here.

You have to pay to go to medical. $13.55 per visit, which is a king's ransom when we're forced to work in here for free. And when you get there, they treat you like crap. And the medical staff can't answer their questions as well as I can, because unlike the people they're treating, they aren't incarcerated. I know the materials available to women, Vaseline, baby shampoo.

I know the exact way to ask for certain treatments without getting punished. Like for yeast infections. Going in and saying, I have a yeast infection will often lead the nurse to start asking about your sex life. And if you let slip that you have a girlfriend, the guards supervising your appointment can write you a disciplinary. The safer way I tell people is to tell the nurse you took antibiotics

recently and are noticing this side effect. You have to let the nurse think she figured it out. Also, I know the various factors the women are weighing when they consider their own care. For instance, early on, one of the most common medical questions people would write to me was, do I really need to get a mammogram? I know what they mean when they ask this.

We all hate the mammogram trip. We have to take a nausea-inducing bus ride that freezes us during the winter and cooks us in the summers. We have to pack all of our belongings to send to storage while we're gone, and when we move back, they assign us a new roommate. It's so hard to get a decent roommate. Few people want to risk losing that by leaving. When people ask me if it's worth going on the trip,

I write back explaining breast cancer, and ask if their mom or anyone else in their family has a history of cancer. I try to convince them, and myself, that it's only once a year and probably worth going. But the prison instituted a new rule last summer. They now promise to hold our assigned bed and roommate for a week. People are still refusing to go, though, even though you could get a disciplinary infraction if you skip the trip. Ain't nobody ridin' in that wheeled cauldron.

More questions I've received. My roommate got lupus. Can I catch it from her? No. You don't have to worry about that. It's an autoimmune disease which means it's her body fighting her body. This girl wrote me and said, I pee only a little bit each time I go. Is this my prostate? That's not your prostate. You don't have one. This is a UTI. I have two girls in here who wrote me with signs and symptoms of endometriosis.

The problem is, the only way you can diagnose endometriosis is surgery. I'm still figuring out what to write back to them. I used to think my special expertise was to help women who were incarcerated with me, but then I started getting mail from released friends too. Like one from my friend I'll call Flaca, who asked me, what can she drink to get rid of her pregnancy? She was sexually assaulted by a guest at the motel where she works. Abortions are illegal in Texas. Flaca has a snitch on her ankle in the form of an electronic GPS monitor so she can't

slip over to New Mexico and get abortion care. She can't get medical abortion pills mailed to her in the faith-based halfway house that opens all incoming mail. Flaca still has to figure out how to get health care while being surveilled and restricted. These days feels like women all over Texas do, not just those of us in prison. All I could tell her was to call the National Planned Parenthood hotline, not from her phone, because parole officers might search her phone history. I was relieved to hear that she ended up getting the pills by having them delivered to someone

else's address. I just hope it's a friend, somebody who won't try to extort or tell on her. Flaca is still on parole. Since receiving Flaca's letter a year ago, I have received eight more letters from women asking for abortion care resources. When I've needed medical advice, I don't have anyone to ask for help. I've had to figure out how to be my own mama, Detroit. About nine years ago, I was sent to solitary confinement and a few years in, I started to feel like I was losing it. I couldn't sleep and I started to get

incredibly emotional. One day, one of the girls below me told three of us through a shared heating vent, that's our phone, about a letter from her father asking for forgiveness. As I stood listening at my vent, I just couldn't stop crying. This was not normal for me, but I had read about how in solitary, people react differently to extreme isolation. Then my memory started to go.

I started needing to use my cell walls as a whiteboard to jot down reminders for myself. The date of my daughter's next volleyball game or what three things I wanted to talk about at my next doctor appointment. My memory has always been really, really good. My second husband used to say that we got divorced because of my memory, because I just couldn't let things go. It was hard to let go that he kept cheating.

So when I started not being able to remember anything, it was a really scary moment for me. I couldn't focus on what I was reading. My body ached. It was late 2020 and I thought, this is long COVID. This is solitary confinement. Finally, one of my friends on the outside wrote to me saying, you think it might be menopause?

I told her, I am not that old. I was only 48. They never taught us about menopause in nursing school. It was just some punchline about hot flashes, which I started to get, too. There isn't air conditioning in our prison building in Texas. It gets so hot in the summer that Coke cans will just spontaneously explode. Toothpaste liquefies. In June 2019, I fainted from the heat and the sergeant took the

temperature in my cell that day, 129 degrees. So I already felt like I was being cooked before the hot flashes. But when that burning feeling hits the middle of my chest then radiates to the rest of my body, it's unbearable. I learned to keep bowls filled with tap water to dump over my head at the start of each hot flash. I always expect the water to sizzle. So I wrote to my friends back home and asked what they used to treat their menopausal symptoms.

They told me about black cohoche, flaxseed, apricots and berries, but the general consensus was that the most effective treatment was estrogen vaginal cream and hormone replacement therapy. My friends inside prison told me, there's no way you're gonna get any of those. I went to dreaded medical and tried for three years to get hormone replacement therapy. I finally got a dreaded medical and tried for three years to get hormone replacement therapy.

I finally got a prescription and the change was instantaneous. It was like a switch turned me back into the old me. My skin cleared up, my hair regained thickness, my mood was lighter, and the brain fog cleared. Best of all, the hot flashes stopped. It was a miracle drug, until the prescription ran out after two months. The doctors would not give me a refill. That was two years ago. So here I am, living with all my symptoms, waiting for this phase to pass. The symptoms can last a decade. Studies show black women experience more hot flashes,

longer hot flashes, and longer perimenopause. I learned this from the radio and from a pamphlet about menopause that I asked my lawyer to send me. When I tried to learn more by ordering books like the Menopause Manifesto, the prison denied the books for being sexually explicit. Meanwhile, I've gotten a few questions from other neighbors about menopause. We're all getting older in here.

After all these years, I'm not tired of answering questions yet, but I am tired of answering the same questions. I am tired of repeating the same answers. Depot shot is the name of the birth control everyone wants because the guards don't hand out enough pads and tampons. The flu shot will not give you the flu. No, the COVID vaccine didn't have a chip in it. Tampons don't cause cancer. They don't cause infertility. I thought by 2025 we'd move on to something else. But the girls still aren't getting this information

anywhere else. I wish I could put the 10 most asked questions on a flyer and just pass them out. But that's not how it works in here. So I keep writing. Quenadah Harris's story was read by the actor Keisha Lewis. You can see her on Broadway now in her Tony award-winning role in the musical Hell's Kitchen. We did reach out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for comment. They told us that guards are not supposed to be writing disciplinary infractions for

notes unless they are violent or drug-related. And that the menopause manifesto is on the approved book list. Also, Quenetta has moved prisons over the years. In her current one, the mammogram trip isn't as long. Our story was produced by Diane Wu. You can find more of Quinnetta's writing on her sub-stack, Write or Die, Raw Dispatches from a Texas Woman's Prison. Act 3, Ask Harriet.

So earlier in the show we had a story about how to know when to leave a relationship. This last story is about a woman who wishes she had that problem. And for the second time in today's show, here's Diane Wu. Yuna's life outside of dating is as busy as a rom-com heroines. She lives outside Boston near her family and a ton of beloved friends. She has a job she likes, fills her free time with jujitsu and weightlifting. She can deadlift 370 pounds,

which if you don't know what that means, it's as impressive as it sounds. Yuna's dream is to meet someone at the gym, but that hasn't happened yet. Because you know, a lot of men are very afraid to approach women at the gym, which I totally understand because obviously people like, a lot of time are very afraid to approach women at the gym, which I totally understand because obviously people, like, a lot of times don't want to be disturbed in the workouts.

Yeah. But there are people that want to be disturbed, me, by a hot man. Anyways. Yuna's 29 and has never had a boyfriend. Not for a lack of trying. In high school and college, she was a nerdy pianist who didn't really date. But five years ago, she got on the apps. On her first date, she was so nervousdy pianist who didn't really date, but five years ago she got on the apps. On her first date, she was so nervous

that her teeth were chattering as she waited for the guy to arrive. Didn't go great, very few of them have. Sometimes it feels like in her friend group, she's the last one standing. I feel like we've always all been single, like a lot of my best friends, and like now they're all in relationships,

and that's when I'm like, it's because I'm blind. —Yuna's been blind since she was a little kid. She grew up in Albania, moved to Boston when she was five. The way her blindness works is that everything is very, very blurry. She reads on her phone by zooming in a lot and then holding it right up to her face. The friends she's thinking of who've paired off, they're sighted. There's no other thing that explains why it's been so difficult for me. I just can't pinpoint another thing that separates me from the other people that I feel like

are successful besides being blind. Yuna's like, I think I'm at least average pretty. I think she's pretty. I'm fun to talk to. Also true. What gives? She experiments with putting that she's blind on her dating profile.

The number of matches she gets plummets. Doesn't surprise her. She feels like meeting people in real life is also harder because of things like eye contact, which doesn't come naturally to her. I will often look at people's mouths because that's where their voice comes from. So I think I'm always like four inches under eye contact, and sometimes I'll consciously make an effort to look higher than where I want to look.

But then I get very uncomfortable because another big insecurity I have is that my eyes make people uncomfortable. And so I kind of feel bad looking at them in the eye. So basically, I've just like given up on like looking at people's eyes. I'll just look at their mouth. You know, sort of resigned to having a bad time of it. But then a couple of years ago, friends mom told her, my friend Harriet is blind, too. You guys should meet. You know, is pretty skeptical at first, but liked Harriet right away.

They're both musicians, both very talkative. But what really stood out to Yuna was Harriet's bountiful love life. She's 78 and has had three husbands and more boyfriends than she can count. Even an affair, which seemed to really impress Yuna. Yuna's always wanted to ask her, what's your secret? What should I be doing differently? We went over to Harriet's home one December evening to find out.

Her partner, Frank, let us in. Hi, Frank! In the kitchen, Yuna tells me one of her favorite stories, the story of how Harriet and Frank met 20 years ago. Harriet and Frank met on a red line train. Harriet was playing recorder and Frank heard it and was like, can you teach me that song, right guys? Yeah, that's how it happened.

He sat down next to me and he said, I have my recorder with me. Which is crazy. Like Frank, why did you have your recorder with you? I don't know, that was a certain time in my life. They played together on the train, exchanged numbers, became friends, and five years into that friendship, started dating. We sit around the kitchen table and get down to business.

Okay, should we begin? So Harriet. Una starts by explaining how her dating life has gone so far. No real success. Her conclusion that blindness is getting in her way. So in your idea of your life, right, if you think back on your life, have you ever thought to yourself that your vision impacts your dating? Or has it to you just not been a related topic? Not been a related topic, except to share with people all the amazing experiences that I

have kinesthetically and otherwise as a blind person. Let's say like meeting people in person, right? One thing that I feel like is very difficult is that I can't make eye contact. And I never could, baby. So I don't know what you're talking about. But Harriet, all like the videos on TikTok about like how to meet people at the gym and stuff or whatever is like the person makes eye contact with you and then you smile to let them know that like you're available to come.

Harriet's waving her hands. Harriet. I just bump into them awkwardly and say, where's the treadmill? Harriet. Okay, I do that too sometimes, but like. With panache, you know, with ease, you know, like, oh, hey, there's the treadmill? I know it. Okay, I do that too sometimes, but like. With panache, you know, with ease, you know, like, hey, where's the bathroom? You know, can you walk me over there?

Thank you, I'll get it fixed. I'll do it better next time, you know, whatever. But don't you see, it's like, we're unwilling to be vulnerable. Everybody is. Well, not here yet. I have no problem. I'll stand up in the subway and say, Hey, anybody getting off at X spot? I have to cross over from, you know, from the A line to the West 4th Street, you know, whatever. That's crazy. Like, I have literally

been lost for hours because I refuse to ask for help. I'm like, I'm going to wander around until I find where to go to avoid asking for help. So now Harriet's laughing at me. No, not at you. I'm just laughing at the discomfort and awfulness of it, you know? Yuna's default mode is to be completely competent in everything she does. She hates being underestimated or condescended too. This is her way of protecting herself from all of that. But talking to Harriet, she realizes it might

come with a downside. Like when Yuno's friend invites her to go salsa dancing, even though she wants to try it, she doesn't. She worries the way she dances might look embarrassing. You know what I mean? How much you're basing all of your perceptions, at least from where I'm sitting with this, on the sighted world. But the sighted world is the world, Harriet. It is, but it hasn't been a problem. I still feel that my world has total integrity. I feel like my world has total integrity too, but I feel like, I don't know. I think the hardest thing in life, whether you're sighted or anything, is a deeper self-acceptance.

Really. And that doesn't matter what the hell other people react to or what they think or whatever. Whatever you're sensing from me, do you think that that plays a role into why it might be hard for me to date people? Yes. Okay, why? Because you have a lens, you have a filter that is constantly on high, that says,

they're not gonna get me, they're gonna put me down, they're gonna ignore me, they're going to put me down, they're going to ignore me, they're going to pity me. And if that is sort of in the emotional undercurrent within you, then it'll amplify everything. Accept yourself. It's hard to know what to do with that kind of advice. What do you think that I should do differently? But like you can't say you have to deeply accept yourself because I just don't even

know what that means. So it's like... Harriet gives her a concrete thing to try. Yuna's been taking jiu-jitsu classes that she really loves with mostly guys. And she has a crush on one of them. Just see if they want to go out and have have coffee or tea. I just don't think people do that anymore Harriet. Like, so what? Maybe they're all waiting. I don't want to be the one to do it. Why can't they do it? I always make the first move. Harriet. Treat it as

friendship. It's just a thought. No, I think you're right. Like the guy I have a crush on, for example, me and my friends call him my husband. I'm like, your husband's not in class today. And I'm like, how am I supposed to go talk to my husband? I'm too scared. Like, I'm scared. No, no, no, no, no, you have to reset.

Reset. So last week, Harriet, I was in class and my jiu-jitsu husband usually will ask me to spar once in class. And this time we only had one sparse. Long story short, we didn't get to spar. And I'd only come to class to see my jiu-jitsu husband. And so I saw him on the mat, right? And I was like, I'll go ask him. But I was scared. I was like, I'll go ask him because And I was like, I'll go ask him.

But I was scared, but I was like, I'll go ask him. Cause he always asked me, I'll go ask him. And I went to go ask him and he's like a very shy, like introverted person. And I asked him, he's like, oh, yeah, like actually I was stretching cause I was going to leave, but yeah, I guess we can spar, yeah. And I was like, oh no, it's okay.

We can do it next time, yeah, okay. I like ran back to the locker and he kept me like, no, no, no, let's do it. I was like, no, no, it's okay, we can do it next time, yeah, okay. I like ran back to the locker and he came up to me and he's like, no, no, no, let's do it. I was like, no, no, it's okay, we can do it another time. He's like, no, let's, let's part. Anyways, it took him like three different times to be like, no, let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. And then we did. And I was like, I'm never talking to him again. Like, he can talk to me if he wants, but I am never speaking to him again in class

because I was so embarrassed. The fact that he asked you the three times is already not saying I want to be your husband, but it is saying I would like to do that. So it's authentic. I think he's asking from just my sense about it, from a very authentic place. And so build on it. Just get to know him. When you finish sparring, you can say, if you would like to go to brunch sometime, just

the two of us after Jiuujitsu, let me know. Okay. ["Jujitsu Song"] So it's been three weeks since you went and talked to Harriet and I'm calling to see are there any updates? Oh my god, I feel like I'm on like one of those dating shows anyways. So I went the first time after talking to Harriet and I was like, you know what, let me treat this person the same way I treat everybody else in this class and just like be normal and be his friend. And so I started

talking to him and it was like the worst conversation I've ever had in my entire life. Like not because of me, like he, it was like talking to a brick wall you guys. It was like so terrible. And I went to the dog park the next day and I was like, you guys, I think he has literally no personality.

And they were like, then why do you like him? And I said, I literally think it's just because of his arms and I've been so stupid. Very wise person once tweeted, a crush is just a lack of information. Though for Yuna, getting that information, progress. Yuna, determined to follow Harriet's instructions, actually continued befriending the guy,

who ended up being much more fun to talk to later. She still seems a long way from ever making the first move but now at least she knows it's an option. Diane Wu is a producer on our show. Well our program today was produced by Tobin Lowe and edited by Ira Glass. The people who put together today's show include Fia Benin, Michael Comete, Manuel Giochi, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Howley, Hanna Joffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Miki Miik, Katherine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumory, Alyssa Shipp, Lily Sullivan, and Christopher Swatala. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is Emanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Susanna Fogel, Susan Burton, Emily Nonko at Empowerment Avenue, David P. O'Neill, Thomas Reed, Evan Ferrante,

Derek Campana, Dasha Slater, Jessica Peters, and thanks to all the people who spoke to us about their breakups caused by a comedian. One other quick note. We checked the police report about that car accident that Miles told me about at the beginning of the show involving, he said, a Kia Soul. Sorry, Miles. Turns out it was not a Kia Soul. The police report listed as a Chevy. I don't know, make and model. We're going to try to find out for you. Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. If you become a This American Life partner, you'll get bonus content, ad free listening and more.

In our newest bonus episode, Ira plays two stories that never aired on the show. Not because they're bad, but for more interesting reasons, which he explains. To hear it, go to thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. That link is also in the show notes. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Special thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Toria Malatya. He's seen Elon Musk's Roman salute and Steve Bannon's. Just has one question. Are those Nazis real Nazis? I'm David Kestenbaum.

Back next week with more stories of this American life. I'm feeling tired And I do appreciate the baby's ride Help me set my feet back on the ground Won't you please help me?