Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia. I'm Leah Tao. I'm sorry I disappeared for the last month.

Maybe you noticed that we missed an episode. I just reached a kind of breaking point with my stress level.

And instead of becoming angry and petulant and borderline abusive

to the people around me and to myself,

like I usually do,

instead of pushing through yet again,

I just collapsed into a heap of tears.

I just couldn't push anymore.

What I hated was not the show or the work itself

or the distributor who put in my contract that I must produce 24 episodes a year.

What I hate it was myself, my own ambition and my apparent willingness to put it before my health, my sanity, the people who love me, those who need me, even my own kid at times.

It'll be seven years next month since the first stem cell for this show was formed.

My son was five months old at the time and his dad and I were temporarily back together after an awful breakup during my pregnancy.

We lived in New York, but we were in San Francisco for five days.

He was there for our conference, and I had tagged along with the baby because a month before,

I'd gone through the second awful breakup of that year from the Moth, the storytelling organization I'd been running for nearly 10 years, and I was

really relieved not to be working, and also really terrified that my career was over. So, so scared that I would

never do anything big again, but also really scared that I would attempt something big again

and that it might kill me.

I'd been in talks with KCRW for a couple of months at that point

about coming to L.A. to create a show for them.

And we'd agreed that I'd fly down to meet them in person while I was in San Francisco.

...