The Disorientation of Survival - Part 1

Everything Is Stories

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.8 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2024

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

*This episode contains descriptions of sexual situations, listener discretion is advised. As a closeted gay teenager, lying was familiar to Mark Olmsted. Concealing parts of his identity was just part of the deal–and he was good at it. But when the AIDS crisis threatened his life and left him with little to lose, the lying would turn so grandiose that no one who knew him could quite believe it. In part one of our three-part series, Mark vividly recounts his childhood upbringing and the complicated relationship with his brother that would ultimately transform in one of the most unexpected ways. And after thriving in the mecca of 70s and 80s New York City gay life he found himself facing a hard question: How would he cope following an unthinkable family tragedy and react to a future life he assumed had vanished? --- Produced by Mike Martinez, Tyler Wray, and Grace Heerman. Music by Mike Etten. Sound design by George Drake, Jr. Photos by Clarke Tolton. For more about Mark, you can purchase his book Ink From The Pen: A Prison Memoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them.
0:10.0	The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.
0:14.0	No, no.
0:16.0	No.
0:18.0	The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them.
0:22.6	The way to understand these stories is to know they are about us. This episode contains descriptions of sexual situations.
0:48.4	Listener discretion is advised. Because of the war, my mother's teenage years were interrupted by the Nazi occupation of southern France.
1:05.9	Her life has always been divided in three, before, during, and after.
1:12.6	I'd always been so enamored with stories of the French resistance that I heard growing up false IDs and forgeries and secret panels.
1:24.6	And I remember seeing the great escape when I was maybe 11 or 12 and just all the
1:31.5	forged identity cards I just loved that part of it I thought it was just fascinating the whole
1:42.2	idea of having a second ID was just super cool to me.
1:47.0	So for me to be able to live that, there was a creative rush from that angle.
1:53.0	As I got older and got to talk to my mother more and more about the war, I realized how deeply it affected her.
2:04.6	There was that nervousness about things in general, this feeling that you could be a refugee at any minute or taken hostage or the way she would just walk fast in the streets.
2:20.3	I was amused by her being so affected by something that had happened so long ago.
2:27.3	When I got older, my mom told me thoughts that it haunted her for years, that she had
2:42.0	breathed the same air of the people who had died in concentration camps, that she was eating
2:49.2	and working and sleeping while they were suffering.
2:52.6	It took me longer to start to realize that I had inherited a lot of that baked-in anxiety.
3:02.1	She managed to pass along a lot of trauma onto me.
3:14.2	I finally realized what a horrible traumatic event the war had been for her. I thought I'd never experience anything like what she went through. In fact, I thought that my
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