June 18, 2026 • 36 mins
In grade 8, Julia was bullied so badly by a group of girls that she changed schools without telling anyone. Soon after, the girls from her old school showed up at her house and rang her doorbell. She didn’t answer it. For the past 20 years, Julia’s been wondering what those girls wanted.
Ten years after the release of this episode, we check back in with Julia, to hear how her life changed in the aftermath of the episode.
You can sign up for our free newsletter at patreon.com/heavyweight
This episode was produced by Jonathan Goldstein, Chris Neary, and Kalila Holt, with senior production by Wendy Dorr. Editing by Alex Blumberg and Jorge Just. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Maya Goldberg-Safir, Lina Chambers, Emily Kennedy, Laura Scott, and Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Haley Shaw. Music for this episode by Christine Fellows, with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Keen Collective. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Mixing on this update by Sarah Bruguiere, with production by Lisa Wang.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hi, Hello, we're back again in the studio.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yes, and in your earbuds.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Who do we have on the docket today?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
This one? Her name's Julia.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Okay. This episode is the first one that I ever
did with a stranger. Yeah, like someone that wasn't a
friend or a family And it was a little scary.
It was a little intimidating. Julia is a journalist and
I needed to step up.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It's a great episode.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Partly because of Julia kept me on the straightened arrow.
Speaker 5 (00:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (00:49):
No, I was gonna say it's great, not because of us,
because of Julia and spoiler alert, another woman we talked to,
h if.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
You stick around. At the end of the episode, I
talk again with Julia, and what was really very gratifying
to me was how the episode really did have have
an important impact on our life.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
All right, well, I'm looking forward to listening to this
one again.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Yes, let's both sit down. I'm already seated, and silence.
Do you have any snacks?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
No, I can't eat a snack silently.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It was a trick question.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh did I pass? Yes?
Speaker 7 (01:30):
You did?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thank God?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
All right, and here we go. Oh but first we're
gonna pay those bills. Gonna pay my automobills with a
word from our sponsor. Hello, happy birthday, birthday girl. Are
(01:52):
you going out for dinner tonight with Rick?
Speaker 4 (01:54):
What?
Speaker 7 (01:55):
It's not my birthday for another seven months?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
You hang on a second, hang.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
On, I'm hanging hanging out in traffic, So.
Speaker 7 (02:03):
That's perfect for you.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
According to my calendar alert, it is your birthday.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Because I don't know how many times I'm gonna say
it's not my birthday and how many times you're gonna
repeat that it is my birthday. This year you didn't Actually,
this year, you forgot.
Speaker 7 (02:21):
To call me on my birthday, not even an email, nothing.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Okay, okay, what about that time you got me an
ice cream cake for my birthday knowing I'm lactose sensitive.
Do you remember the man at the roller ring kept
on knocking on the bathroom door?
Speaker 4 (02:47):
That's good? Are you kidding me?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
From Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight
Today's episode. Julia. Julia is a journalist and she's endlessly
(03:16):
curious about the world around her. Once on assignment for
The New York Times, she investigated the benefits of bacteria
and as a part of her research. She didn't bathe
for a month. She's done political stories too, where she's
kept after a source or a story for years, which
is what makes her reluctance to seek out the answer
(03:37):
to a question that's been dogging her for over two
decades all the more curious.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
I think the story begins on a Monday. I'm pretty
sure it's a Monday, and I was fourteen years old.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
This is Julia, and the question she can't stop thinking
about revolves around a moment from her own life. It
all began twenty one years ago in the eighth grade
at one of the fanciest all girls schools in Montreal.
Speaker 5 (04:04):
I remember wearing my itchy green kilt.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
You have to wear a uniform there, Yes, okay, that's.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
Sort of a puke green uniform with a button down
white shirt, and on Mondays we had to wear ties.
We also had bloomers.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
It was just sort of like a balloon with holes
in the bottom.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
And were they ruffled?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
No, cursed with a lifelong inability to distinguish between bloomers, couloats, pantelats, pantaloons, drawers,
and even knickerbockers. I was glad for the opportunity to
finally sort it all out, but that's not why we're here.
So after about fifteen minutes of inquiry, I was ready
to move on. Okay, sorry, yes, I'll go go on.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
As I left morning assembly on Monday and walked into homeroom,
I looked for my desk and I stopped and looked around,
and it was missing. My desk was gone, and that
was where it started.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
The desk had been hidden by her classmates, and that
was just the beginning. Without warning, the girl she'd been
friends with since third grade completely froze her out, and
Julia had no clue why. To top it off, her
best friend was the ringleader.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
The girl who used to be my best friend. I
guess we can give her a name. Let's call her Jane.
It was just strange knowing that she and I had
hung out at my house and all of the secrets
music exchange and all of the fun we'd had, and
then seeing how she was being now it just it
(06:00):
was a bit surreal.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
But yeah, then let's started happening. Was every time she
walked into the classroom, Julia noticed that the girls would
drop what they were doing and study her. If she
so much as scratched her nose or sniffled, they'd furiously
(06:21):
take notes. It seemed like everyone was collaborating on some
big project that she knew nothing about. The notes were
collected by Jane, who buried them in her desk. The
girls kept at it day after day until finally Julia
reached her breaking point. She gathered up her courage, and,
like the good reporter she'd eventually become, decided to investigate.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
I eventually snuck into homeroom one day during recess. It
was empty, and I searched Jane's desk, and there at
the bottom I found a nicely bound document with a
cover page. And I picked it up and read it,
and it said one hundred reasons why we hate you
(07:12):
in my memory. This document I'm holding is one hundred
pages long, but I'm sure it was only ten. And
I opened it and inside I read about myself. Everything
was something about me that they hated. I hate the
way she walks, I hate the sound of her voice,
(07:37):
I hate her face.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
After that, Julia started skipping school. Eventually, she told her
parents what was going on, and they contacted the administration,
but the bullying continued. Ultimately, her parents decided that the
only solution was to send her to a new school,
but Julia still had a few weeks left at the
old one.
Speaker 5 (08:06):
I became a double agent. I pretended that I was
coming back the following year, and I didn't tell anyone
I was changing schools because I had no friends left
to tell.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
The school year ended and her new life began, But
because her new school was so close to the old one,
Julia lived in constant fear that her old life would
find her. Every day, she'd map her route to and
from school, carefully avoiding the streets her old friends lived on,
the coffee shops they hung out at, and for the
(08:40):
most part, it worked. For those first few weeks at
her new school, she managed to hide in plain sight.
She was starting to feel like things would be okay.
But then one day after school, Julia was upstairs in
the den doing homework and the doorbell rang. She went
to her parents' bedroom window and looked down at the
(09:02):
doorstep and saw standing there her former best friend Jane,
along with a few of her old classmates.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
I hit the ground as if someone was shelling the
second floor windows. I was in a state of total panic,
and I saw them in my mind's eye there on
the front steps, waiting for someone to answer the door.
And I was just on the ground, trying to breathe,
and they rang the doorbell again and I waited.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Eventually they left. And this is the moment that Julia
has fixated on for over twenty years. Why had the
girls shown up at her door? And what did they want?
Maybe they'd shown up to bully her, but maybe they'd
had a change of heart, realized how mean they'd been
and were there to apologize. Whatever the case, Julia was
(10:02):
too scared to open the door and find out, and
that decision to not go downstairs and face the girls
who tormented her still haunts Julia. Even listening to her
talk about it all these years later, it still feels raw.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
I'm thirty five now, and that day has become one
of my only regrets because the memory of my weakness
sometimes supersedes all of the strong things I've done since then,
and it makes me feel weak.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Even though you were you were just a child, I
was fourteen.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
I think it's the memory of that fear still somewhere
in my physiology. It makes me fearful when I think
of it, I just wish i'd gone down there. I
wish I'd had the guts.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
What do you think has stopped you up until now
from just using the question, you know, like just finding
the girls and just asking them why they were there
that day.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
I'm afraid to find out what I did to bring
on the bullying, because it's very possible that I was bad.
I think, deep down I don't really know what was wrong.
I don't know what was wrong with me, and I
don't want to know what.
Speaker 8 (11:37):
Was wrong with me.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I mean, it feels like you're being really hard on yourself,
or being hard on this little kid basically, you know, like,
do you look at photographs of yourself at that age?
Speaker 7 (11:53):
I try not too well.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
I think it'd be surprised by like I mean, I
have memories of being that age where I thought like
I was at weddings and I thought I was like
flirting with adult women and stuff like that. And I
look at pictures of myself and I look like a
cabbage patch doll.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
You know.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
I think I probably looked like the tin men because
I had a full set of braces. And then after
I graduated from my braces. I immediately went to headgear
neck gear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But I've only seen them on TV sitcoms.
Speaker 5 (12:24):
So combine that with my glasses. It was a sad
state of affairs.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
As soon as she graduated high school, Julia left Montreal
for good.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Depending on how you know the outcome of that conversation,
I might have chosen not to leave Montreal. When I'm
in Montreal once a year, I avoid the neighborhood I
grew up in where all of this went down for
the most part, and those girls are long gone. I mean,
we're all grown ass women now with careers and jobs
(12:58):
and kids. And here I am avoiding friends of friends
on Facebook because I don't want any of those girls
to know what's going on with my life.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Do you feel like, had you answered the door and
they had apologized to you, that that would have changed
your life in some way, that it would have changed
your relationship with your past and the city and these friends.
Speaker 5 (13:25):
I think it might have, but I'll never know what
they wanted to say to me because I didn't answer
the door.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your
whole life running from. So when I gently suggest that
you try to find out why they were at the
door that day, Julius suggests that maybe the past to
just stay in the past.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
You know, we move on with our lives. We you know,
we move on, and it's another thing to open up.
You know that Pandora's Box.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Again, even the language that you're using about fear of
opening up that Pandora's box, it is so similar to
the language that you used and describe like fear of
opening that door.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
So what you're saying is I should really just finish
the job.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
After the break opening Pandora's Box, in spite of her
(14:48):
initial trepidation, once Julia decided to find out why the
girls came to her door that day, she was all in.
Watching her take it on was impressive. Julia went back
to Montreal and reached out to her former best friend Jane,
who agreed to meet with her but said she didn't
remember anything. And so, for the first time since eighth grade,
(15:09):
Julia returned to her former school to go through the
yearbook and find the names of her old classmates, and
then she started searching.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
I reached out to probably twelve girls from from my grade. Yeah,
and in my worst moments, I imagine that none of
them were going to write back, and it was sort
of going to feel like, you know, I was on
the outside of the group again, you know, and that
(15:40):
the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were
still in play and all that. But then the responses
started to trickle in.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Yeah, this is Julia.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Julia logged hours and hours of interviews school.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
And rang my doorbell. I thought you might have been
one of them. I don't think so. Do you remember
anything about that?
Speaker 6 (16:00):
Was I there?
Speaker 4 (16:01):
No? Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
I remember one time you were hiding in.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
A bathroom stall, But just like Jane, not a single
person said they could remember showing up at her door
that day.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Oh yeah, Well, I honestly don't remember doing that.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
I don't, I don't.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
I'm sorry, I don't. I don't remember anything. I just
don't remember it. Promise you I have no recollection of this.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 8 (16:29):
Sorry, sorry.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Well, what each of them did remember was their own pain.
There'd been a lot of bullying that year, and no
one felt safe. Julia heard about one girl who'd found
her desk filled with meticulously cut out images from porn magazines.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Another girl remembered someone spreading rumors.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
That she had aids. I hated that place, said one.
It's all a big fog of chaos, said another, a
dark cloud over the class. You never knew who you
could trust. We were awful, awful little girls. The more
Julia heard about it, it started to sound like a
Stephen King novel, and not one of those cutesy ones
about clowns or talk cars. In almost every conversation, one
(17:16):
name kept coming up as the person who had it
the worst. Even Julia acknowledged it. The name was Sarah Taba.
Sarah had the misfortune of being the only eighth grader
who was slightly overweight, and as such she was always
kept at a distance in high school. I was also
someone who existed on the margins, so I understand how
(17:37):
oftentimes kids like me, kids like Sarah Taba, become the
eyes and ears of the school, fidgety, uncomfortable witnesses forced
to watch from the wings. I'm reminded of this all
the time with the friends I went to high school
with who were more popular than me. Remember the time
Robert Siolick wore a three piece suit to school? I
ask the time Madame Reber slammed the classroom door so
(18:00):
hard the clock fell off the wall, the day Sharon
Wiener got suspended for leaving the schoolyard during recess. Of
course they don't they living their lives. But I was
on the sidelines taking it all in, remembering.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Hi, Sarah, Hi, it's been a really long time.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
Yeah, yes it has.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Having all these conversations made Julia think about Sarah and
what she might remember. But when she asked her if
she had any recollection about the day those girls showed
up at her door, Sarah couldn't remember anything.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
The first thing I thought of when he said a
group of girls right in the doorbelt, I immediately thought
it would be a bad experience, Like it wasn't people
coming looking for you to be like we miss you?
Where are you?
Speaker 5 (18:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (18:56):
Grade eight was a bad year at that girl. Either
you were being bullied and picked on, or you had
to turn around and become the bully.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yeah, there's something toxic, something dark.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
I think normal bullying. If there's such a thing as
normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim
and the like. But it was just so pervasive.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
Do you remember the day that you realize that I
was gone.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
I don't, actually, no, I remember feeling like you were
just sad all the time.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I remember you being sad too. Yeah. One thing I
remember people would call you tubby taba.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
Doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff
like that. I can't help but think that our grades
behavior had impacts on the staff. What do you mean, well,
(20:11):
I actually I'm assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't.
But Miss McDonald killed herself the following year. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Mss McDonald was Julia's favorite teacher and Sarah's too. Miss
McDonald had gone to the school as a student and
later returned to teach biology. She was the fun teacher
who wore frog earrings.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
You think that there was something to do with what
was happening in the school that caused her to commit suicide.
Speaker 4 (20:46):
I think it had a role in her depression. She
left right in the end of our grade eight year.
She because what I knew of her and with her school,
it was her passion. She was an old girl. She
was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love of
(21:06):
animals and biology and all of us, and we were
a bunch of brats. I remember there being a lot
of associations between that pig that she had on top
of her TV and her a lot of comments about
her way. Yeah, had an impact.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Ms McDonald had been hospitalized over the summer, and when
she came back in the fall, she was no longer
the biology teacher, but a substitute. The last period of
the last day she taught before she killed herself was
a class called Personal and Religious Education. The students considered
the class a joke. Sarah was there that day and.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
The grade was just running around and doing everything they
weren't supposed to do in the classroom. She tried to
get people to calm down and sit down and pay
attention and like, I wasn't even trying to teach us anything.
I don't even know if there was any material to
cover that day. And then we showed up at school
Monday morning to find out that she killed herself for
(22:13):
the weekend.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
She was my role model. She was the person who
survived the school despite not being the stereotypical prefect or
perfect girl. She was just this wonderful, round woman who
rejuvenated life and as an overweight teenager. For me, that
(22:44):
was like, okay, so you don't have to be perfect
to achieve anything. She was my role model who the
next year killed herself and like shattered all my dreams
that you can go about living your life the way
you're living your life in this environment and succeed, which
(23:06):
made me want to completely change my body. The only
way that I was going to get through this school
was to lose a bunch of way to gain the
respect of these people that have basically disliked me since
I was eleven, and I did it.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
Yeah, I've been really over the years. I wondered about you,
and then when I looked you up on Facebook, I
saw pictures of you and I clicked right by them.
I thought, oh, I have the wrong person. Yeah, because
you didn't look like yourself, right, So I mean you
didn't you just stopped eating it sounds like.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Yeah, yeah, in tenth grade, tenth through eleventh grade, and
then basically destroyed myself in the process because it's an
illness that I've been battling for the last twenty years.
(24:14):
It's amazing what your childhood experiences can push you to
do so that I definitely remember because that's how I
ended up in the situation. I am now I'm actually
talking to you from outside of a clinic for treating
eating disorders.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
So I'm really sorry, Sarah.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
It's not your fault. That's the just a sad reality
of all of this.
Speaker 5 (24:44):
It's like, yeah, please picture you know, my nerdy looking
fourteen year old self giving you a big hug.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Oh thanks. I actually do have to let you go
because we have to have lunch now, but it was
nice to speak, confute and do keep in touch.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
The conversation had left Julia feeling devastated. The scale of
her own pain had been altered in the face of Sarah's.
Later that night, I couldn't stop thinking about Julia and
(25:44):
Sarah's conversation, and as I turned it around in my head,
a theory began to form. Miss McDonald had died around
the start of the school year. Wasn't it possible that
those girls had shown up at Julia's door to let
her know. Maybe they'd been worried about the way Julia
had just disappeared from their school and feared the worst.
Wasn't it possible the girls had meant good that day
(26:06):
that they came to the door, and if so, wouldn't
knowing that changed the way Julia felt about the past
twenty years and maybe even changed the way she saw herself.
So I took this last task upon myself. Hey is
this Christine? He Hey Jennifer, this is I found up
(26:29):
all the people Julia had already spoken with, and I
ran my theory by them.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
To be honest, I would love to believe that's what
their intentions were.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
I can't be sure about anything.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
I can't say yeah, sure, that's it because I don't
have a memory of it.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Okay, well, thank.
Speaker 4 (26:44):
You, bye, all right, you have a great night. Okay,
bye bye bye.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Okay, okay, okay, take it easy.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
Hi, bye bye.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
There was there's only one thing left for me to do.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
I just feel like I'm at a loss, Like this
whole thing started off as me encouraging you to give
it a try and that it might be helpful in
some way, and I don't feel like I brought you
any closer to knowing what happened at the door that day.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
And I just if there's one of us who's disappointed,
it certainly isn't me. I don't know whether I was
emotionally equipped to open the door as a fourteen year old,
But to me, the important part is is that I
opened the door. Now, I couldn't have I couldn't have
(27:57):
confronted that if I hadn't literally done what we decided
we were going to do, if I hadn't had these
phone calls and ask these hard questions. And I've forgiven
(28:20):
that little girl for being so frightened. I was so ashamed,
I was so regretful, And I don't blame myself for
being afraid. Then I had every right to be. It
wasn't rational. And so I think the biggest challenge for
me and all of this was to allow myself to
(28:40):
slip back into that fourteen year old girl's skin and say, look,
you know, I get it. It's okay, you know, it's okay.
I'm proud of who I was. Then It's been a
long time since I could say.
Speaker 9 (29:01):
That, and you feel like that's happened like that, that's
how and in this process, yeah, I do, Well that
makes me feel better.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
Well, I'm happy to make you feel.
Speaker 7 (29:17):
Better, Jonathan, I might ding dong, I'm ding dong.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
Is this the part where I rewrite history and answer
the door. That's right, ding dong, Okay, I'm answering the door.
Open the door.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
What happened to you?
Speaker 5 (29:44):
I change schools?
Speaker 8 (29:47):
And you know why, Now.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
That the fernitures returning to it's goodwill home, now that
the last month's rent is scheming.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
With the damage to poss take this moment to do so.
Speaker 5 (30:38):
If we meant it, if we talked.
Speaker 8 (30:42):
We felt around for far too.
Speaker 5 (30:47):
From things that accidentally.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Uh, Julia, Hi, how are you? It's a it has
been ten years? Yeah, ten years. Have you listened to
the episode recently.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
After you reached out? I listened to around my neighborhood,
and you know, hearing myself be scared on the recording
made me scared again, and then hearing myself be triumphant
made me feel made me feel fully grown all over again.
(31:29):
And it was it was cool. It was it was
a really special thing to be able to collaborate with
you on that.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
And you feel like it changed something for you.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
I think it changed a lot of things for me.
For one thing, it gave me permission to reimagine myself
as a player in my own life. I didn't have
to be the girl that things were done too. I
could be the woman who could choose to do things,
(31:59):
and it gave me the opportunity to rethink my relationship
with Montreal, and all of that felt like such an
unlock stemming from our time together. Yours of line, Jonathan.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
That's really nice. Did any of the of the girls
who showed up at your door that day did you?
Did they ever reach out? Did you learn anything more
about that actual incident?
Speaker 5 (32:27):
I never learned anything about the incident. It remains a mystery.
But I did get out of the blue. A couple
of days after the episode aired, a voicemail from one
of the girls in my grade, not one of the
main girls who made the Julia book, but she called
(32:51):
and left a sobbing voicemail, and then I called her
back right away. I actually don't know how she got
my number. I called her back right away and we
had a very heartfelt conversation.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
That's so nice that it generated all of this. Did
you ever speak with Sarah tab again?
Speaker 5 (33:10):
I just reached out to her the other day, Huh.
I was inspired to reach out to her by you
reaching out to me and re listening to my episode.
But it's really our episode. Sarah's and mine, and I
think it's okay for me to share that Sarah Taba
is thriving.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Oh that's so good to hear, I know. I know,
so you think you might see her?
Speaker 5 (33:36):
Oh yeah, we made plans for me to hang out
with her next time I'm in Montreal.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
You're not moving back to Montreal, are you.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
I am kind of moving back. So the big headline
is that I really fell in love with my hometown,
and I've been spending my summer's there getting to know
a new version of I'm sure all, getting to know
a new version of who I can be there. And
I fell in love with a wonderful man, and he
(34:10):
and I are talking about buying a condo in Montreal.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
You know, I've lived a lot of different places over
the past years, but I'm always a little jealous of
my friends who remained in Montreal and have a cool
life there and have grown roots. And I'm envious of you,
you know. Hearing that you're moving back like that, I
think that's really cool.
Speaker 5 (34:34):
You know, we're not talking about spending winters there. Let's
just be clear.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Well, sincerely, I mean, if I am there for more
than a couple of days you'll ye'll hear from me sincerely,
that would be a joy. Thanks to everyone who originally
(35:04):
put this episode together. Will be back in one week's time,
that's right on Puny Little Week with something very special,
a very special treat. If you will, Uh, can I
say khluila? Will you allow me? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (35:18):
You can.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
This is going to be unbelievable. People are going to
think that we're doing some kind of bit right now,
but you and I are going to be featured on
a children's podcast.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
We're going to be debating, We're going to.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Try to take each other to the mat, knock each
other out. Uh. And also, boy, we have a lot
to talk about as well. We have our newsletter. What's
your favorite thing about our newsletter?
Speaker 6 (35:44):
I like to know what's on everyone's mind. Like stuff
comes up in the newsletter, things we've enjoyed or been
thinking about that we're not necessarily even talking about one
on one.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
No, No, you find out things about me. Yeah, I
find out things about you and Stevie.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Sometimes I'm shocked.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
You know what? My favorite thing about the newsletter is
that it's the it's on the Internet. I don't have
to get paper cuts opening up an envelope that comes
to my door. People have to know my business, so
I ask you, one and all to please subscribe to
that newsletter, which I don't know if I mentioned, is
completely free and you can find it at patreon dot com.
(36:23):
Slash Heavyweight
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hi, Hello, we're back again in the studio.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yes, and in your earbuds.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Who do we have on the docket today?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
This one? Her name's Julia.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Okay. This episode is the first one that I ever
did with a stranger. Yeah, like someone that wasn't a
friend or a family And it was a little scary.
It was a little intimidating. Julia is a journalist and
I needed to step up.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It's a great episode.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Partly because of Julia kept me on the straightened arrow.
Speaker 5 (00:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (00:49):
No, I was gonna say it's great, not because of us,
because of Julia and spoiler alert, another woman we talked to,
h if.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
You stick around. At the end of the episode, I
talk again with Julia, and what was really very gratifying
to me was how the episode really did have have
an important impact on our life.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
All right, well, I'm looking forward to listening to this
one again.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Yes, let's both sit down. I'm already seated, and silence.
Do you have any snacks?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
No, I can't eat a snack silently.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It was a trick question.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh did I pass? Yes?
Speaker 7 (01:30):
You did?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thank God?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
All right, and here we go. Oh but first we're
gonna pay those bills. Gonna pay my automobills with a
word from our sponsor. Hello, happy birthday, birthday girl. Are
(01:52):
you going out for dinner tonight with Rick?
Speaker 4 (01:54):
What?
Speaker 7 (01:55):
It's not my birthday for another seven months?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
You hang on a second, hang.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
On, I'm hanging hanging out in traffic, So.
Speaker 7 (02:03):
That's perfect for you.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
According to my calendar alert, it is your birthday.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Because I don't know how many times I'm gonna say
it's not my birthday and how many times you're gonna
repeat that it is my birthday. This year you didn't Actually,
this year, you forgot.
Speaker 7 (02:21):
To call me on my birthday, not even an email, nothing.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Okay, okay, what about that time you got me an
ice cream cake for my birthday knowing I'm lactose sensitive.
Do you remember the man at the roller ring kept
on knocking on the bathroom door?
Speaker 4 (02:47):
That's good? Are you kidding me?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
From Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight
Today's episode. Julia. Julia is a journalist and she's endlessly
(03:16):
curious about the world around her. Once on assignment for
The New York Times, she investigated the benefits of bacteria
and as a part of her research. She didn't bathe
for a month. She's done political stories too, where she's
kept after a source or a story for years, which
is what makes her reluctance to seek out the answer
(03:37):
to a question that's been dogging her for over two
decades all the more curious.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
I think the story begins on a Monday. I'm pretty
sure it's a Monday, and I was fourteen years old.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
This is Julia, and the question she can't stop thinking
about revolves around a moment from her own life. It
all began twenty one years ago in the eighth grade
at one of the fanciest all girls schools in Montreal.
Speaker 5 (04:04):
I remember wearing my itchy green kilt.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
You have to wear a uniform there, Yes, okay, that's.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
Sort of a puke green uniform with a button down
white shirt, and on Mondays we had to wear ties.
We also had bloomers.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
It was just sort of like a balloon with holes
in the bottom.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
And were they ruffled?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
No, cursed with a lifelong inability to distinguish between bloomers, couloats, pantelats, pantaloons, drawers,
and even knickerbockers. I was glad for the opportunity to
finally sort it all out, but that's not why we're here.
So after about fifteen minutes of inquiry, I was ready
to move on. Okay, sorry, yes, I'll go go on.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
As I left morning assembly on Monday and walked into homeroom,
I looked for my desk and I stopped and looked around,
and it was missing. My desk was gone, and that
was where it started.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
The desk had been hidden by her classmates, and that
was just the beginning. Without warning, the girl she'd been
friends with since third grade completely froze her out, and
Julia had no clue why. To top it off, her
best friend was the ringleader.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
The girl who used to be my best friend. I
guess we can give her a name. Let's call her Jane.
It was just strange knowing that she and I had
hung out at my house and all of the secrets
music exchange and all of the fun we'd had, and
then seeing how she was being now it just it
(06:00):
was a bit surreal.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
But yeah, then let's started happening. Was every time she
walked into the classroom, Julia noticed that the girls would
drop what they were doing and study her. If she
so much as scratched her nose or sniffled, they'd furiously
(06:21):
take notes. It seemed like everyone was collaborating on some
big project that she knew nothing about. The notes were
collected by Jane, who buried them in her desk. The
girls kept at it day after day until finally Julia
reached her breaking point. She gathered up her courage, and,
like the good reporter she'd eventually become, decided to investigate.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
I eventually snuck into homeroom one day during recess. It
was empty, and I searched Jane's desk, and there at
the bottom I found a nicely bound document with a
cover page. And I picked it up and read it,
and it said one hundred reasons why we hate you
(07:12):
in my memory. This document I'm holding is one hundred
pages long, but I'm sure it was only ten. And
I opened it and inside I read about myself. Everything
was something about me that they hated. I hate the
way she walks, I hate the sound of her voice,
(07:37):
I hate her face.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
After that, Julia started skipping school. Eventually, she told her
parents what was going on, and they contacted the administration,
but the bullying continued. Ultimately, her parents decided that the
only solution was to send her to a new school,
but Julia still had a few weeks left at the
old one.
Speaker 5 (08:06):
I became a double agent. I pretended that I was
coming back the following year, and I didn't tell anyone
I was changing schools because I had no friends left
to tell.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
The school year ended and her new life began, But
because her new school was so close to the old one,
Julia lived in constant fear that her old life would
find her. Every day, she'd map her route to and
from school, carefully avoiding the streets her old friends lived on,
the coffee shops they hung out at, and for the
(08:40):
most part, it worked. For those first few weeks at
her new school, she managed to hide in plain sight.
She was starting to feel like things would be okay.
But then one day after school, Julia was upstairs in
the den doing homework and the doorbell rang. She went
to her parents' bedroom window and looked down at the
(09:02):
doorstep and saw standing there her former best friend Jane,
along with a few of her old classmates.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
I hit the ground as if someone was shelling the
second floor windows. I was in a state of total panic,
and I saw them in my mind's eye there on
the front steps, waiting for someone to answer the door.
And I was just on the ground, trying to breathe,
and they rang the doorbell again and I waited.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Eventually they left. And this is the moment that Julia
has fixated on for over twenty years. Why had the
girls shown up at her door? And what did they want?
Maybe they'd shown up to bully her, but maybe they'd
had a change of heart, realized how mean they'd been
and were there to apologize. Whatever the case, Julia was
(10:02):
too scared to open the door and find out, and
that decision to not go downstairs and face the girls
who tormented her still haunts Julia. Even listening to her
talk about it all these years later, it still feels raw.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
I'm thirty five now, and that day has become one
of my only regrets because the memory of my weakness
sometimes supersedes all of the strong things I've done since then,
and it makes me feel weak.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Even though you were you were just a child, I
was fourteen.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
I think it's the memory of that fear still somewhere
in my physiology. It makes me fearful when I think
of it, I just wish i'd gone down there. I
wish I'd had the guts.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
What do you think has stopped you up until now
from just using the question, you know, like just finding
the girls and just asking them why they were there
that day.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
I'm afraid to find out what I did to bring
on the bullying, because it's very possible that I was bad.
I think, deep down I don't really know what was wrong.
I don't know what was wrong with me, and I
don't want to know what.
Speaker 8 (11:37):
Was wrong with me.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I mean, it feels like you're being really hard on yourself,
or being hard on this little kid basically, you know, like,
do you look at photographs of yourself at that age?
Speaker 7 (11:53):
I try not too well.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
I think it'd be surprised by like I mean, I
have memories of being that age where I thought like
I was at weddings and I thought I was like
flirting with adult women and stuff like that. And I
look at pictures of myself and I look like a
cabbage patch doll.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
You know.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
I think I probably looked like the tin men because
I had a full set of braces. And then after
I graduated from my braces. I immediately went to headgear
neck gear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But I've only seen them on TV sitcoms.
Speaker 5 (12:24):
So combine that with my glasses. It was a sad
state of affairs.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
As soon as she graduated high school, Julia left Montreal
for good.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Depending on how you know the outcome of that conversation,
I might have chosen not to leave Montreal. When I'm
in Montreal once a year, I avoid the neighborhood I
grew up in where all of this went down for
the most part, and those girls are long gone. I mean,
we're all grown ass women now with careers and jobs
(12:58):
and kids. And here I am avoiding friends of friends
on Facebook because I don't want any of those girls
to know what's going on with my life.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Do you feel like, had you answered the door and
they had apologized to you, that that would have changed
your life in some way, that it would have changed
your relationship with your past and the city and these friends.
Speaker 5 (13:25):
I think it might have, but I'll never know what
they wanted to say to me because I didn't answer
the door.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your
whole life running from. So when I gently suggest that
you try to find out why they were at the
door that day, Julius suggests that maybe the past to
just stay in the past.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
You know, we move on with our lives. We you know,
we move on, and it's another thing to open up.
You know that Pandora's Box.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Again, even the language that you're using about fear of
opening up that Pandora's box, it is so similar to
the language that you used and describe like fear of
opening that door.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
So what you're saying is I should really just finish
the job.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
After the break opening Pandora's Box, in spite of her
(14:48):
initial trepidation, once Julia decided to find out why the
girls came to her door that day, she was all in.
Watching her take it on was impressive. Julia went back
to Montreal and reached out to her former best friend Jane,
who agreed to meet with her but said she didn't
remember anything. And so, for the first time since eighth grade,
(15:09):
Julia returned to her former school to go through the
yearbook and find the names of her old classmates, and
then she started searching.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
I reached out to probably twelve girls from from my grade. Yeah,
and in my worst moments, I imagine that none of
them were going to write back, and it was sort
of going to feel like, you know, I was on
the outside of the group again, you know, and that
(15:40):
the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were
still in play and all that. But then the responses
started to trickle in.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Yeah, this is Julia.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Julia logged hours and hours of interviews school.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
And rang my doorbell. I thought you might have been
one of them. I don't think so. Do you remember
anything about that?
Speaker 6 (16:00):
Was I there?
Speaker 4 (16:01):
No? Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
I remember one time you were hiding in.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
A bathroom stall, But just like Jane, not a single
person said they could remember showing up at her door
that day.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Oh yeah, Well, I honestly don't remember doing that.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
I don't, I don't.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
I'm sorry, I don't. I don't remember anything. I just
don't remember it. Promise you I have no recollection of this.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 8 (16:29):
Sorry, sorry.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Well, what each of them did remember was their own pain.
There'd been a lot of bullying that year, and no
one felt safe. Julia heard about one girl who'd found
her desk filled with meticulously cut out images from porn magazines.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Another girl remembered someone spreading rumors.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
That she had aids. I hated that place, said one.
It's all a big fog of chaos, said another, a
dark cloud over the class. You never knew who you
could trust. We were awful, awful little girls. The more
Julia heard about it, it started to sound like a
Stephen King novel, and not one of those cutesy ones
about clowns or talk cars. In almost every conversation, one
(17:16):
name kept coming up as the person who had it
the worst. Even Julia acknowledged it. The name was Sarah Taba.
Sarah had the misfortune of being the only eighth grader
who was slightly overweight, and as such she was always
kept at a distance in high school. I was also
someone who existed on the margins, so I understand how
(17:37):
oftentimes kids like me, kids like Sarah Taba, become the
eyes and ears of the school, fidgety, uncomfortable witnesses forced
to watch from the wings. I'm reminded of this all
the time with the friends I went to high school
with who were more popular than me. Remember the time
Robert Siolick wore a three piece suit to school? I
ask the time Madame Reber slammed the classroom door so
(18:00):
hard the clock fell off the wall, the day Sharon
Wiener got suspended for leaving the schoolyard during recess. Of
course they don't they living their lives. But I was
on the sidelines taking it all in, remembering.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Hi, Sarah, Hi, it's been a really long time.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
Yeah, yes it has.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Having all these conversations made Julia think about Sarah and
what she might remember. But when she asked her if
she had any recollection about the day those girls showed
up at her door, Sarah couldn't remember anything.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
The first thing I thought of when he said a
group of girls right in the doorbelt, I immediately thought
it would be a bad experience, Like it wasn't people
coming looking for you to be like we miss you?
Where are you?
Speaker 5 (18:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (18:56):
Grade eight was a bad year at that girl. Either
you were being bullied and picked on, or you had
to turn around and become the bully.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yeah, there's something toxic, something dark.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
I think normal bullying. If there's such a thing as
normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim
and the like. But it was just so pervasive.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
Do you remember the day that you realize that I
was gone.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
I don't, actually, no, I remember feeling like you were
just sad all the time.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I remember you being sad too. Yeah. One thing I
remember people would call you tubby taba.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
Doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff
like that. I can't help but think that our grades
behavior had impacts on the staff. What do you mean, well,
(20:11):
I actually I'm assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't.
But Miss McDonald killed herself the following year. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Mss McDonald was Julia's favorite teacher and Sarah's too. Miss
McDonald had gone to the school as a student and
later returned to teach biology. She was the fun teacher
who wore frog earrings.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
You think that there was something to do with what
was happening in the school that caused her to commit suicide.
Speaker 4 (20:46):
I think it had a role in her depression. She
left right in the end of our grade eight year.
She because what I knew of her and with her school,
it was her passion. She was an old girl. She
was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love of
(21:06):
animals and biology and all of us, and we were
a bunch of brats. I remember there being a lot
of associations between that pig that she had on top
of her TV and her a lot of comments about
her way. Yeah, had an impact.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Ms McDonald had been hospitalized over the summer, and when
she came back in the fall, she was no longer
the biology teacher, but a substitute. The last period of
the last day she taught before she killed herself was
a class called Personal and Religious Education. The students considered
the class a joke. Sarah was there that day and.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
The grade was just running around and doing everything they
weren't supposed to do in the classroom. She tried to
get people to calm down and sit down and pay
attention and like, I wasn't even trying to teach us anything.
I don't even know if there was any material to
cover that day. And then we showed up at school
Monday morning to find out that she killed herself for
(22:13):
the weekend.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
She was my role model. She was the person who
survived the school despite not being the stereotypical prefect or
perfect girl. She was just this wonderful, round woman who
rejuvenated life and as an overweight teenager. For me, that
(22:44):
was like, okay, so you don't have to be perfect
to achieve anything. She was my role model who the
next year killed herself and like shattered all my dreams
that you can go about living your life the way
you're living your life in this environment and succeed, which
(23:06):
made me want to completely change my body. The only
way that I was going to get through this school
was to lose a bunch of way to gain the
respect of these people that have basically disliked me since
I was eleven, and I did it.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
Yeah, I've been really over the years. I wondered about you,
and then when I looked you up on Facebook, I
saw pictures of you and I clicked right by them.
I thought, oh, I have the wrong person. Yeah, because
you didn't look like yourself, right, So I mean you
didn't you just stopped eating it sounds like.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Yeah, yeah, in tenth grade, tenth through eleventh grade, and
then basically destroyed myself in the process because it's an
illness that I've been battling for the last twenty years.
(24:14):
It's amazing what your childhood experiences can push you to
do so that I definitely remember because that's how I
ended up in the situation. I am now I'm actually
talking to you from outside of a clinic for treating
eating disorders.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
So I'm really sorry, Sarah.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
It's not your fault. That's the just a sad reality
of all of this.
Speaker 5 (24:44):
It's like, yeah, please picture you know, my nerdy looking
fourteen year old self giving you a big hug.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Oh thanks. I actually do have to let you go
because we have to have lunch now, but it was
nice to speak, confute and do keep in touch.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
The conversation had left Julia feeling devastated. The scale of
her own pain had been altered in the face of Sarah's.
Later that night, I couldn't stop thinking about Julia and
(25:44):
Sarah's conversation, and as I turned it around in my head,
a theory began to form. Miss McDonald had died around
the start of the school year. Wasn't it possible that
those girls had shown up at Julia's door to let
her know. Maybe they'd been worried about the way Julia
had just disappeared from their school and feared the worst.
Wasn't it possible the girls had meant good that day
(26:06):
that they came to the door, and if so, wouldn't
knowing that changed the way Julia felt about the past
twenty years and maybe even changed the way she saw herself.
So I took this last task upon myself. Hey is
this Christine? He Hey Jennifer, this is I found up
(26:29):
all the people Julia had already spoken with, and I
ran my theory by them.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
To be honest, I would love to believe that's what
their intentions were.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
I can't be sure about anything.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
I can't say yeah, sure, that's it because I don't
have a memory of it.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Okay, well, thank.
Speaker 4 (26:44):
You, bye, all right, you have a great night. Okay,
bye bye bye.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Okay, okay, okay, take it easy.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
Hi, bye bye.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
There was there's only one thing left for me to do.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
I just feel like I'm at a loss, Like this
whole thing started off as me encouraging you to give
it a try and that it might be helpful in
some way, and I don't feel like I brought you
any closer to knowing what happened at the door that day.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
And I just if there's one of us who's disappointed,
it certainly isn't me. I don't know whether I was
emotionally equipped to open the door as a fourteen year old,
But to me, the important part is is that I
opened the door. Now, I couldn't have I couldn't have
(27:57):
confronted that if I hadn't literally done what we decided
we were going to do, if I hadn't had these
phone calls and ask these hard questions. And I've forgiven
(28:20):
that little girl for being so frightened. I was so ashamed,
I was so regretful, And I don't blame myself for
being afraid. Then I had every right to be. It
wasn't rational. And so I think the biggest challenge for
me and all of this was to allow myself to
(28:40):
slip back into that fourteen year old girl's skin and say, look,
you know, I get it. It's okay, you know, it's okay.
I'm proud of who I was. Then It's been a
long time since I could say.
Speaker 9 (29:01):
That, and you feel like that's happened like that, that's
how and in this process, yeah, I do, Well that
makes me feel better.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
Well, I'm happy to make you feel.
Speaker 7 (29:17):
Better, Jonathan, I might ding dong, I'm ding dong.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
Is this the part where I rewrite history and answer
the door. That's right, ding dong, Okay, I'm answering the door.
Open the door.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
What happened to you?
Speaker 5 (29:44):
I change schools?
Speaker 8 (29:47):
And you know why, Now.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
That the fernitures returning to it's goodwill home, now that
the last month's rent is scheming.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
With the damage to poss take this moment to do so.
Speaker 5 (30:38):
If we meant it, if we talked.
Speaker 8 (30:42):
We felt around for far too.
Speaker 5 (30:47):
From things that accidentally.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Uh, Julia, Hi, how are you? It's a it has
been ten years? Yeah, ten years. Have you listened to
the episode recently.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
After you reached out? I listened to around my neighborhood,
and you know, hearing myself be scared on the recording
made me scared again, and then hearing myself be triumphant
made me feel made me feel fully grown all over again.
(31:29):
And it was it was cool. It was it was
a really special thing to be able to collaborate with
you on that.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
And you feel like it changed something for you.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
I think it changed a lot of things for me.
For one thing, it gave me permission to reimagine myself
as a player in my own life. I didn't have
to be the girl that things were done too. I
could be the woman who could choose to do things,
(31:59):
and it gave me the opportunity to rethink my relationship
with Montreal, and all of that felt like such an
unlock stemming from our time together. Yours of line, Jonathan.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
That's really nice. Did any of the of the girls
who showed up at your door that day did you?
Did they ever reach out? Did you learn anything more
about that actual incident?
Speaker 5 (32:27):
I never learned anything about the incident. It remains a mystery.
But I did get out of the blue. A couple
of days after the episode aired, a voicemail from one
of the girls in my grade, not one of the
main girls who made the Julia book, but she called
(32:51):
and left a sobbing voicemail, and then I called her
back right away. I actually don't know how she got
my number. I called her back right away and we
had a very heartfelt conversation.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
That's so nice that it generated all of this. Did
you ever speak with Sarah tab again?
Speaker 5 (33:10):
I just reached out to her the other day, Huh.
I was inspired to reach out to her by you
reaching out to me and re listening to my episode.
But it's really our episode. Sarah's and mine, and I
think it's okay for me to share that Sarah Taba
is thriving.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Oh that's so good to hear, I know. I know,
so you think you might see her?
Speaker 5 (33:36):
Oh yeah, we made plans for me to hang out
with her next time I'm in Montreal.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
You're not moving back to Montreal, are you.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
I am kind of moving back. So the big headline
is that I really fell in love with my hometown,
and I've been spending my summer's there getting to know
a new version of I'm sure all, getting to know
a new version of who I can be there. And
I fell in love with a wonderful man, and he
(34:10):
and I are talking about buying a condo in Montreal.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
You know, I've lived a lot of different places over
the past years, but I'm always a little jealous of
my friends who remained in Montreal and have a cool
life there and have grown roots. And I'm envious of you,
you know. Hearing that you're moving back like that, I
think that's really cool.
Speaker 5 (34:34):
You know, we're not talking about spending winters there. Let's
just be clear.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Well, sincerely, I mean, if I am there for more
than a couple of days you'll ye'll hear from me sincerely,
that would be a joy. Thanks to everyone who originally
(35:04):
put this episode together. Will be back in one week's time,
that's right on Puny Little Week with something very special,
a very special treat. If you will, Uh, can I
say khluila? Will you allow me? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (35:18):
You can.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
This is going to be unbelievable. People are going to
think that we're doing some kind of bit right now,
but you and I are going to be featured on
a children's podcast.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
We're going to be debating, We're going to.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Try to take each other to the mat, knock each
other out. Uh. And also, boy, we have a lot
to talk about as well. We have our newsletter. What's
your favorite thing about our newsletter?
Speaker 6 (35:44):
I like to know what's on everyone's mind. Like stuff
comes up in the newsletter, things we've enjoyed or been
thinking about that we're not necessarily even talking about one
on one.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
No, No, you find out things about me. Yeah, I
find out things about you and Stevie.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Sometimes I'm shocked.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
You know what? My favorite thing about the newsletter is
that it's the it's on the Internet. I don't have
to get paper cuts opening up an envelope that comes
to my door. People have to know my business, so
I ask you, one and all to please subscribe to
that newsletter, which I don't know if I mentioned, is
completely free and you can find it at patreon dot com.
(36:23):
Slash Heavyweight
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