Spencer Bailey

It was sort of this going from this sort of black and white, like something's deeply buried, to I can put this out in the world and...

It matters, because while it's just my story to tell, we all have our own different versions, maybe slightly less visceral than a plane crash and losing your mother, but it felt like this thing that I could put out there and...

Yeah, I continue to feel that way when I share the story because it's all a form of processing and I feel like every day imbues it with new meaning.

It's not like I just told that story senior year of high school and that was it.

It's like I'm still processing it now.

I'll be processing it when I'm 50, when I'm 60, when I'm 70, hopefully when I'm 80.

You've described the speech as liberating.

Was that the first time that sharing this experience stopped feeling like exposure and more like authorship?

For sure.

Yeah.

And I think it was such a, you know, it reads like a high school kid wrote it.

So it was the best version of that story that I could tell at that time.

And then after that, actually, I didn't really share it that widely.

I felt more free telling friends in college that, you know, hey, this happened to me.

But it was only kind of when I became a journalist more formally and writer that I'm like, oh, this is my territory and terrain.

I can explore this a little bit.

I can use it as material to understand myself more deeply, but also the things I'm interested in more deeply.

Architecture, memory, art, culture, history.

You went on to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

You had a short-lived college newspaper column.