Sarah Elle's Exit Journal

I’m beginning to understand why podcasters either become deeply enlightened or fully unhinged. There appears to be no middle ground.

What started as, “Hey, we should make a podcast,” has quickly evolved into me sitting under a heated blanket at 1:14 a.m. aggressively moving audio waveforms one millisecond to the left while whispering things like, “Why does this breath sound like a gasp for life?”

I’ve learned a lot already. For example, editing software? It likely has an entire personality that has been created around passive aggression. Microphones absolutely pick up every possible sound except the one you intended, and editing a podcast is essentially just repeatedly listening to yourself make the same mistake. Well, until you dissociate, after you've wondered which part of your sentence can be removed and still make sense enough times, that nothing makes sense at all anymore. Oh, and that small adjustment? It, would require no less than 25 changes to remove that one little sigh with the added "um" to be extracted and no less than 30 minutes of your time.

Also, no one tells you how much of podcasting has absolutely nothing to do with recording. It’s websites, sourcing, emails, artwork, scheduling, file names, exports, descriptions, fixing weird audio issues, and Googling things like: “why does my podcast sound like it was recorded in a cave, underwater?" Until the realization that it's always the

damn REVERB.

Yet, through all of this, I’ve developed an entirely new relationship with the English language. Certain words now trigger a physical response. Not emotionally. Spiritually. I fear I may never recover from hearing the word “somethin'" spoken into a professional microphone ever again. And when I hear the word "spendy?" I cannot help but finding myself falling into a lost land far away in my mind of linguistics, regions, the dawn of time and whether or not time is even real.

Still, somewhere between the waveform chaos, cold coffee, over-researched timelines, and asking people to please re-record one sentence for the seventeenth time, something really cool has started happening. I have a strong need to improve every week. I want our audio to be better. Our stories to be told more authentically and although it may be a bumpy start on this downhill single lane exit ramp in our clutch-started '67 bug (this was mine and ML's first car) onto The Corridor, we owe it to the Passengers who have been taken too soon, to strive for better.

The mission feels real. The conversations we’ve had with listeners, retired detectives, family members, and complete strangers have reminded me why I wanted to do this in the first place. Not for perfection. Not for polished radio voices. Although, we are definitely trying to get there. But because some stories deserve more than a passing headline and a twenty-second clip before the internet moves on.

That being said, if anyone needs me, I’ll be manually removing mouth noises from audio while staring into the void like a Victorian orphan operating factory machinery.