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lift every voice and sing

Lift every voice and sing,
‘Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.

I did not know about Juneteenth until I was in my 40s. I recall how embarrassed and ashamed I felt, but it just wasn’t taught to me in school, and America doesn’t exactly go out of her way to teach privileged white kids like me about the horrors our ancestors inflicted on generations of human beings. Hopefully, that has changed.

In the extremely unlikely event you are hearing about this for the first time: “Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. The holiday’s name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of the words June and nineteenth, referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War.”

As the institutions and corporations that influence so much of American culture draw shamefully away from celebrating and honoring marginalized communities, including communities of color, it falls (as it always does) to us, the people, to step up and use our collective voice to speak out so our friends, neighbors, and fellow humans who do not have the same privilege that so many of us have are seen and heard.

Here’s LeVar Burton reading the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Google put this on their doodle a few years ago. Today, there is nothing. Shameful. My bad. My VPN autoconnected to the UK, and when I reset it to the US, I see that Google is honoring Juneteenth. I regret the error.

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it picks me up, puts me down

I’ve been open and unashamed about my mental health struggles and triumphs, always willing to talk about my CPTSD, always willing to supportively listen when someone chooses to share their experience with me.

I make this choice every day, because I am doing my best to be the person I need in the world. I need people who are kind and compassionate, who are willing to share their struggles and victories in a way that validates my own experiences. I make this choice so that maybe I can be the person I need, for someone I will never meet, the way people like Jenny Lawson, or Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade were for me, when I was beginning my healing journey.

It’s in that spirit that I’m writing today. This is sort of a general update on how that journey is going, and a look at where I am, with some thoughts on how I got here.

So, broadly and generally speaking, I’m doing great! I mean, everything in the whole world is terrible, but the little bit of reality that’s being rendered around me at any given moment is pretty great. I’m healthy and safe, my family is healthy and safe, I have all the work I need, I have time and space for activities.

But … the chaos, cruelty, rage, and unpredictability coming out of the White House is identical to what I experienced growing up1 and holy shit has that activated a lot of stuff for my body to remember.

For the two weeks or so that preceded Sunday, I woke up to intense anxiety every morning, before I was even fully awake and aware of anything. It was really unpleasant, but at least I knew that it was nervous system dysregulation2, and I have a lot of skills I can use to help my nervous system get back into a parasympathetic, resting, state. I’m grateful that I know what to do, but my god did I wish I didn’t have to do it every morning at the start of my day.3

Then, Sunday, I woke up like Frodo in Rivendell, and I have, every morning since. I don’t feel tight and clenched in my chest. I haven’t sweat through my pajamas and woken up shivering. I have had peace and warmth and gentle calm.

And the thing is, I didn’t know when this would happen, but I knew that it would. This sort of nervous system freakout thing tends to happen when I’ve been working hard to reprocess one or more specific traumas, and I’m really close to closing a circle on my imaginary trauma healing watch. It’s like my body doesn’t realize, yet, that I’m safe and I’m now, and it needs to be gently coaxed out of dysregulation.

I’ve closed a few metaphorical circles over the years since I started EMDR and IFS therapy, and I have had some version of this experience each time. When it does, I imagine a drawing of my body, like from one of those old Disney SCIENCE IS FUN cartoons. In some places, there is fear and anxiety.4 In others, confusion5. Depending on how old I am in the drawing, there’s anger and resentment6. And all around these memories, connected to each of them, is sadness and loss. Over time, as I’ve worked so hard to heal from the abuse of my emotionally immature, toxic parents, those pieces I see in the drawing have faded away, eventually joining together in lingering loss and sadness.

And honestly, I’m okay with that. It’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to acknowledge the loss. I hasten to clarify that this took literal years of work. When I first began to see all the sadness, it was like looking into infinity. When I first felt the enormity and profundity of the loss, it was free falling into an abyss. There were a lot of stops and starts as I learned how to regulate it, how to reprocess it in a way that wasn’t overwhelming.

Again, not easy. Again, years. Again, worth it.

Now, listen, I am not a doctor and I have no professional experience or education. I’m just sharing my experience. But if you see something familiar, I encourage you to look into what nervous system dysregulation is, and learn some of the techniques we use to calm our bodies down when they aren’t on the same page as our mind, our soul, our Self.

A few resources I value include

There’s a somatic component to emotional healing and trauma recovery that I didn’t expect. It’s only recently that my emotional self and my physical self have started to work in harmony, and that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t know that the somatic part existed. It’s taken such a long time, and though the work is ongoing, I hope that someone who needs to know that they aren’t alone sees this. I hope this helps on your own healing journey.

Thanks for reading my blog. If you would like to get these updates in your email, here’s a thing:

Take care of yourselves, friends, and take care of each other.

  1. My father’s rage, my mother’s fear, and the tension between them was so thick in the air, it was suffocating. I never knew what was coming down the hallway, or through the front door. Would dad be mean to me, or would he just ignore me? Would mom and dad fight so ferociously that it ends with my mom kicking another hole in another cabinet? We’re running out of towels to hang over the ones that are already there. I’m going to put headphones on and turn them up as loud as they can go because that’s the only way to escape the yelling and arguing that vibrates through the walls into my bedroom. ↩︎
  2. For decades, I had panic attacks every night when I was falling asleep. More often than not, I had night terrors, these vaguely remembered nightmares that had no images or other senses associated with them, just pure terror. When it was really bad, they happened more than once a night and the only reason I stayed asleep was after I’d cried myself to sleep in exhaustion. Trying to escape them was a big part of my alcohol abuse. I’m so grateful that doesn’t happen anymore. ↩︎
  3. And it still kind of lingered with me throughout the day, you know? It was a lot. ↩︎
  4. Oh, imagine that Professor Duck guy, giving a lecture at a chalkboard. ↩︎
  5. Why is he so mean to me? Why won’t she just let me be a kid? Why won’t they love me like they love my brother and sister? ↩︎
  6. Or, there was. The healing ring I am most proud of closing, the one that was the key to closing so many others, was this one. When I realized that my anger was no longer a shield that protected me, but something else entirely that only caused me pain, it was astonishingly easy to find it, coax it out, validate it, and send it on its way. There isn’t any anger in my drawing now. Where it used to be is something that is almost indifference. ↩︎
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behind his eyes he says ‘i still exist’

This thing has been happening to me since I built my first blog about 25 years ago, and you’d think that by now it would have stopped, but here we are.

The longer I go between posts, the more SUPER IMPORTANT the next post becomes. This is especially gross after I’ve been promoting something. I feel like I’ve bombarded the world with my promotional stuff, so I ought to give the world something to offset that.

…only when I sit down to do that, the part of me that creates those things is like, “Oh hell no. I’m on vacation.”

So I come in here, day after day, get to about this point in a post just like this one, and then I get frustrated, delete it, and go play video games.

I have to break that cycle, so here’s a little bit of a roundup to put something new here.

Yesterday, I finished building the LEGO Batmobile, which I started months ago. It has some adorable little details that were a lot of fun to discover, but holy shit was it tedious most of the time. It turns out that building vehicles, even one that I have been obsessed with since I was a little kid, is not something I enjoy.

I think I’m doing the Haunted House next.

If you’d told me a year ago that the Stanley Cup final in 2025 would be the same teams from 2024, I never would have believed you, and once again I am cheering for Florida because Edmonton is literally the only Canadian team I just can’t abide. Sorry, Oilers Nation, but fuck Corey Perry.1

Remember Trek Side of the Moon? It’s back, in T-shirt form.

I loved the movie, but am very late to the What We Do In The Shadows series party, so I’m only now getting into its third season. A couple nights ago, I watched an episode that takes them to Atlantic City. Nandor gets completely hooked on a Big Bang Theory slot machine, and is delighted to discover that there is a television series that is “faithful to the slot machine.”2

The thing is … because The Big Bang Theory canonically exists inside the What We Do In The Shadowsverse, that means I exist inside that universe. This feels like an achievement that should come with a badge, and it makes me stupidly happy.3

Late last week,I saw that Loretta Swit passed away. We worked together when I was a kid, and I remembered some things about her.

A friend of mine observed that we are slowly becoming the Elders, and that’s just really weird. I have been thinking about that, and it turns out there is a lot about that I’m not really ready to embrace, like accepting that people I love, who mean so much to me, are getting older (and elderly) with all that implies. It’s just … it’s really weird. At the same time, it feels really good and … gentle? … to embrace a position in life that allows me to be a kind, patient, supportive, and encouraging person in the world for anyone who needs it.

I’m thinking a lot about how I can talk about things from a place of experience, in a way that younger me would have been able to hear and internalize. I want to be a Helper so much, y’all.

I had a meeting with my team to discuss next steps on It’s Storytime. The audience is small but passionate, and growing steadily. I think we’ve found a way to make it break even, or slightly better, while the audience continues to grow. Thank you to everyone who is supporting the show on Patreon, to everyone who has liked and subscribed and whatnot. It looks like the audience is right around 20,000 listeners which seems like a lot to me, and something I feel really good about! But you know what’s crazy? In the podcast world, it’s tiny. Isn’t that nuts?

When I was walking Marlowe, I came across this weirdly bent spoon in the street, so I posted it in my Instagram stories with the caption “If anyone sees Uri Gellar, tell him I found his spoon.”4

I think this is a pretty good joke.

I watched a fantastic film a couple nights ago, about the post-punk scene in West Berlin from 1979-1989, called B-Movie: Lust & Sound. It’s streaming all over the place, and if you like the same kind of music and aesthetics that I do, it’s probably worth your time.

I think that’s all for now. Have a good day, friends.

  1. Also, Florida sent 9 players to Four Nations, and Four Nations was the most exciting and satisfying hockey tournament I have ever seen. So there’s that. ↩︎
  2. I love how this show keeps surprising me like this. The first time, it was throwing the bone off the roof in the werewolf fight. I never saw it coming, and it just killed me. ↩︎
  3. I also exist inside Tommy Westphal’s snow globe, but that doesn’t feel as exclusive. They’ll let anybody into that thing. They let me in there! ↩︎
  4. If you get this reference, that means it’s time to schedule a colonoscopy, if you haven’t already. And make sure you’re getting enough vitamin D, because our aging bodies need it. ↩︎
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hey it’s me on the katee sackhoff podcast!

I recorded this episode of the Katee Sackhoff Podcast a couple of weeks ago. It’s when I realized I needed to spend some money on a camera and some lights, so I could present myself in my — literal — best light.

I mean… look at the difference between us:

On the left, Katee Sackhoff, properly lit and photographed. On the right, Wil Wheaton is blown out and pixelated.
Left: Katee Sackhoff is properly framed and lit. On the right: Wil Wheaton is blown out, pixelated, and coming to you from a nightmare.

Okay! Lesson learned! All future on-camera podcast appearances will look a little less … uh … 320×260.

I had such a wonderful time talking with Katee, this could easily have gone on another hour. It was such a privilege to spend this time with her. Here’s an embed from YouTube:

Very much looking forward to having breakfast with Katee. Seth McFarlane is not invited, but will be honored while we wait for our food1.

Podcast news!

Feedback, reviews, comments and emails all tell me that the audience for It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton absolutely loves it. I am so honored and so grateful to know that it’s landing on listeners the way I hoped it would.

This first block of episodes was a learning experience for me. I had some stumbles that I’ll tell you about someday, but they weren’t insurmountable and I learned from those mistakes. I leveled up my skills as a narrator and I hear it in the work. I know how to do this, now, and I just have to figure out how to make it cost-neutral (with the expectation that it will eventually find sponsors and revenue sources that allow me to convert it to something I do every week as a job.) I have a meeting coming up with my business team to discuss all of that. As I said in my last post, my gut is pessimistic, but it does that to protect me from disappointment and I know that. My team is positive and enthusiastic about this meeting, fully expecting that we’re going to keep doing this. So I’m doing my best to trust that they have more experience than my gut in this regard, and I’m cautiously optimistic.

If you’d like to get these updates in your email, here’s the thing

It’s Story Time With Wil Wheaton is available wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Subscribe now at

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

  1. This will be amusing to you, after you’ve listened to the podcast ↩︎

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it’s storytime with wil wheaton episode 7 – end of play by chelsea sutton

Well, here we are in Spain. I feel like I am just getting started, and I wish I had more new episodes yet to come, but we have come to the final episode of what’s turning out to be one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done. I set out to make ten episodes for the first season of the podcast, and through a series of unfortunate events, lost two of them. That means that this is the final episode of my proof of concept, shakedown cruise, for what I hope will become a weekly series that runs for years.

I have learned so much during this process about myself, as a creator, producer, and host. I’ve learned a lot about promotion and marketing. I don’t know precisely how much XP I farmed through the whole thing, but I’ve gone up a couple of levels. I know how to do this, now.

I honestly don’t know what comes next. I’m going to have an all-hands meeting with the team to look at total downloads other metrics, and they will tell me if it looks like there is enough audience to attract sponsors and Patreon subscribers.

My gut tells me that it isn’t going to happen. I don’t feel it catching and growing the way I did with Tabletop. That’s probably because the podcast space is crowded, and even though I’m not necessarily competing with another audiobook podcast (I think I’m the only one), I am absolutely competing with every other podcast in the universe, because there is only so much time available, and those True Crime podcasts are pretty great. But I’m hopeful that my gut is filled with a lifetime of disappointment and sadness, so it’s not giving me truly useful advice. I’m hoping that I get good news, wihle bracing myself if it doesn’t come.

All of that said, if this is all I ever get to do, I am so happy and proud of this. I do not regret taking this chance, investing my time and money and spirit. From a creative standpoint, this is a huge success. I am so proud of my work, I feel so good about it, and I am so grateful that I am closer to my artistic self now than I was six months ago, entirely because this whole effort demanded that I give it everything I had to give. To get there, I had to really clean up and get rid of a lot of baggage and lingering bits of my former life as an on-camera actor. A wonderful and unexpected benefit of that (other than the genuine emotional healing and trauma recovery) is that I have a much clearer picture of who I am as a person and an artist.

I am supposed to be coy and play it cool, fake it ’till I make it and all that, but I am going to tell you, even though they all tell me I am not supposed to, that I want to do this podcast as my daily job more than anything. I want to feel the satisfaction of putting something good into the world, the joy and the rush and the art that only happens when I’m narrating audiobooks or working in animation. And since animation doesn’t seem interested in giving me feedback on a single audition going on for two decades now, I’m going to lean hard into narrating audiobooks.

If you’re in the audience for It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, I need you to know how grateful I am that you’re trusting me with your time and attention. The world is on fire, everything is terrible, and we all desperately need to find as many moments of peace as we can. It’s my hope that I can tell you a story once a week, and for an hour or so, you can get a rest from all of *gestures broadly at everything*. I sincerely hope I can keep doing this for you (and for myself), and if I do, you’re the reason why.

And a very very very special thank you to everyone who supported me on Patreon. You are part of a very small group of people (much smaller than I anticipated) and I hope you enjoyed the things I shared specifically with you, as my way of saying thank you.

So enough about me, let’s get to the reason you’re here… this week’s hopefully not final episode of It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton!

Every single story I did is wonderful, and I love each one on its on merits for specific reasons. This week’s, however, is a stand out for me, among other great work. This story is almost a monologue, and I can see myself doing it as a one act play at the theatre where it is set, just down the road from here. Every story I narrate uses at least some of the skill I developed when I was an actor, but this one just demanded that I use all of them.

Actually, let me restate that: it gave me permission to feel the joy that actors must feel when they give a fulsome performance that goes all the way to the marrow of their creative selves. That was rad.

Our editors did some very gentle work on this, too, that fills out a bit of space and makes the whole thing just so much more than I even hoped it would be. I’m so excited to share this with all of you.

Here’s my intro:

This is the part of my introduction where I talk about the story you’re about to hear, where I write what I call “the magazine heading” which will help you press pause on the real world and come with me into Story Time. This part is challenging for me; I need to summarize just enough of the plot to entice you, without giving away anything important.

I’m struggling with this part more than usual today, because this story doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. It’s a ghost story, it’s a love story, it’s a gorgeous monologue that cries out to be staged in the real life theatre where the titular play is set. It is a beautiful way to wrap up our first season. There is nothing I can say about it now that adds anything to it, so I invite you to take your seat, because the house lights have come down, and we have to begin, if we are going to get to the End of Play.

You’re going to love this, I promise.

As always:

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Thanks, everyone. I’m so glad you’re here, and so grateful that you’re part of this.