Hi, I'm Talley, and this is first day back.

This is a serialized podcast about me getting back to work after taking six years off to be with my kids.

But once in a while, I do something different, and this is one of those times.

After the last episode, I got a lot of emails from listeners,

way more than usual.

You had a lot of things to say about work and parenthood,

and about how hard it is to know what to do with your life,

with kids or without.

If I had to sum up what I heard, it's this. It's really complicated. And a lot of you, like me,

are not exactly where you want to be. So I asked people to send in recordings of themselves,

talking about their situation. Hi, Talley. My name's Isabella, and I'm 33 years old. People send in tape from

all over. This is Brian Gresco in New York. This is Jenny Stein and I'm from Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania. I'm in kind of a large room with the window open because my cats love it.

Editing these, I remembered how this is my comfort zone, telling other people's stories instead of my own.

And I heard that other people are also mapping it out as they go along.

I always worked in libraries throughout college and then after college and then through my master's degree.

That's Dana. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, is in her late 20s and is just married.

She's always been driven and worked hard with the expectation that it would lead to a good job in a library or archive.

She even got a master's in library studies because she knew it would better her chances.

Then, after working two low-paying library jobs for a while, she landed an interview for that

big job she had been working towards.

She called it,

...