Hannah Pittard
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Hannah Pittard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
At this point, my heart has just dropped and I feel like I'm gonna vomit. The betrayal felt so intentional and possibly like it was a long time coming.
I remember writing stories from the time I was a little girl.
We had horses, chickens, barn kittens. It was a wonderful time.
I was constantly getting interviewed by a different therapist. It felt to my mind like we were constantly going to see a judge. I read and I would just go into this fictional dream and block out the noise of whatever was happening in the other room.
By sixth grade, I was writing poems, horrible, sad, sack poems. And as a 13, 14-year-old, I had started writing little sketches and just became pretty serious about it.
But when she got there... I was still me, naturally introverted, living in my head, writing stories.
I was blissfully unaware of what an elite institution it was. And I was blissfully unaware of any kind of real competition. Truly, the worst part of it was what I was doing in private to myself.
You're a kid with a secret and it's a really big secret. It is a secret where you are hurting your body in this intentional way and you're not relying on the outer world and you're not trusting anybody else because you don't want to get caught. You're just so much by yourself. Socially, I was definitely isolated and isolating.
By the time I graduated, I'd won a couple writing awards. So I had this idea that maybe I was good or I could be good.
I was too intimidated to take a single creative writing class. I didn't want to be told that I wasn't as good as I felt like I'd been on Deerfield's campus. I thought, if I'm not saying what I want, then nobody knows to be disappointed in me or embarrassed on my behalf. Oh, you didn't get it. You wanted to be a writer and you didn't get it.
I think I sent them something that I might not even have reread and swiftly was rejected. And I'm so glad that I was rejected because it was a wake-up call that if you want this, you have to try.
It paid off. I got into several different programs and ultimately ended up at the University of Virginia.
You're going to get to grad school and you're going to become the social person that you know you want to be. You're going to change your life.
The program had its very first meeting. All of the second years in the program were there, and all of the new first years were there. I will always remember the first time I saw Trish. She was captivating.
She had on a great outfit, red lipstick. I think she had on a pair of yellow ballet flats. Her hair looked amazing. She just was cool.
Back then, I was being plagued with situational rosacea, which I've had all my life. If you made eye contact with me, I either cried or blushed. And it's not just blushing. You know, I think sometimes people hear the word blush and they think of like these two little cherries on either side of your cheeks. It's like a rash that crawls up my neck and makes my cheeks splotchy.
I'm still bright red and she came over and she put her hand on my arm and she said something like, it's really sweet how you blush when you're nervous. It makes you seem authentic. I was pretty excited that she'd noticed me. She made me feel seen and we became friends after that.
People from the program would call to invite me out and they'd come back to my house for house parties. And meanwhile, we're all just reading and writing and going to coffee shops. It was the fantasy that I'd imagined for myself.
Trish seemed so comfortable in her skin. She seemed comfortable enough Being pretty, she seemed comfortable being perceived as somebody who wanted to look pretty. Meanwhile, I am all day long, nonstop thinking about my body during this time. I was so embarrassed of having anyone think that I wanted to be pretty or sexy or feminine, even though that is desperately what I wanted.
I was eliminating curves, but I was also eliminating the embarrassment of being perceived as somebody who wanted to be sexy.
Showing 1–20 of 82 · page 1 of 5
Next →