From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is my unsung hero, stories where one person reached

out to help another in a time of need.

I would like to thank my unsung hero. I do not know her name.

And all of a sudden I look up and this hand slides two warm chocolate chip cookies across the desk.

To this day it was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

Today's story comes from Sarah Marshall.

When Sarah was a teenager, her whole life revolved around getting into a good college.

She spent a lot of time thinking about what she could do to be the perfect applicant.

When she finally did get into her dream school, though, she felt adrift.

There was something also remarkable about suddenly being done with that existential question and the amount of

pressure that you put on yourself to get in that suddenly it feels like the thing

that you were aiming for the whole time is less relevant in a way than the fact that you're not scared about making it happen anymore.

Like many teenagers, she'd spent so much time shaping herself into the perfect student that she hadn't

had time to develop a sense of self. But there was a place where she felt like she could

explore who she really was. My freshman year of college I took my first ever acting class and the class was in a black box theater.

It's a small space and I think there was something about an acting class that was some kind of a comfortable or a safe

intermediary space for me between being someone who largely had learned how to behave in terms of how to do what you need to do in a classroom and how to meet adults expectations, but where the expectation is not,

you're going to memorize these dates, or you're going to do this algebra,

or you're going to write this essay, but you are going to show up as yourself. And I just remember a particular moment probably

midway through or near the end of this course when I was doing an improv scene and I remember this

acting professor, Dina giving us notes and this moment where she said to me you're

you're funny you're shy but you're funny. And for me it was a moment of being recognized in a very

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