Hello on-bearing listeners. This is Marie Sambole. I'm an audio producer here at

on-bearing studios and I'm here with another installment of a little

experiment we've been doing. We're calling it Living the Questions, where

Christopher responds to questions from you. So it's something that I'm always

thinking about as a young person in their mid-twenties is the question of my

own place in the world and my sense of agency and whether my voice is being

heard and it's something that a lot of you have been wondering about too. One

listener, Jillian Hubern, asked it in a really beautiful way. Where do we allow

space for young people to access and articulate their sense of power and purpose,

their vulnerability and their courage? This led Christopher reflect on how she

felt about her own voice and sense of agency as she was growing up.

Such an interesting question. I grew up in a small town and you know what

felt like a small world. Very contained, known. At this point in my life I also see

that we don't live in one big world. We live in a collection of small worlds. So in

that sense I think my sense I had of how contained the world was was you know

probably a sense that a lot of people have in very different circumstances but I

had this feeling that there was a big reality out there. It was just kind of

like this black hole of the rest of the world and I think I only started to

get curious about that when I was a teenager. It was a time you know before the

internet. So just having a sense of the world out there was not accessible in

the way it is now but I also wonder if now you can like immediately dial in to

so many pictures and so much information and that's still not the same as

...