Saleem: Hey. It’s Saleem Reshamwala. This is More Than A Feeling, from Ten Percent Happier. Today, we're talking about tears. 

[music]

Saleem: It’s inevitable working on a show about emotions that big feelings come up in the creative process. On our team we’ve tried to create a judgment free zone where tears are welcome. And that’s a good thing, because it turns out we have some real criers…

[Jen sniffle]

Saleem: This is our executive producer, Jen Poyant, crying. She’s watching a movie that a literal tears expert recommended for its likelihood to induce crying. This film is called The Story of the Weeping Camel.

Jen (tape): Wow. I really didn't think I would, but it's an hour and 17 minutes in and I'm like, definitely crying. 

Saleem: But while Jen was surprised by her tears, we know her. And honestly we weren’t surprised. She’s what some people would call a low threshold crier. I know for a fact she cries at least once a week. No judgements, Jen…it’s all love. Palace Shaw is another producer on our show, and she and I watched The Story of the Weeping Camel with slightly different results.

Saleem (in studio): Hey, Palace.

Palace (in studio): Hey, Saleem.

Saleem (in studio): So I, like you, I just watched the weeping camel and I wanna know – did you cry? 

Palace (in studio): I didn’t. I didn't cry.

Saleem (in studio): I also did not cry. Ah, are we broken robots? Is there something wrong with us? Is there hope for us? Should we really be working on a show about emotions?

Palace (in studio): ugh, I really, really hope we’re not broken. (chuckles)

Saleem: A quick recap, if you haven’t seen The Story of the Weeping Camel, it’s a documentary that follows a Mongolian family in a very rural setting. And I’m not gonna totally spoil it for you, but there’s emotional music, a camel baby is struggling to survive, there’s a human family with their own hopes and dreams. It’s all very emotional, and seems to make a lot of people cry. People who aren’t Palace and me. And one thing I’ve always wondered is – is that a bad thing if you don't cry in situations like this? What does it say about us? What’s it say about me?

Saleem (in studio): Palace, what do you think is the difference between someone who cries at this movie and someone who doesn't? Is there a difference? 

Palace (in studio): Honestly I have no clue. (laughs)

Saleem (in studio): (laughs)

Palace (in studio): Um yeah. I don't know. I don't want it to be true obviously, like I don’t have this picture of me as a broken person. But also what I’m thinking about too is just – is there a “right” emotional expression? Is there a “right” version of emotional expression? Should I be concerned if I don’t feel what other people feel? I do think there’s something to feeling out of sync with these emotional moments. 

Saleem (in studio): Fair. You know for the record I’ve never thought of you as a broken person. But I do feel like society can kind of make us feel that way. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know what's actually true here. One thing I do know is that I wanna understand it better. I wanna understand tears, in general, better, but I am curious what's going on here.  Should we learn how to cry here or should we be changing the way we're thinking about the weeping camel? I wanna know about all of it.

Saleem: So today on the show we’re gonna dive into the the science, mystery, and meaning of our tears. We’re gonna talk to two very different experts on crying and tears as a whole. One of them is a self-proclaimed crybaby who spent years suppressing his tears until one day, he decided to go to some extremes to get them back. 

And then, we’re gonna meet the scientist who recommended this movie to us. He has some pretty intriguing answers to our big questions about tears, like whether me and Palace are fundamentally broken because we’re not moved to tears by the plights of adorable camels. There is a lot more to come on tears, from inside the lab, and out there in real life– stick around. 

[SEGMENT BREAK]

Saleem: Welcome back. Reverend Benjamin Benjamin Perry started out thinking his crying was a big problem.

Benjamin Perry: I'm a minister at Middle Church in New York City and for the purposes of this interview, I'm a crybaby.

Saleem: When Ben was growing up, they got a lot of mixed messages about their tears.

Benjamin Perry: I cried very easily. I was a sensitive kid, pretty bookish. I was bullied a fair amount and had a lot of internalized homophobia, behavioral, attentional issues. All sorts of things going on as a child. So I was very emotional, very quick to cry. I was very fortunate to grow up in a house where that was never demonized. I had parents who were pretty open and expressive about their own emotions, who certainly never criticized me for having my own. 

That being said, I also grew up in a country where I absolutely received those messages. And so I have lots of memories being very young, seeing other, particularly boys, in my class crying and being mocked by our other classmates. And so I remember seeing those things happen and making a mental note to myself like, “Oh, if you're gonna cry, you need to not cry in front of other people.” So I started crying behind closed doors…

Saleem: By middle school, Ben had stopped crying altogether. But that actually didn’t stop the bullying. So when they got to college, they decided to try a different tactic.

Benjamin Perry: So I joined a fraternity. I was like a, a very, very different human being. And I would like always go into to the gym. And I was, you know, like really putting on a, a kind of drag, you know, this, this like very masculine, macho, like I'm one of the boys thing that like, never, ever for a second felt, healthy or genuine. But all of a sudden I was, you know, accepted in a way socially that I had never been to that point.

Saleem: But Ben started to feel more and more disconnected from his emotions and from himself. And after college, when he went to seminary school? Well, right away he realized he needed some of those emotions back. 

Benjamin Perry: I remember my first year of seminary having a professor asking us to just think back to like a moment of really intense grief. When was the last time you wept? And I realized that I couldn't remember. And all of these other classmates were going around and sharing these stories of deep grief or weeping or, and they were beautiful and powerful and touching.

And I realized I had nothing. Like, I had maybe some memories as a kid, but I did not have anything that was even closely remotely recent. And so I went home that day and was really, seized with this conviction that like, especially if I was gonna be a minister, especially if I was gonna try to provide care to other people, to being so clearly and obviously divorced from my own emotions to the degree that I had not cried in a decade, was probably not gonna not help me in that work. And so I started this experiment where I just forced myself to cry every day.

Saleem: But what's so cool about your story to me is you were like, “Oh, I'm gonna do a very direct exploration of this and cry every day.”  It's never occurred to me to try to cry in a really regular way. It's almost in the way that someone might approach exercise or something like that.

Benjamin Perry: Yeah. Oh, and that's, that's a hundred percent how I was thinking about it in my mind at the time. I should also say seminary, particularly the first year of seminary, is like a really radically intense time. It's a time where you're like really, digging into a lot of what you believe about the world, what you believe about yourself, down to your basic philosophical assumptions about the world and having them really, radically shaken and changed.

Uh, you know first year seminarians are sort of wont to acts of emotional and personal extremity. But yeah, I, I really approached it with that kind of discipline in the same way I used to lift weights. I was like, I'm gonna really be intentional about it and I'm gonna be regimented about it in the same way that I would approach anything else.

Saleem: What does that literally look like? What's it look like when you sit down and what's that Day One like?

Benjamin Perry: I went back, literally the afternoon after this class and I was like, “Okay, I'm gonna make myself cry.” And I remember being surprised by how hard it was. I think I thought, “Oh. Crying. It's a thing that like everybody does. So like, yeah, like I'll just go back to my little studio apartment and I will just make myself cry. How hard can it be?” 

And I remember sitting down and just sort of being like, “Okay, like cry. Like go for it, body. Like, here's the time. Like I've told you no for, for a decade, but here's the moment.” Like cue my tear ducts. And nothing happened. And so then I said, “Okay, I'll, I'll like watch some things that make other people cry.”

And so then I started like looking at, those videos of, soldiers coming back from war and their dogs run up to greet them or any of the kinds of things that you'll see on like Now This or whatever, where they're like, oh, this heartwarming moment like the mother has accepted her gay son or like any of these, these kinds of sort of cultural tropes.

Saleem: I love that. It's like, let's just Google some stuff and see if I can…

Benjamin Perry: Yeah, literally I was like, “Yeah, let me just like bring up some, some things that like, might make me cry. Come on.” And again, it's not that I didn't feel the emotion. I could name my emotions. I would say, “Oh, that's sad.” It's just I had no depth anymore. I could sort of feel the shape of an emotion or I could say, “Oh yes, that's happy, that's sad.” But all of my emotions were closer to that baseline state of just existing than they were to any kind of heightened sensation. 

And so then I started, really digging into my, like to my own relationships in my life. I started really thinking back on things that happened to me as a kid that were really painful or, thinking back to moments that I experienced loneliness or loss or those kinds of things. And again, still, the eyes were not doing it.

I remember the thing that finally did it was I was thinking about, I'm very, very close with my parents. And so I was thinking about what would I say to them if they were dying? And if they died, like right now, at that time, like, what would go unsaid? At that point I hadn’t come out to them, yet. There were just lots of things that I would've loved to have told them if the road ended there. And all of a sudden I noticed feeling some of those physiological cues for crying. Your breath getting a little bit more ragged, your throat starting to catch. 

And I was attuned enough to those physical responses that I was like, “Okay, we're, we're on the right track. Like, we're not there yet.” And so then I just kept like hitting that emotional hammer again and again and again, just thinking about the same moment, just focusing on, like, what would I tell them? How deeply I loved them, how grateful I was for the way that they raised me, for how much they meant to me. And I just was just going over and over and over and over again. And eventually I got myself to the point where I started crying. And then in that moment it was like something broke.

I had kept everything so suppressed for so long that when all of a sudden I started crying, it was like, this switch flipped and I just was a mess. Afterwards that evening I was like, “Whoa. Oh my God.” Like I felt alive in a different kind of way that I had not felt in a very long time. And so that was the affirmation for me that I needed to keep doing this. I would go back at the end of my classes before I would go out, I would go and do my homework and I would read my books and write my papers and I would make myself cry. It still was very hard for quite some time and I still had to like really devote a lot of care and intention and energy to it to make myself cry.

As the sort of months wore on, it became easier and easier. And then I started noticing the most interesting thing, which was that all of a sudden I was just crying normally. Or I would be in a chapel service and I would hear a gorgeous piece of music and the light would strike in the right way. And I would just feel that awe of that sensation of being overwhelmed by the beauty and wonder of the world and I would start to tear up. 

Saleem: I was struck again by how similar it sounds to exercise. The same weight might seem lighter. The same weight might seem lighter six months in and might not even feel like much of a weight, that very first day weight that you were lifting. And it sounds like you kind of crossed a threshold.

Benjamin Perry: I stopped actually because I was just so regularly crying in the rest of my life that I was like, “Well, I don't need to do this anymore. If I miss a day crying, I have clearly, I have so dramatically shifted my emotional baseline to the point that I am now just somebody who cries pretty regularly.

[music]

Saleem: Becoming a quote unquote “crybaby” was a big change for Ben. But he didn’t tell anyone about it at first.

Benjamin Perry: I definitely didn't tell my friends, I think I was a little ashamed actually at not being able to cry. I did tell my partner, my now wife, Erin. That was at the beginning of our relationship too, which is really interesting.

Saleem: Your partner was there…

Benjamin Perry: Sometimes yeah, like mostly I would do it myself, but yeah, she was there for the whole experiment though. 

Saleem: So someone you were in a relationship with pretty early on, got to see you go from a non-crier to a crier. 

Benjamin Perry: Yeah. I think she would say that, I changed a ton in those first, that first year that we were together. And so I think over the course of that year, the combination of this very intense crying experiment that I had undertaken and, just the beginning of a seminary career that also really forced me to be in situations that were very intense and made sure that I was aware of my own emotional life. I became a very, very different emotionally attuned person and I think a better partner, a better friend, a better human being, than I was when we first met. 

Saleem: What's changed about the way you interact with the world since you became someone who cries?

Benjamin Perry: Yeah, that's…that's an incredible question. And it's, it's the thing that I, I care most deeply about. The thing that I, I value and cherish most about having learned to cry again is the way that has connected me in so many incredible, wonderful ways with the world, with my friends, with my relatives, with all of these, these folks who I love.

Being a minister is an interesting job. I often times am in situations that are very intimate with people's marriages, people's funerals, visiting people who are sick in the hospital.  Also a lot of the public theology kind of stuff that I've done, going to places like Standing Rock or The Border, talking with folks who are experiencing unimaginable political oppression. And being able to just be there as another human being and connect with them in that moment.

Being in tune with my own emotions helps me fully show up in those situations. It lets me really listen carefully to what people are saying. It really makes me more attuned to some of what is left unsaid. 

Saleem: Well, hearing you talk about that shift that got you personally in touch, it makes me wonder a little bit… Because what you did to, I think the common listener and myself, it's, it's, just speaking in the most statistical sense, it's extreme, right? Like it's something that very few people have engaged on an intentional crying project like this.

One thing I'm trying to get straight in my own head. So like, you can imagine somebody who is a frequent hiker being like, “Hey, everyone should try hiking at least once.” And that seems really reasonable, right? You could imagine someone who has climbed Mount Everest, it would be unreasonable for them to be like, “Oh everyone should climb Mount Everest, right?

Benjamin Perry: (laughs)

Saleem: Where does, where does this experiment fall in how you might advise other people to try experimenting with crying?

Benjamin Perry: Yeah, I've never told anybody, “Oh, you know what you should do? You should try crying, every day.” 

Saleem: Yeah. Everyday for half a year? Ok. 

Benjamin Perry: That would be a weird thing to tell anybody to do.

Saleem: We don’t all have to go home and do that. Ok. 

Benjamin Perry: You certainly don't need to go out and, and go home and like cry everyday in order to reclaim a fuller emotional life, to have a better relationship with tears, to unlearn some of the ways that we're taught to suppress what we're experiencing. Like that is not requisite. (laughs)  

It's a thing that I did. And I think part of the reason why I kept doing it was cause it felt really good. I want to just sort of name that, that was a big part of it was that when I would cry, I would feel really, really great. But what I would say is that, I think being able to have a more intentional relationship with our tears is something that everybody can do. You don't have to go and abuse yourself into crying everyday.

But I think with some intentionality you can explore why you don't cry. Cause all of us cried at some point. It is a universal experience. Like we all started out crying. Like that's a thing that, that's like the primary way that babies communicate with the world. And at some point, a number of us lost that ability. And I think digging into sort of some of the why of, why crying is suppressed is really important in recovering that ability to truly feel again. 

Every person can explore their relationship with tears. All of us can try to spend some time cultivating a fuller emotional life. And I think that if we do, and when we do, we benefit, the people around us benefit. I think culturally as a society we would benefit.  

[music]

Saleem: Ben says that to cry or not to cry is not really the question. The bigger issue is how our shame about crying can keep us from exploring our inner worlds.

Benjamin Perry: There's so much shame that we grow up with about when and if we do cry. And then as we get older, there's so much shame that people have, particularly as like, this is now more of a cultural conversation. And that shame is not helpful. It's not helpful when we experience it in ways that make us stop crying in the first place. Whether we cry everyday or we cry once a month, what the goal should be is having a rich emotional life and full access to what we're feeling and experiencing.

Saleem: That's a great distinction. The distinction between this binary of crying or not crying. That as a distinct thing from whether or not you feel shame about crying or not crying. I really, really like that distinction.

 Benjamin Perry: The symbol I keep coming back to is I feel like in the same way that light gets refracted through a drop of water into the rainbow spectrum that we see. I think that crying is this incredible prism that refracts a myriad of human experiences. And when we start talking about crying, all of a sudden we're not just talking about crying. We're actually talking about racism. We're actually talking about patriarchy. We're actually talking about internalized shame. We're actually talking about fear. We're actually talking about climate anxiety. We're actually talking about our hope, our yearning, our desire to be different. Our desire to accept ourselves fully. Like by opening that door, talking about crying, we open the door to a thousand other kinds of transformation.

[music fade out]

Saleem:  A couple of the emotional doors Ben was able to open after they got their tears back led to some pretty awesome stuff     

Saleem: In your bio, the last line is amazing. It says “his two proudest achievements are skydiving with his grandmother and winning first prize in his seminary drag show.” 

Benjamin Perry: Yes.

Saleem: Can I ask you what the drag persona was that won your seminary drag show?

Benjamin Perry: Yes. It was Princess Split Timber. And I did a whole big, choreographed number that ended with me in an inverted cross in the shadow of this actual massive cross that we had at the seminary. In a gorgeous black number… 

Saleem: Ben says we don’t really need to do what he did to have a rich emotional life. But for him, getting his tears back, was so pivotal to having the life he wanted. 

[music]

Saleem: Thanks to Ben Perry, reverend and author of Crybaby, coming out this spring. Ben’s personal story kinda left me wondering what science has to say about our tears and what they do for our emotional lives. So when we come back, we pose that question to THE tears guy. A scientist who has literally collected tears in little tiny test tubes held to people’s eyes while they watch super sad things. I’m not kidding, it’s really that. That’s how he does it. After the break. 

[SEGMENT BREAK]

Saleem: For Ad Vingerhoets, a scientific interest in tears started where so many good things do. At a dinner party.  

‍Ad Vingerhoets: I was at a party and one of the other guests approached me and she said, “I often read that crying is healthy. But is that really true? What’s the scientific status of that statement?” And I found that a very intriguing question, and I promised, “I don't know, I don't know the answer, but I will try to look it up in the scientific literature.” But I couldn't find any relevant literature.

Saleem: Ad Vingerhoets, is a former Professor of Emotions and Well-Being at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He was already an expert in stress and emotion when he got asked this intriguing question about the purpose of tears – and whether we benefit from shedding them. So he started looking into it, and checking out the theories on what tears were for in the first place. 

There were theories going back as far as Charles Darwin about the purpose tears and crying might serve for our survival. Like flushing out irritants – for example, when you’re cutting onions – or babies making noise to get attention. But even after we learn new ways to communicate our needs, the tears still fall, Ad says.

Ad Vingerhoets: We still need love and protection and advice of our parents and other adults. And so tears and crying are perfectly developed to elicit the necessary support. 

Saleem: As we  get older we cry less out of hunger or to signal dirty diapers and more about the emotional hurdles we face. And our tears connect us to people who might help. But what exactly are we crying about? Ad says there’s a few major triggers. 

Ad Vingerhoets: So the first is loss and separation, and that stays important all over the lifespan from the cradle to the grave, that's important. Powerlessness, being overwhelmed. That's also important all over the lifespan. 

Saleem: And some of those triggers change over time.

Ad Vingerhoets: But then tears in reaction to physical pain and physical discomfort.That's very important for babies and children until puberty. But adults and the elderly, we hardly, if ever cry because of physical pain. That's very unusual. 

What we see when we grow older, that we start to cry more for empathic reasons. So we do not just cry because of the suffering and, and pain of ourselves, but also of the suffering and pain of others. So we develop our empathic skills and even if it's fiction, the head characters or a movie or a book, can make us cry. And also when we become older is that we see an increase in our proneness to cry because of positive and sentimental reasons.

Saleem: I’ve noticed that change in myself. I basically never cried as a teenager or in my 20s. But getting older, becoming a dad, I definitely cry a bit more. Ad talked about this as a shift in what he calls our crying threshold. Some people have low thresholds and cry often, like Jen looking at a sad camel. While others don't cry unless under significant emotional pressure. And a number of things can affect our thresholds. Crying runs in families but lack of sleep, hormone levels, substance abuse, near death experiences, and trauma can all affect our relationship to our tears. 

Ad Vingerhoets: You have people who have, experienced a near death experience or who have, survived a heart attack or cancer. They often become more emotional. I had a colleague who once told me that one of these patients, they were enjoying a meal in a restaurant and then suddenly he burst out in tears and the other family members who were attending that dinner, they were surprised and asked what's happening? And he said, “Oh, this, I like this sauce so much.”

Saleem: Wow. We gotta find out the name of that restaurant. I'm curious, what would you say to somebody who's listening and is like, “Oh, I cry all the time. Am I okay?” Or some people who maybe don't cry at all and are wondering, oh is there something necessarily wrong with me?

Ad Vingerhoets: Yeah. Well, the association between crying and whether you are okay or not is not that strong. There's an interesting example of a British comedian who kept track of the crying of his wife. And it's really bizarre. She cries for really everything. When she heard that, swans could also be gay, she cried. It was just she had this low crying threshold, which might be, not often easy to have in daily life, of course. And you might not always feel comfortable with it, but, but it's okay.

Saleem: Ad says that some people who struggle with depression cry more, but some people who are depressed lose the capacity to cry. So at the end of the day, it's hard to establish what amount of crying is quote unquote “normal.” 

But the question that sparked Ad's curiosity in the first place wasn’t about how much crying was normal. It was whether a good cry is actually good for us or not. So when he dove into his own research, that’s the big question he took on. Here’s where we get to those tiny test tubes of tears that we mentioned. His experiments worked like this: 

[music]

Saleem: Collecting tears. I mean it sounds like something that you do when you're in like a fantasy novel to prepare ingredients for casting a spell or something. What does it look like? How do you collect tears? 

Ad Vingerhoets: We had a kind of test tube and a small mirror that people could, could collect the tears that they see where they run and then they…

Saleem: So I love this surreal sci-fi vibe of this image. He literally gets people to hold little mirrors up in front of their eyes and sticks the test tube there and collects the drops. And he does this by having them sit in front of very sad movies. 

Saleem: I don't think I've ever tried to make someone cry on purpose. How do you choose the movie that will make people cry?

Ad Vingerhoets: Well, yeah. That's based on trial and error. We work mainly with two, uh, movies. The first was, “Once Were Warriors.” “Hachi,” about the dog. You know, it?

Saleem: Oh yeah.

Ad Vingerhoets: Another very interesting movie is “The Weeping Camel.”

Saleem: So that's the sweet spot. Sad animal movies...

Saleem: But the results of his research yielded more than some good movie recommendations. He told me about one study where he and his colleagues tried to find evidence that crying brings emotional relief and has a positive effect on a person’s mood. Ad also studied who actually benefits from crying and what conditions need to be present to allow for that benefit.   

Ad Vingerhoets: You need to be in a good mental shape to benefit from your crying. Whereas, for example, people who are depressed or who suffer from a burn out, so actually those who needed mood improvement, they do not benefit from crying.

Saleem: Wow. That seems so unfair. 

Saleem: We learned earlier that tears function to get us the emotional support we need. But if your tears aren’t received well, they start to lose their power. Like our friend Reverend Ben Perry. He got the message that his tears weren’t welcome, and slowly but surely they disappeared for a long time. Ad actually found that how others react to our tears is a huge part of whether they benefit us or not. He decided to study a group of people who are so relevant to the story of Ben’s youth. People who hadn't cried for over a decade.

Ad Vingerhoets: And we compared them to “normal” criers. And we didn't find any difference in their wellbeing. But what we found was that those who normally cried, they felt more connected to others, and they received more social support from others. And that's, of course, very important. We know of the literature, there's a strong literature that, receiving adequate social support from others, especially when you are in stressful conditions, that that's very important and that can buffer the possibility that you develop all kind of stress related health problems.

And we also have some data suggesting that people who feel very lonely, that although they might have more reason to cry, they cry less. So it's again, a sign that crying especially is also about communication, and that you do need someone that you cry to, in order to receive support from the other. And if there is no one available to provide that support, then it's less likely that you will cry.

Saleem: Oh, interesting. Yeah. If there's no one to receive that signal, you're less likely to make that signal.

Ad Vingerhoets:  So that's again, another indication that the function of crying must be searched for in the interpersonal domain. It's about communication. Tears connect. Tears provide support to us when we needed it.

Saleem: That's a great takeaway. Thank you so much. 

Ad Vingerhoets: Well, I would like to thank you for your interest in my work, and it was a real pleasure to chat with you about this. 

[music]

Saleem: So now we know tears may help us to connect to others. But as for what our tears actually mean or don’t mean? Well, it’s so dependent on the context, and one’s own life story, that there isn’t really an answer as to how much, if any, is the right amount to cry. Which is kind of amazing, and freeing. I've had times in my life where I feel like society was maybe telling me to cry more, definitely times as a kid when it was telling me not to cry. And society was kind of random through all that. Which brings us to the big question of the episode.

Saleem (in studio): So, Palace. What did you think of all that? And very importantly – are we broken?

Palace (in studio): (laughing) I feel like we’re not broken. And I think we got our answer. Being curious about our tears can lead to so much more. It doesn’t really matter how much or how little we cry, actually. But we all have to take a look at ourselves sometimes and just try to understand how we relate to ourselves and the world around us. 

Saleem (in studio): I loved when Ben said that thing about understanding more than just ‘the shapes’ of our emotions. All that said, are you thinking about crying more?

Palace (in studio): I don’t know. Are you?! (laughs) 

Saleem (in studio): I’m thinking about trying it. (Salem and Palace laugh)

[theme music]

Saleem: This is, I’m sorry to say, for the foreseeable future, the final episode of More Than A Feeling. Which, whether or not you’re crying, is very sad. But it does feel kinda fitting to end the show on an episode exploring tears. This really visible emotional indicator, that doesn’t always mean what we think it does, but is very worth thinking deeply about and experimenting with. 

And hopefully the experiments we’ve done on the show have helped you come away with some greater understandings of why we feel what we feel, and what we might be able to do about all that. It’s been helpful for me! I’ve been super grateful to get to do this exploring alongside all of y’all. Thank you so much for listening. 

Oh, and More Than A Feeling is a finalist for a 2022 Signal Award for Best Original Score/Music in a podcast, thanks to our banging theme song, “Kabhi,” by El Michels Affair and Piya Malik. That means we’re eligible for a listener’s choice award, too. So fans of the show (and song) can vote for us — if you’re so inclined —  before the December 22nd deadline. We’ll put a link in our show notes.

More Than A Feeling is produced by Palace Shaw, Yasmeen Khan, Reva Goldberg, Kim Buikema, and Stacia Brown. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Fact checking for this episode by Jeanette Beebe. Scoring and mixing by Matt Boynton of Ultraviolet Audio. Connor Donahue is our manager of technical operations. And very special thanks to Patricia Angelin for her help on this episode.

[theme music]

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