Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Michelle Jalasky. This week,

we're talking about one of the most powerful human emotions. Not love, not fear, shame.

Shame can be difficult to understand where it comes from the strange ways it moves us,

but we all know it when we feel it. Up first this week is Lizzie Peabody. Lizzie told

this story at a DC Story's Land where the theme of the night was caught. Here's Lizzie,

live at the Moth.

So I'm volunteering for DC's first podcasting festival. I'm brand new to audio production,

but I figure that volunteering at this festival is a great way to rub elbows with the Muckety

Mucks in the audio world. And the first night of the festival, there's sort of an opening

party and there are cake pops. I avoid them for like the majority of the party, but the

very end of the night finds me in front of the cake pop table. And I eat one, and it

is just velvety and smooth and chocolatey and fudgy and so, so sweet. And I know immediately

that I have made a huge mistake. So growing up, my family ate the most austere breakfast

cereal out there, grape nuts. And the only time I was allowed to have honey on my grape

nuts was on my birthday. The closest thing that my brothers and I got to actual fruit snacks

or fruit roll ups was this like aptly named fruit leathers that you had to chew on for

like an hour and they got stuck to all the parts of your mouth. And the closest thing

we got to soda was juicy juice, 100% juice for 100% kids. And as a result of this sort

of draconian health food policy, my brothers and I were always on the hunt for our next

sugar fix. And in the summers, this meant going door to door to neighbors and eating their

popsicles, usually when they weren't home because nobody locked their doors in Blue Hill

Maine. One night after a successful raid on the Millicans freezer, we came home with

...