NPR: An Essential Part of a Treatment Plan

With the gentle lull of the annual begathon accompanying my meals this week, I found myself, as I was microwaving leftover lentils and rice after a late class on Wednesday, donating sixty bucks I don't have to my local NPR station.

I think my reasons are political. I think my reasons are personal. And I know that it's not a melodramatic exaggeration to say that public radio, and the people who invest their time in collecting stories and reporting injustice, have saved my life.

I didn't grow up in an NPR household--my parents are too conservative for that. But when my parents moved us from a working class mill city in Massachusetts to a burgeoning hipster city in Southern Maine, I was eating disordered. I was depressed. And I was a good writer. After taking my first journalism class my sophomore year, one my colleagues recruited me to train at our local community radio station for something called Blunt. And so for three years, I became involved with community radio public affairs: hosting shows on genocide in Central Africa, corporatizing of our city by Walmart; creating features before the days of Pro-tools and other digital editing on re-visioning of Columbus Day and Gay Proms. I fell in love with writing for radio and began to do stories of my own life. And it was one of these stories that clued in my mentor and radio advisor, Claire.

If I hadn't had a reason to write, I'm not sure how much cardiac arythmia and internal bleeding would have had to surface before anyone noticed.

It was Claire I called from the hospital my first New Year's Eve in treatment. It was Claire I introduced my first girlfriend to a few years later, when the pieces of my trauma puzzle were beginning to fit into place and I knew part of my recovery meant coming out.

And from working in Community Radio, I became an NPR addict. It's been my constant meal companion--when I'm too anxious to slow down with the food in front of me, when I'm too tired to make it through a plate, when I'm sitting with uncomfortable fullness I tell myself: make it through this one feature story. Then another. And another. Until the moment has passed.

And sometimes it takes several meals of listening for something to sink in. That war that has been consuming my entire adult life: this morning, I heard it. I had been hearing it, of course, for the past 24 hours, but today, over a breakfast burrito and coffee, I teared up. It was over. Our troops--troops we should be apologizing to--are coming home. And I felt a lightness after my meal; a changing of tides; a new story beginning to unfold.