2026 Update: Julia

0:06Pushkin.

0:11Hi. Hello. We're back again in the studio. Yes, and in your earbuds. Yep. And who do we have on the docket today? This one, her name's Julia. Okay, this episode is the first one that I ever did with a stranger. Yeah. Like someone that wasn't a friend or a family, and it was a little scary. It was a little intimidating. um julia is a journalist and i needed to like step up um it's a great episode partly because of julia kept me on the straight and narrow yeah no i was gonna say it's great not because of us but because of julia and spoiler alert another woman we talked to uh if you stick around at the end of the episode i talk again with julia and uh what was really very gratifying to me was how the episode really did have an important impact on her life.

1:02All right. Well, I'm looking forward to listening to this one again. Yes. Let's both sit down. I'm already seated. And silence. All right. Do you have any snacks? No, I can't eat a snack silently. It was a trick question. Oh, did I pass? Yes, you did. Thank God. All right. And here we go. Oh, but first, we're going to pay those bills. Going to pay my automobiles. With a word from our sponsor.

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3:15Hello? Happy birthday, birthday girl. Well, are you going out for dinner tonight with Rick or anything? It's not my birthday for another seven months.

3:26Hang on a second. Hang on. I'm hanging. I'm hanging. I'm in traffic, so it's perfect for you. According to my calendar alert, it is your birthday. It's not my birthday. Are you sure? You're 100 % sure. I don't know how many times I'm going to say it's not my birthday and how many times you're going to repeat that it is my birthday. This year you forgot to call me on my birthday. Not even an email. Nothing. Okay. Okay, what about that time you got me an ice cream cake for my birthday, knowing I'm lactose sensitive? Do you remember? The man at the roller rink kept on knocking on the bathroom door.

4:12Oh, that's great. Are you kidding me?

4:20From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Julia.

4:39Julia is a journalist, and she's endlessly curious about the world around her. Once, on assignment for the New York Times, she investigated the benefits of bacteria, and as a part of her research, she didn't bathe for a month. She's done political stories, too, where she's kept after a source or a story for years. Which is what makes her reluctance to seek out the answer to a question that's been dogging her for over two decades all the more curious. I think the story begins on a Monday. I'm pretty sure it's a Monday. And I was 14 years old. This is Julia. And the question she can't stop thinking about revolves around a moment from her own life.

5:22It all began 21 years ago, in the eighth grade, at one of the fanciest all-girl schools in Montreal. I remember wearing my itchy green kilt. You have to wear a uniform there. Yes. Okay. It's sort of a puke green uniform with a button-down white shirt, and on Mondays we had to wear ties. We also had bloomers. I don't think I ever understood what bloomers were. It was just sort of like a balloon with holes in the bottom. And were they ruffled? No. Cursed with a lifelong inability to distinguish between bloomers, culotes, pantalettes, pantaloons, drawers, and even knickerbockers, I was glad for the opportunity to finally sort it all out.

6:09The shape of it. But that's not why we're here. So after about 15 minutes of inquiry, I was ready to move on. Okay, sorry, yes, go on. As I left morning assembly on Monday and walked into homeroom, I looked for my desk, and I stopped and looked around, and it was missing. My desk was gone. And that was where it started.

6:47The desk had been hidden by her classmates, and that was just the beginning. Without warning, the girl she'd been friends with since third grade completely froze her out, and Julia had no clue why. To top it off, her best friend was the ringleader. The girl who used to be my best friend, I guess we can give her a name, let's call her Jane. It was just strange knowing that she and I had hung out at my house and all of the secrets we exchanged and all of the fun we'd had. And then, you know, seeing how she was being now, it just, it was a bit surreal, but yeah.

7:34Then what started happening was every time she walked into the classroom, Julia noticed that the girls would drop what they were doing and study her. If she so much as scratched her nose or sniffled, they'd furiously take notes. It seemed like everyone was collaborating on some big project that she knew nothing about. The notes were collected by Jane, who buried them in her desk. The girls kept at it, day after day, until finally, Julia reached her breaking point. She gathered up her courage, and, like the good reporters she'd eventually become, decided to investigate. I eventually snuck into homeroom one day during recess.

8:16It was empty, and I searched Jane's desk. And there at the bottom, I found a nicely bound document with a cover page. And I picked it up and read it, and it said, 100 Reasons Why We Hate Julia. In my memory, this document I'm holding is 100 pages long, but I'm sure it was only 10. And I opened it, and inside I read about myself. Everything was something about me that they hated. I hate the way she walks. I hate the sound of her voice. I hate her face.

9:13After that, Julia started skipping school. Eventually, she told her parents what was going on, and they contacted the administration, but the bullying continued. Ultimately, her parents decided that the only solution was to send her to a new school, but Julia still had a few weeks left at the old one. I became a double agent. I pretended that I was coming back the following year and I didn't tell anyone I was changing schools because I had no friends left to tell. The school year ended and her new life began. But because her new school was so close to the old one, Julia lived in constant fear that her old life would find her.

9:57Every day, she'd map her route to and from school, carefully avoiding the streets her old friends lived on, the coffee shops they hung out at. And for the most part, it worked. For those first few weeks at her new school, she managed to hide in plain sight. She was starting to feel like things would be okay. But then, one day after school, Julia was upstairs in the den doing homework, and the doorbell rang. She went to her parents' bedroom window and looked down at the doorstep and saw standing there her former best friend Jane, along with a few of her old classmates. I hit the ground as if someone was shelling the second floor windows.

10:38I was in a state of total panic, and I saw them in my mind's eye there on the front steps, waiting for someone to answer the door. And I was just on the ground trying to breathe, and they rang the doorbell again. And I waited.

11:05Eventually, they left. And this is the moment that Julia has fixated on for over 20 years. Why had the girls shown up at her door? And what did they want? Maybe they'd shown up to bully her, but maybe they'd had a change of heart, realized how mean they'd been, and were there to apologize. Whatever the case, Julia was too scared to open the door and find out. And that decision, to not go downstairs and face the girls who tormented her, still haunts Julia. Even listening to her talk about it all these years later, it still feels raw. I'm 35 now, and that day has become one of my only regrets.

11:52Because the memory of my weakness sometimes supersedes all of the strong things I've done since then. And it makes me feel weak. even though you were you were just a child i was 14 i think it's the memory of that fear still somewhere in my physiology it it makes me fearful when i think of it i just wish i'd gone down there i wish i'd had the guts

12:31what do you think has stopped you up until now from just posing the question you know like just finding the girls and and just asking them why they were there that day i'm afraid to find out what I did to bring on the bullying because it's very possible that I was bad.

12:58I think deep down I don't really know what was wrong. I don't know what was wrong with me and I don't want to know what was wrong with me. I mean, it feels like you're being really hard on yourself or being hard on this little kid, basically. You know, like, do you look at photographs of yourself at that age? Uh, I try not to. Well, I think you'd be surprised by like, I mean, I have memories of being that age where I thought like I was at weddings and I thought I was like flirting with adult women and stuff like that. And I look at pictures of myself and I look like a Cabbage Patch doll, you know?

13:36I think I probably looked like the Tin Man because I had a full set of braces. and then after I graduated from my braces, I immediately went to headgear-neckgear combo. I don't know if you've ever had that, but... I've only seen them on TV sitcoms. So combine that with my glasses. It was a sad state of affairs. As soon as she graduated high school, Julia left Montreal for good. Depending on the outcome of that conversation, I might have chosen not to leave Montreal. when I'm in Montreal once a year I avoid the neighborhood I grew up in where all this went down for the most part and those girls are long gone I mean we're all grown-ass women now with careers and jobs and kids and here I am avoiding friends of friends on Facebook because I don't want any of those girls to know what's going on with my life do you do you feel like had you answered the door and they had apologized to you, that that would have changed your life in some way?

14:43That it would have changed your relationship with your past and the city and these friends? I think it might have, but I'll never know what they wanted to say to me because I didn't answer the door. It's scary to return to the moment you've spent your whole life running from. So when I gently suggest that she try to find out why they were at the door that day, Julia suggests that maybe the past should just stay in the past. You know, we move on with our lives and we, you know, we move on. And it's another thing to open up, you know, that Pandora's box again. Even the language that you're using about fear of opening up that Pandora's box, It is so similar to the language that you used in describing, like, fear of opening that door.

15:39So what you're saying is I should really just finish the job? I think so.

15:53After the break, opening Pandora's box.

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18:05In spite of her initial trepidation, once Julia decided to find out why the girls came to her door that day, she was all in. Watching her take it on was impressive. Julia went back to Montreal and reached out to her former best friend Jane, who agreed to meet with her, but said she didn't remember anything. And so, for the first time since 8th grade, Julia returned to her former school to go through the yearbook and find the names of her old classmates. And then she started searching. I reached out to probably 12 girls from my grade. And in my worst moments, I imagined that none of them were going to write back and it was sort of going to feel like, you know, I was on the outside of the group again, you know.

18:58And that the social dynamics I remembered from the eighth grade were still in play and all that. But then the responses started to trickle in.

19:07Hello? Hello? Hello? Yes. This is Julia. Julia logged hours and hours of interviews. And rang my doorbell. I thought you might have been one of them. I don't think so. Do you remember anything about that? Was I there? No. Oh boy, I don't remember much about high school to be honest. I remember one time you were hiding in a bathroom stall. But just like Jane, not a single person said they could remember showing up at her door that day. Well, I honestly don't remember doing that. I don't. I don't. I don't. I'm sorry. I don't. I don't remember anything. I just don't remember it. I promise you I have no recollection of this.

19:46I'm sorry. Sorry. But what each of them did remember was their own pain. There'd been a lot of bullying that year, and no one felt safe. Julia heard about one girl who'd found her desk filled with meticulously cut-out images from porn magazines. Another girl remembered someone spreading rumors that she had AIDS. I hated that place, said one. It's all a big fog of chaos, said another. A dark cloud over the class. You never knew who you could trust. We were awful, awful little girls. The more Julia heard about it, it started to sound like a Stephen King novel, and not one of those cutesy ones about clowns or talking cars.

20:32In almost every conversation, one name kept coming up as the person who had it the worst. Even Julia acknowledged it. The name was Sarah Taba. Sarah had the misfortune of being the only eighth grader who was slightly overweight, and as such, she was always kept at a distance. In high school, I was also someone who existed on the margins, so I understand how oftentimes kids like me, kids like Sarah Taba, become the eyes and ears of the school, fidgety, uncomfortable witnesses, forced to watch from the wings. I'm reminded of this all the time with the friends I went to high school with who were more popular than me.

21:11Remember the time Robert Siolick wore a three-piece suit to school, I ask? the time Madame Robert slammed the classroom door so hard the clock fell off the wall? The day Sharon Wiener got suspended for leaving the schoolyard during recess? Of course they don't. They were living their lives. But I was on the sidelines, taking it all in, remembering.

21:37Hello? Hi, Sarah. Hi. It's been a really long time. Yeah, it has. Yes, it has. Having all these conversations made Julia think about Sarah and what she might remember. But when she asked her if she had any recollection about the day those girls showed up at her door, Sarah couldn't remember anything. The first thing I thought of when you said a group of girls riding the doorbell, I immediately thought it would be a bad experience. It wasn't people coming looking for you to be like, we miss you, where are you? Yeah. Grade 8 was a bad year at that school. Either you were being bullied and picked on or you had to turn around and become the bully.

22:24Yeah, something toxic, something dark. I think normal bullying, if there's such a thing as normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim. But it was just so pervasive. Do you remember the day that you realized that I was gone? I don't actually, no. I remember feeling like you were just sad all the time. I remember you being sad too. Yeah. One thing I remember, people would call you Tubby Taba. Doesn't surprise me, yeah. I remember a lot of stuff like that.

23:16I can't help but think that our grades' behavior had impacts on the staff. What do you mean?

23:29Well, I'm assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn't, but Miss McDonald killed herself the following year.