The Ghost Town Where I Held My Breath: The Strange Second Life of Times Beach

Once a riverside getaway along the Meramec River, Times Beach, Missouri, became one of America’s most infamous ghost towns after dioxin contamination forced the evacuation of its entire population. This is the story of what happened to the town that disappeared.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Every summer, my Aunt Stacy would take me to Six Flags in Eureka, Missouri. We’d leave Glendale, Missouri, and head west on Interstate 44, and somewhere along the way, before the rides and the funnel cakes, we’d pass a town where no one lived.

Stacy was only twelve years older than I was, so she always felt more like a big sister than an aunt. Picture 1980s wall bangs, scrunched socks, and a closet full of Hypercolor and Michael Jackson T-shirts. She was also a jokester.

Every time we passed the old houses of Times Beach, Missouri, Stacy told me to hold my breath.

There was something in the ground there, she’d say. A chemical. Bad enough that everyone had been forced out.

So I would hold my breath, cheeks puffed, watching the town slide by through the glass.

From the highway, the place looked frozen. Houses sagged under vines and overgrowth. Weeds broke through the streets. Nothing moved. It was a whole town abandoned to something I couldn’t see, and that was somehow worse than if I could. I had no idea what dioxin was or how a chemical could empty an entire town of every last person. I only knew the rule: when we reached Times Beach, you held your breath until you were safely past it.

I assume Stacy’s warning was mostly a joke, her way of leaning into the lore that had already grown up around the place in St. Louis. But to a kid in the backseat, Times Beach held a real and peculiar mystery. A ghost town beside the interstate, poisoned by something invisible, glimpsed for a few seconds through a car window on the way to roller coasters.

I didn’t know then that decades later, I’d go back on foot nearly every week.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized the trail I now walk regularly isn’t simply near the old town of Times Beach.

It is Times Beach.

The roads I had imagined buried beneath decades of history were still there beneath my feet. The woods I walked beside had once been backyards. The quiet stretches of pavement that seemed to lead nowhere had once led people home.

A $67.50 Dream on the Meramec: How Times Beach Began

The story starts with a newspaper subscription. In 1925, the St. Louis Star-Times ran a promotion: buy a six-month subscription for $67.50, and the paper would throw in a small lot of land along the Meramec River as a bonus. It worked. Families snapped up the riverside lots and built simple summer cabins, coming from St. Louis to swim in the Meramec, escape the summer heat, and spend weekends along the river. The community that sprang up took the paper’s name: Times Beach.

The St Louis Times advertisement, which gave away Summer home sites in Times Beach with a six-month subscription.

What began as a newspaper promotion gradually became a real community. Seasonal cabins gave way to year-round homes, and by the early 1980s, more than two thousand people lived there. There were neighbors and businesses, children and families, and streets whose names would survive long after the houses disappeared.

One problem never went away: the roads were dirt, and they were dusty.

The Dioxin Disaster That Emptied Times Beach

In 1971, the town hired a waste hauler named Russell Bliss to spray its dirt roads with used oil to keep the dust down. The city kept him under contract from 1972 to 1976. What residents didn’t know was that Bliss had also been paid to dispose of chemical waste from the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company in Verona, Missouri, a byproduct of the plant’s production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. He mixed that waste into the oil, then sprayed it on roads across the state, including in Times Beach.

The effects showed up elsewhere first. At Shenandoah Stables, more than 40 horses died after exposure to Bliss’s oil, and birds, cats, and dogs turned up dead near the arena. Investigators traced the contamination back to Bliss by 1974, but nobody yet understood how far it had spread or that a whole town had been living on top of it for years.

Swimmers stand in the Meramec River at Times Beach Resort in the 1920s.

That changed in December 1982. The Meramec River flooded, and by the time the waters receded, EPA testing had found dioxin concentrations as high as 0.3 parts per million along the town’s entire road network. On December 23, the CDC and the Missouri Department of Health told residents the contamination made the town uninhabitable, with soil readings around 100 parts per billion, roughly 100 times the level the EPA then considered toxic.

It was two days before Christmas.

Follow-up testing by the EPA found levels 300 times the CDC’s safety threshold.

Two months later, on February 22, 1983, EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford announced that the federal government would buy out the entire town. The buyout covered 800 residential properties and 30 businesses at an estimated cost of $36.7 million, with the federal government contributing $33 million and the state covering the rest. At the time, the government wasn’t just cleaning up a dump site. It was purchasing an entire American town and closing it for good.

What Happened After Everyone Left

For years afterward, Times Beach sat frozen behind a fence: empty houses, overgrown lawns, streets with nowhere to go. This was the Times Beach of my childhood, the one I watched through the car window with my cheeks puffed and my breath held.

Then the EPA got to work on one of the largest dioxin remediation projects in the country’s history. An incinerator was built on-site, and over the course of the cleanup, it treated a total of 265,354 tons of dioxin-contaminated material, drawn not only from Times Beach but from 27 other eastern Missouri dioxin sites. The incinerator was dismantled once the work was finished, and the land was handed over to the State of Missouri in 1997.

An aerial view of Times Beach, Missouri, before the town disappeared, showing the grid of residential streets that still winds through what is now Route 66 State Park. The Meramec River borders the townsite to the north. Photo credit: St. Louis Times, via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Rather than sell the cleared land for development, Missouri turned it into a park. In October 1999, the former townsite reopened as Route 66 State Park. Two years later, in 2001, the EPA formally removed Times Beach from the Superfund National Priorities List.

Walking Through a Ghost Town at Route 66 State Park

This is what makes the site so interesting to visit today. You’re not walking through a generic state park; you’re walking through the actual streets of Times Beach.

The roads don’t feel like trails because they aren’t. They curve through the trees at the width of neighborhood streets, sometimes meeting at intersections where people once turned toward houses, businesses, and neighbors. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might never wonder why.

The Outer Loop Trail follows the former Times Beach streets of Riverside, Lincoln, and Blakey, and a portion of the trail near the main parking area sits on the historic Route 66 alignment itself.

Following the Inner Loop Trail from the trailhead, hikers pass a small wetland and then reach the Town Mound, where the physical remains of Times Beach’s demolished structures are buried. There is nothing ominous about it. Grass grows over the gentle slope, and without the sign explaining what lies beneath it, a visitor could walk past without giving it much thought. It’s a quietly strange landmark: a green hill that functions, in effect, as the town’s grave marker.

Fields of wild grass and brush now grow where evacuated residents’ homes once stood, and deserted streets still line the park, hinting at the community that used to be here. The park also supports more than 175 recorded bird species and forests of oak, hickory, river birch, cottonwood, and pine, home to deer and wild turkeys.

Across the Meramec River, the visitor center has its own connection to the vanished town. Built in 1935 along the original Route 66, the roadside restaurant first opened as the Bridgehead Inn, serving travelers crossing the river and passing through Times Beach. Over the decades, it became Steiny’s Inn in 1946, returned to the Bridgehead Inn name in 1972, and became the Galley West in 1980. Today, the same building serves as the Route 66 State Park Visitor Center, where exhibits preserve the history of both the Mother Road and the town that once stood across the river.

It’s also worth knowing that the EPA came back to check its work. In 2012, testing at the site concluded that soil samples from Route 66 State Park showed no significant health risks for park visitors or workers.

The cleanup held up.

Planning Your Visit to Route 66 State Park

One quirk of the park’s layout is worth knowing before you go. The main park grounds are accessible only from eastbound Interstate 44 at Exit 265, while the visitor center is reached from either direction at Exit 266. The two are separated by the Meramec River because the old Route 66 bridge that once connected them has been closed due to safety concerns. Plan on picking one side or building in a short drive between the two.

Trails and picnic areas (the former townsite): Reached from eastbound I-44 at Exit 265.

Visitor center (Route 66 and Times Beach exhibits, in the former Bridgehead Inn): Reached from either direction at I-44 Exit 266.

Hours: The park grounds are open daily from 7 a.m. to a half hour past sunset year-round. The visitor center is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily from March through October. It is generally closed from November through February, except during the second week of December for holiday shopping. Check current hours before visiting if the exhibits are your main goal.

Cost: Free to enter.

The old Route 66 bridge: Plans have been developed to rehabilitate the historic bridge for pedestrian and bicycle use, which would eventually reconnect the visitor center with the main park grounds.

What to bring: A bike or comfortable walking shoes. Many of the trails follow the old Times Beach roads and use paved or crushed-gravel surfaces, making much of the park accessible for casual walking and biking.

It’s an unusual kind of place. A state park whose origin story is a Superfund site isn’t something you find often, and that’s exactly what makes it worth the drive. Most parks show you nature. Times Beach shows you nature reclaiming something, one paved-over street at a time.

And the town I once held my breath to pass has become one of the places I go to breathe.

A former Times Beach street now serves as a trail through Route 66 State Park in Missouri, where nature has reclaimed the site of the abandoned town.
Fields and wetlands now cover parts of the former Times Beach townsite, where more than two thousand people once lived. Photo by Jill Szoo Wilson.
From the River Bench Series: A quiet place along the Meramec River at Route 66 State Park, on the former townsite of Times Beach. Photo by Jill Szoo Wilson.

References

AllTrails. (n.d.). Best hikes and trails in Route 66 State Park. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from https://www.alltrails.com/parks/us/missouri/route-66-state-park

EBSCO Research Starters. (n.d.). Evacuation of Times Beach, Missouri. Retrieved July 3, 2026, from https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/evacuation-times-beach-missouri

Missouri Department of Natural Resources. (2024, June 28). Times Beach dioxin contamination (Publication No. PUB2960). https://dnr.mo.gov/print/document-search/pub2960

Missouri State Parks. (n.d.). General information: Route 66 State Park. Retrieved July 3, 2026, from https://mostateparks.com/page/54997/general-information

O’Neil, T. (2010, December 5). A look back: Times Beach disappeared after 1982 flood. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Powell, W. (2012, December 3). Remember Times Beach: The dioxin disaster, 30 years later. St. Louis Magazine.

Route 66 State Park. (n.d.). Times Beach. theroute-66.com. Retrieved July 10, 2026, from https://www.theroute-66.com/times-beach.html

U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library. (n.d.). Description of Times Beach, Missouri, and the Times Beach Dioxin Research Facility [Special Collections exhibit]. Retrieved July 3, 2026, from https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/speccoll/items/show/3712

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2025, December 11). A town, a flood, and Superfund: Looking back at the Times Beach disaster nearly 40 years later. https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back-times-beach-disaster-nearly-40-years-later

Wills, L. (n.d.). Times Beach, Missouri, evacuated due to contamination with dioxin. Environment & Society Portal, Rachel Carson Center. Retrieved July 8, 2026, from https://www.environmentandsociety.org/tools/keywords/times-beach-missouri-evacuated-due-contamination-dioxin

The One Thread Underneath It All: Vocation and the Unfinished Life

On uncertainty, giftedness, and trusting what you cannot yet see

Part 7 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)
Teaching the Pause (Part 4)
What to Do When the Room Is Empty (Part 5)
Everyone Else’s Straight Line (Part 6)

By Jill Szoo Wilson

This is the last piece in this series, and I want to use it differently than the others, less to teach one more idea and more to say plainly what all of it was actually about.

Every piece so far has approached the same underlying question from a different angle. A student choosing a major worries mostly about being behind. Someone starting over in midlife faces something more urgent and more practical. A generation raised with too little practice tolerating ambiguity turns that same uncertainty into something closer to anxiety, a stalled feeling that gets mistaken for a verdict on an entire life. Whether calm company happens to be close by or absent, the uncertainty still has to be lived through somehow, hour by hour. And a feed full of other people’s arrivals adds a distortion of its own, a comparison built from an unfair sample that makes an ordinary winding path look like a personal failure.

If there is one thread holding all of it together, it is this: the discomfort of an unclear direction gets treated, almost by default, as evidence that something has gone wrong. Nearly everything in this series has tried to loosen that default a little. Uncertainty itself turns out to be raw material rather than a problem, the stuff a life actually gets built from, visible or invisible to the people around you.

I have spent enough years in classrooms, and enough years outside them, to know that very few lives make sense while they are being lived forward. The coherence usually comes later. A class taken almost at random becomes useful ten years afterward, or a job that felt like a detour turns out to have taught exactly what the next one required. Even a door closing can end up looking, in hindsight, less like an interruption and more like part of the architecture.

This is a narrower claim than it might sound, closer to an observation about timing than a promise about outcomes. Some disappointments stay disappointments. What tends to hold true, more reliably, is that a path is hardest to judge accurately from inside the middle of it.

Understanding what is happening, at best, changes the story a person tells about what the feeling means, rather than erasing the feeling itself. A winding path stops reading as a verdict and starts reading as simply what building something honest tends to look like from the inside, while it is still happening. The discomfort does the same work either way. What changes is whether a person spends that discomfort fighting the path or actually walking it.

There is another way to hold all of this, one I have saved until now. Scripture gives us a larger frame for this process in sanctification, the lifelong shaping of a person into the likeness of Christ, proceeding on a timetable entirely its own. Philippians tells us that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion, and that promise covers the years you can only see in part from where you stand. He placed the gifts in you to begin with, and He keeps using them, patiently, across every season that still looks unfinished from the inside.

A life held this way asks something different of you than gripping the plot yourself. Proverbs says a person’s heart plans the course, but the Lord establishes the steps, and there is real relief in that division of labor. You are responsible for showing up inside the part you can actually see. He is responsible for everything else, including the years that are still bewildering to you.

That shift changes the posture more than it changes the facts. A person still faces the same unclear stretch, whether that means a job still unresolved or a major still undeclared. But there is a real difference between gripping a path as though the whole plot depends on you, and walking one you have been invited into by the God who authored it from the start. The first stays exhausting by nature. The second, even on hard days, can feel closer to an adventure than an ordeal. Not because every turn will make sense, or every loss will become visibly useful, but because the promise of Romans reaches even here: God is at work in all things for the good of those who love Him.

That reframe is the real hope this series has been circling toward, small enough to hold in one hand and sturdy enough to lean on for years. The conversation between your gifts is still happening, quietly, on a schedule that answered to Him long before it answered to you. The only real job left is staying in the room long enough to hear it.

He knows what He put there.

Everyone Else’s Straight Line

How social comparison turns an ordinary winding path into a private verdict

Part 6 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)
Teaching the Pause (Part 4)
What to Do When the Room Is Empty (Part 5)

By Jill Szoo Wilson

It is eleven at night, and you are scrolling through your phone before bed, not really looking for anything, when a former classmate’s post appears: a promotion, a new title, a photograph in front of an unfamiliar building. Something tightens in your chest before you’ve even finished reading the caption. You close the app a minute later, and the feeling stays.

This moment is common enough that it barely needs describing, yet it is worth pausing on, because the feeling it produces gets treated, almost universally, as a personal failing. Something wrong with your ambition, your gratitude, your capacity to be happy for someone else. The truth is closer to something structural, a mechanism with a name and a fairly long research history behind it.

In 1954, the psychologist Leon Festinger proposed an idea that still anchors most research on this topic: people evaluate their own abilities and situations by comparing themselves to others, and they lean on this comparison hardest exactly when an objective measure is missing. If you want to know how fast you can run a mile, a stopwatch settles the question instantly. Whether your career is going well is a much fuzzier kind of measurement, and the mind fills that gap with the nearest substitute it can find: other people, and whatever version of them happens to be visible.

Festinger’s original theory also distinguished between two directions this comparison can run. Looking at someone doing worse, a downward comparison, tends to bring temporary relief. Looking at someone doing better, an upward comparison, tends to sting, though it can also motivate, depending on how attainable the gap feels. The internet, it turns out, skews the sample heavily in one direction. It is built, by the incentives of what gets shared, to run almost entirely upward.

Here is the part worth slowing down on, because it explains more than the feeling itself. A person who gets promoted posts about it. A person stuck eight months into a discouraging job search rarely does. A person who finally resolves a two-year stretch of uncertainty might write a single line about it after the fact, once it has turned into a good story. The eight months themselves rarely make it online, since there is little to announce yet, little that reads as an update. What this means is that the sample of career news arriving in your feed every day skews heavily away from how careers actually go, filtered down to the good news, submitted voluntarily by the very people experiencing it.

Researchers have measured the downstream effect of exactly this kind of filtered exposure. A 2017 study by Pisarik and colleagues found that college students who used social media to track how their peers’ careers were unfolding reported measurably higher anxiety as a direct result, anxiety specifically about their own trajectory rather than general worry. A separate study by Haferkamp and Krämer found something even more precise: after viewing a stream of unusually successful career profiles, people perceived a wider gap between where they actually stood and where they wanted to be, compared to people who viewed a more ordinary stream. The comparison itself, in other words, moved the goalposts. It did more than make people feel bad. It temporarily changed their own assessment of how far they had left to go.

A natural question follows: does this fade once a person has some career under their belt, once the twenty-two year old anxiety about a first job gives way to actual experience? A 2021 study tracking Japanese employees over the course of a week suggests otherwise. Simply viewing a colleague’s positive career post, tracked day by day, was enough to trigger measurable frustration through the same comparison mechanism, in employees well past the entry-level stage this series has mostly focused on so far. Seniority, it turns out, changes very little about how this particular mechanism operates.

This is the same distortion the rest of this series has been trying to correct, arriving through a slightly different channel. What appears in a feed is nearly always the arrival, rarely the walk. A single, polished result stands in for years of interior weather that the same person, in a private conversation, would likely describe very differently. Reading a stream of arrivals, one after another, quietly rebuilds the myth this series opened by naming: the idea that other people’s lives move directly and cleanly toward a single, discoverable destination, while yours, uniquely, keeps wandering.

The same 2021 research contains a finding worth sitting with because it explains its own mechanism rather than simply reporting an outcome. Ordinary daily interaction with other people, in person rather than through a feed, measurably reduced the career frustration that online comparison produced. The likely reason becomes clear once you consider what a feed filters out that a real conversation keeps in. A friend describing her week naturally includes the slow Tuesday, the argument with a coworker, and the job application still sitting unanswered. In person, you get the fuller sample. Online, you only ever get the highlight.

This looks less like a coincidence and more like a natural correction. In-person contact restores something the feed removes by design: the boring, unfinished, in-between material that makes up most of an actual life. That material is unglamorous, but it is also the only honest baseline for comparison, since it is the only version of other people’s lives that resembles the version you are living yourself, mostly ordinary and rarely photographed.

The point here is smaller than an argument against feeds or against celebrating other people’s genuine successes. It is simply that the comparison itself deserves a little more scrutiny before it gets treated as evidence about your own life. A feed shows arrivals. The walk stays mostly off-screen. And the walk, uneven and largely unposted, is where the actual conversation between a person’s gifts has been happening the entire time.

Further reading: Leon Festinger’s original 1954 paper, A Theory of Social Comparison Processes, introduces the underlying concept. The 2021 study on career frustration and companionship, published in Frontiers in Psychology, covers the comparison and buffering research in full.

What to Do When the Room Is Empty

A few things that help when you’re sitting with uncertainty alone.

Part 5 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)
Teaching the Pause (Part 4)

By Jill Szoo Wilson

The previous piece in this series was written for the person standing alongside someone caught in an unclear season, a friend or a mentor whose calm presence can make uncertainty easier to bear. This piece is for the person actually living inside that season, in the hours when the people who could help happen to be elsewhere. Even with good people in your life, much of that season still gets lived alone, thought through in silence long before it ever becomes a conversation.

The research in the last piece, on intolerance of uncertainty and co-regulation, assumes a second person is present, someone whose own calm can be borrowed for a while. Alone, the same nervous system still reacts to ambiguity as though it were a threat, except now only one person occupies the room, playing both parts: the one who feels the alarm, and the one who has to answer it.

Learning to play that second part starts with a distinction worth making early. What you feel, and what you have quietly decided that feeling means, are not the same thing, even though they arrive together and feel fused.

One thing that helps is writing the distinction down instead of carrying the whole conversation in your head. Psychologist James Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing found that putting a stressful experience into words, even briefly and only for yourself, loosens its grip in a way that simply turning it over in your mind rarely manages.

Try writing two short lines. In the first, put the feeling exactly as it arrives, something like I feel behind, or I feel lost. In the second, put the verdict your mind has quietly attached to it, something like I am behind everyone else, or I have ruined my chances.

Seeing the two side by side, in your own handwriting, tends to reveal something surprisingly hard to catch while a worry is still circling in your head: a feeling and a conclusion are different things. I feel lost describes what’s happening in this moment. I have ruined my chances makes a claim about your entire life. The first is likely true. The second demands proof it rarely has.

Writing both sentences down opens a better question: what do I actually know? Maybe you know that the career you once planned has stopped appealing to you, that several job applications went unanswered, or that everyone around you seems to have a clearer sense of direction. Those facts can be hard to sit with. They still say something far more specific than I have ruined my life. Once you separate the facts from the verdict, you have something you can actually think about.

Psychologist Ethan Kross offers a second way to create this kind of distance. His research on self-distancing suggests that people often give themselves better advice when they address themselves by name, or as you, rather than as I. Try asking yourself what you would say to a friend who came to you with the same history and the same fears.

The point of the exercise is simple. We often speak to other people with more perspective than we bring to our own problems. If a friend told you at thirty-five that she had ruined her life because she wanted to change careers, you would probably spot possibilities she missed entirely. You might remind her of what she has learned and how many years she still has ahead of her. Asking what you would say to that friend gives you some of the perspective that’s hard to reach while you’re standing inside your own uncertainty.

A clearer perspective, of course, has limits. The same worry can return within the hour. This is where a third practice helps. Cognitive behavioral therapy often uses a technique built around setting aside a specific time to think through the questions that keep circling. Fifteen minutes in the evening is often enough. During that window, write down whatever has been following you through the day and let yourself think about it fully.

Then, when one of those worries resurfaces at ten in the morning or three in the afternoon, jot it down and remind yourself that you’ve already set aside a time to think it through. You are giving the question your attention on a schedule you chose rather than letting it claim the entire day. Over time, this tends to loosen the habit of turning the same problem over and over again every time it appears.

Together, these practices work on different layers of the same experience. Writing separates the feeling from the conclusion you’ve attached to it, and that alone tends to loosen the sense that the conclusion is settled fact. Speaking to yourself the way you would speak to a friend adds back some perspective you lose at this range. What’s left is the tendency for the same worry to circle back on its own schedule, and that’s exactly what the fifteen-minute window is there to catch.

These practices matter because you carry so much uncertainty in private. Even someone with loving friends and generous mentors will still spend hours alone with the decisions that shape a life. The question follows you home. It shows up in the car or in the middle of the night when sleep is slow to come. You’re the only witness to most of those moments.

This is where the question of vocation comes back around. An unclear season can feel like a season where the calendar has simply stalled, especially while you’re waiting on a job or reconsidering a path entirely. Yet the experience you’re having during that time is still giving you information. You’re learning what kind of work holds your attention, and which abilities keep showing up in more than one part of your life.

The gifts we keep returning to in this series are still engaged in their conversation, even when you’re the only one in the room to hear it. Uncertainty can get loud enough to drown out everything else, but these practices help turn the volume down enough to listen again.

Sometimes that is the entire work of an unclear season: staying present long enough to notice what your own life is already trying to teach you.

Further reading: James Pennebaker’s Opening Up by Writing It Down covers the expressive writing research in full. Ethan Kross’s Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It lays out the self-distancing work in more depth. The worry postponement technique traces back to Thomas Borkovec’s early work on generalized anxiety treatment in the 1980s.

Teaching the Pause

A few things that actually help, backed by research on calm and uncertainty.

Part 4 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)

By Jill Szoo Wilson

The last piece in this series ended on a claim I left mostly unexplained: that guiding someone through an unclear stretch of life now requires something closer to emotional training than career advice. I want to spend this piece making that claim useful for the parents, teachers, and mentors who are doing this work every day, often figuring out how to do it as they go.

Start with what tends to fall flat, because I have tried most of it myself. Reassurance rarely lands the way it is meant to. Telling an anxious nineteen-year-old that everything will work out treats the anxiety as though it were a factual error, something a better set of facts can correct. It rarely does. The anxiety runs deeper than facts. It is about a felt sense that ambiguity itself is dangerous, a feeling that stays in place even when the promised outcomes sound reasonable.

Psychologists have a name for this pattern: intolerance of uncertainty, a well-studied tendency in which ambiguous situations register as threats independent of the actual odds involved. For many young adults, the uncertainty itself becomes the problem.

What helps, in my experience, is creating a room that can hold the discomfort without rushing to resolve it. A student who struggles to sit with an undecided major benefits less from my certainty than from watching me stay calm inside their uncertainty. If I become anxious on their behalf, echoing their fear back to them with a more sophisticated vocabulary, I confirm the thing they already suspected: that this feeling means something has gone wrong. If I stay steady instead, genuinely steady, something quieter happens. They borrow the steadiness for a while, the way a person learns to float by holding onto someone who already knows how.

This lines up with what researchers call co-regulation. Classroom studies have found that when a teacher’s own nervous system stays steady, students recover from stress and refocus more quickly than when that same teacher tries to talk them out of the feeling directly.

There is a specific move worth naming here, one I picked up from watching good therapists and later noticed in good mentors as well: separating the feeling from the verdict. A student says, “I feel completely lost about my life,” and the instinct, mine included, is to solve that sentence, to supply a plan. A better response treats the sentence as two claims stacked on top of each other. One claim is emotional: this uncertainty feels bad right now. The other is factual: a direction is still pending. The first claim deserves acknowledgment. The second deserves patience, more than a plan produced on the spot to make the first one go away.

Practically, this means resisting the urge to fill silence with direction. When a young person describes a shift—a major they are leaving or a job they once described with real conviction—the tempting response is to immediately help them build the next plan. A slower response works better: ask what they discovered in the thing they are leaving, and what first drew them toward whatever comes next. The value lies in the act of noticing itself, done out loud with someone who stays calm. That noticing teaches a skill more valuable than any single answer. It teaches that a life can be examined on its own terms, apart from any verdict about whether it is broken.

It also means saying, plainly and often, that a winding path is simply evidence of a life still being built. On the page, the idea seems straightforward. Said directly to a specific, worried person, it rarely feels obvious to them, and it is worth saying more than once, in more than one way, because the first time usually only partly lands.

This work runs alongside the practical work of building a life: the interviews, the applications, the decisions that eventually have to be made. But the emotional groundwork tends to come first, whether we plan for it or leave it to chance. A person who has learned to tolerate an unclear season tends to use career advice well. Someone still bracing against that season, though, has trouble hearing the advice at all, however good it is, because the fear fills too much of the room.

This is, in the end, the same conversation the rest of this series has been circling. Gifts only get the chance to talk to each other, revealing the pattern they were quietly building all along, once the person carrying them survives the stretch that feels, for a while, like an empty room.

Our job, the ones standing nearby, is beautifully modest. We are there to help someone stay in the room long enough to hear their calling arrive on its own.

The Map and the Compass

Why uncertainty has become so frightening to a generation searching for a vocation.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Part 3 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)

Every semester, I meet students who believe there is a correct answer to a question that has no answer key. They worry that choosing the wrong major, accepting the wrong internship, or moving to the wrong city will permanently derail the life they were meant to live. They are not simply hoping to make a wise decision. They are hoping to eliminate uncertainty altogether.

In the earlier essays in this series, I argued that this anxiety reflects a misunderstanding of vocation. We have inherited the modern assumption that meaningful lives emerge from identifying one ideal career, fully formed and waiting to be discovered. Increasingly, however, I have come to think something deeper is also at work. Long before these students ever chose a major, many were growing up in environments that gave them fewer opportunities to practice uncertainty itself.

Jonathan Haidt’s research offers a helpful framework. In The Anxious Generation, he argues that childhood shifted dramatically during the early 2010s as unsupervised play gave way to smartphones and constant adult oversight. The result was not simply more screen time. There were fewer opportunities to negotiate conflict, tolerate boredom, solve problems independently, and recover from ordinary failure. Childhood gradually became safer in many visible ways while becoming less effective at cultivating resilience in invisible ones.

Read alongside what many educators are observing, Haidt’s work helps explain an increasingly familiar pattern. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe what they call safetyism: the tendency to interpret emotional discomfort as danger rather than as an ordinary part of life. It is not difficult to imagine vocational uncertainty being interpreted through the same lens.

Ambiguity, after all, feels remarkably similar to danger when uncertainty itself has rarely been practiced.

Jean Twenge’s research points toward a related pattern. Her work documents delayed milestones of independence, from driving and dating to living alone, alongside rising levels of anxiety and caution. Read together, Haidt and Twenge describe a generation that has often had fewer opportunities to build confidence through ordinary risk. The consequences extend well beyond childhood. They shape the way many young adults encounter work, relationships, and the future itself.

Yet uncertainty is not simply an obstacle to vocation. It may be one of its necessary conditions.

If life arrived with perfect clarity, we would have little reason to experiment, adapt, or discover capacities we never knew we possessed. We would choose once and simply execute the plan. But that is not how meaningful lives unfold. They unfold through countless small decisions, unexpected detours, closed doors, surprising opportunities, and responsibilities we could never have anticipated when we were eighteen years old. The uncertainty we often resist is also the environment in which wisdom grows.

In retrospect, few people describe their lives as the fulfillment of a carefully executed blueprint. More often, they describe a series of moments that only later reveal their connection to one another. The conversation between our gifts rarely reveals itself in advance. It becomes audible only after years of faithful attention.

The pattern appears repeatedly in classrooms and advising offices alike.

Students frequently ask whether there is some reliable way to know, in advance, that they are making the right choice. They hope there is a test that can reveal whether a career path will ultimately prove meaningful before they commit to it. The realization that no such test exists rarely brings relief. More often, it creates a quiet crisis.

They came expecting a map. What they are given instead is a compass.

A map promises certainty. A compass offers direction, but it still requires judgment, patience, and the willingness to walk before the destination becomes visible. The longer I teach, the more convinced I become that vocation resembles the second far more than the first.

None of this makes students’ anxiety less real, nor does it make them responsible for the conditions that helped produce it. It does suggest, however, that vocational guidance now involves more than helping people identify their strengths or explore possible careers. It increasingly requires helping them cultivate the resilience to remain inside uncertainty without mistaking it for failure.

Perhaps that is one of uncertainty’s forgotten purposes. It is not merely the space between decisions. It is the place where character matures, wisdom deepens, and vocation slowly learns its own voice.

The conversation between a person’s gifts—the conversation this series keeps returning to—cannot happen while every unanswered question feels like a verdict. It unfolds only when we become patient enough to trust that clarity often arrives not before the journey begins, but because we were willing to walk it.

Nothing Good Is Ever Wasted

The hidden continuity beneath every career change.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Author’s Note

This is Part 2 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work.

Since 2020, our economy, our culture, and our professional norms have been in a state of remarkable change. For traditional and nontraditional students alike, the pressure to choose the “right” major, the “right” career, or the “right” place to begin has taken on even greater weight than it did when I was in college. Many people are trying to build meaningful lives while carrying a fear that one “wrong” decision will define everything that follows.

This short series is my attempt to interject a bit of hope into that conversation. My hope is not to offer a formula for choosing the perfect path, but to encourage readers to think differently about vocation, giftedness, and the ways God has equipped us to flourish in a changing world.

Midlife career change carries its own mythology, distinct from the one that shapes a twenty-year-old’s choice of major, though built from similar material. The story goes something like this: at some point, usually after a decade or two in a field, a person realizes the work has stopped fitting. What follows, in the popular version, is a kind of erasure. Somewhere in the retelling, a lawyer starts throwing pottery, and a banker ends up teaching ninth-grade English. The story treats the earlier career as a costume, something worn for years and finally, gratefully, removed.

What rarely gets mentioned in these accounts is how much survives the change. The lawyer who now throws pottery still argues, in a sense, with the material, coaxing a stubborn piece of clay toward the shape it was always capable of holding. The banker who now teaches still reads a classroom the way she once read a boardroom, watching for the moment attention drifts and adjusting the pitch of her voice to pull it back. The old skill simply changes its clothes, arriving in the new work under an unfamiliar name.

Herminia Ibarra, whose work already shaped the argument in the piece before this one, describes reinvention as a process of trying on possible selves through action, long before the identity settles into language. The self doing the trying gets assembled from what came before, carried forward from a different room, under a different title. Much of its deepest work remains the same. It simply finds a new place to express itself.

When people ask me how to reinvent themselves, I have started asking a different question back: what did you already do well, long before this job, that this job happened to interrupt? The answer usually surprises them. A marketing director recalls the elaborate treasure hunts she used to plan for her cousins every summer, mapping clues across a whole neighborhood, while an accountant remembers building furniture in his garage on weekends, following instructions so complicated that friends stopped trusting him to help with theirs. These stories rarely make it onto a resume, yet they hold real evidence of a mind that already knows how it likes to work.

We often imagine careers as collections of technical competencies, though much of what makes work distinctive lives somewhere underneath the technique. Long before someone learns accounting or teaching, medicine or design, they are already developing habits of attention. A person notices patterns before anyone teaches them to. Another organizes chaos instinctively, or feels a pull toward explaining a difficult idea until it makes sense to someone else. Occupations give these habits a context, though they rarely invent them from scratch. Reinvention succeeds when a person finally recognizes the deeper continuities that have been shaping them all along, continuities that were there well before the new job gave them a name.

Reinvention, looked at this way, is less a departure and more a continuation of the same conversation, carried into a new room, with different furniture and unfamiliar lighting, though the old habits of attention are still standing in the corner, waiting to be recognized.

The person who starts over rarely starts empty-handed. They are simply moving the conversation into a room with a better view.

Vocation Is a Conversation

Meaningful work emerges from the integration of many gifts.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Author’s Note

This is Part 1 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work.

Since 2020, our economy, our culture, and our professional norms have been in a state of remarkable change. For traditional and nontraditional students alike, the pressure to choose the “right” major, the “right” career, or the “right” place to begin has taken on even greater weight than it did when I was in college. Many people are trying to build meaningful lives while carrying a fear that one “wrong” decision will define everything that follows.

This short series is my attempt to interject a bit of hope into that conversation. My hope is not to offer a formula for choosing the perfect path, but to encourage readers to think differently about vocation, giftedness, and the ways God has equipped us to flourish in a changing world.

One of the defining narratives of modern career advice is the belief that every person has one ideal career, fully formed and waiting somewhere ahead to be discovered. People describe this search as finding a passion or choosing the right major, and the language shifts depending on who is giving the advice. Underneath it, the same assumption holds. Meaning lies somewhere ahead of us, hidden behind the correct decision, and our task is simply to identify the right path early enough to spend our years walking it well.

This is not to deny that God calls people to particular kinds of work, seasons of service, or specific vocations. Rather, it is to question the modern assumption that faithful vocation always reveals itself as one linear career waiting to be discovered.

The narrative is appealing. Yet it grows more disconnected each year from how people actually build meaningful lives.

Students entering college today inherit expectations built for an economy that has already changed shape. Their parents often describe careers that moved in a straight line, from schooling into steady work and then, over time, into real stability. Contemporary work rewards a different rhythm. Occupations evolve fast enough to outpace the degrees built to prepare for them. Entire industries rise and fall within a decade. Skills once considered peripheral become essential, and specialized knowledge often gives way to an ability to adapt and to draw connections across fields. The real question has moved. It now centers on how well someone connects what they know across different contexts, more than on which facts they hold.

For years, I have watched students interpret this instability as personal failure. They worry that changing majors signals indecision, and they fear that unrelated jobs make them look inconsistent, when what those jobs actually reflect is growth. Previous interests get relabeled as detours, or as years spent on something that mattered less than they’d hoped. Underneath these anxieties lies a common assumption: a life unfolding correctly would leave a straighter path behind it.

Yet my own experience points somewhere else entirely. Looking backward, the moments that once seemed disconnected now appear deeply related. Theatre prepared me for more than performing on a stage. It shaped the way I listen and teach, the way I write and try to understand what moves people. Communication studies built on theatre, adding language and theoretical structure to instincts that performance had already cultivated. Years later, when I began writing professionally, the two disciplines quietly converged. Understanding a character on stage turned out to be close kin to understanding an audience on the page, and playing an action became, in time, a kind of rehearsal for writing with intention. Voice, theatrical or editorial, depended on many of the same habits of attention.

Only in retrospect did I recognize what these disciplines had actually been doing all along. They had been carrying on a conversation, one I simply hadn’t been listening for.

This, I have come to believe, is how vocation often unfolds. Much of a life gets spent watching separate abilities slowly teach each other, until they merge into a single, integrated way of seeing the world. The process resembles weaving threads together, a pattern that only becomes visible with time, more than it resembles choosing a destination.

Career theorists have begun describing this shift in different ways. In Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra argues that professional identity gets built through experimentation, with introspection playing a secondary role. David Epstein’s Range suggests that broad experience frequently produces more innovative thinking than narrow specialization, because generalists develop unusual capacities for pattern recognition across disciplines. Both writers push against the familiar assumption that expertise comes mainly from singular focus, and both point, in their own way, toward integration as a defining trait of resilient careers.

I suspect the implications reach well past employment, into the way we counsel students and imagine our own reinvention later in life. Building a meaningful life may have less to do with identifying one predetermined career than with faithfully cultivating the gifts God has entrusted to us, allowing time to reveal how they speak to one another.

The Cost of Silence, the Courage to Speak

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Yes, I have read the statement.

When several people first sent me the link from different directions, I chose not to read it. Instead, I simply reposted the response I had written after the third lawsuit.

Later, I learned that the statement discussed the discovery materials, including my subscriber lists. At that point, I decided to read it for myself.

The statement itself isn’t what matters to me.

What I do want to address is the discussion of the subscriber lists.

If I were one of my former subscribers, the question I would most want answered is this: Were my emails, messages, or personal stories turned over in discovery?

Today, I confirmed with my lawyer that the materials I produced in discovery were subscriber lists only — not the personal messages you sent me.

Throughout the months that I defended myself in court, I met with one of my mentors to talk through everything that was happening. She said something I have never forgotten:

“You had to tell your story. Imagine where you would be if you hadn’t.”

She was right.

I remain deeply grateful for that year. As we say in the theatre, I left it all on the boards. I wrestled honestly with my own story, asked difficult questions, took accountability, learned painful truths, and discovered grace in your stories, support, and at times your admonitions.

When the case settled, I experienced something I had not felt in a very long time: peace.

After seven months of motions, hearings, discovery, and legal proceedings, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice through a negotiated settlement. There was no prevailing party (no “winner”). I admitted no wrongdoing, and no court entered any judgment against me. I signed the affidavit because it was one of the terms of the settlement. I did not redact or alter my writing. I removed it because I had agreed to do so.

I also agreed to restrictions on what I could say publicly. That was a significant concession, but I signed it without regret because I had already said what I needed to say. I had learned what I needed to learn, and I had the privilege of walking alongside countless thoughtful, courageous, truth-seeking men and women as many of us found language for our own stories.

That year was pivotal and beautiful.

I don’t care about my reputation. My identity is in Christ. He has forgiven me. Hallelujah! My husband has forgiven me, and our marriage is stronger, more peaceful, and more Christ-honoring than it was before. My family has forgiven me. My friends, students, fellow congregants, and colleagues know who I am. Their love and friendship have never been defined by this chapter of my life.

Life has moved forward.

So let me end with what matters most.

Tell your story.

Could you be sued? Yes.

Will some people misunderstand you? Yes.

Will some people think you’re foolish, attention-seeking, or worse? Probably.

Will others recognize themselves in your honesty and finally find the courage to speak? Absolutely.

I’ve sat in rooms where men and women shared their stories aloud for the very first time. I’ve watched tears fall that they were convinced would destroy them. I’ve seen unbearable grief met with patient listeners, steady hands, compassion, and grace. I’ve watched smiles return, hearts begin to heal, and voices that once trembled become steady again.

For all of it, I give glory to God. Every story of healing belongs to Him.

Please don’t let fear keep you silent.

When you tell the truth about your own life, you give others permission to do the same. Stories told honestly have a way of calling people out of isolation, out of shame, and into the light.

Peace to you all,
Jill

The Meta-Absurdism Theatre Lab: Let’s Build It Together

One of the greatest joys of teaching is discovering that your students are asking better questions than the ones you planned to answer.

That’s what has happened over the past year as Meta-Absurdism has gradually begun to take shape.

What began as a theatre course gradually became a collaborative investigation into authenticity, performance, philosophy, psychology, and the changing cultural landscape young artists now inhabit. We read, argued, devised scenes, challenged assumptions, borrowed insights from other disciplines, and followed questions wherever they led. As recurring ideas surfaced, we refined our language, abandoned concepts that failed under scrutiny, and developed others that illuminated what we were observing together.

The framework did not exist before those conversations.

It emerged through them.

For years, I’ve been drawn to educational philosophies that treat learning as an active process rather than a passive one. Jean Piaget argued that “Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an object is to act upon it.” Vygotsky carried that insight further by observing that higher forms of thinking first emerge between people before becoming internal ways of understanding. Both thinkers remind us that genuine learning happens when people engage with ideas together rather than simply receiving information from an “expert.”

Our little classroom on the second floor of the communication building became an opportunity to put those ideas into practice.

Instead of presenting conclusions, we kept asking questions. Instead of defending positions, we tested them. Students challenged one another’s assumptions, connected ideas across disciplines, refined language together, and gradually developed a shared vocabulary for describing something none of us could fully articulate when the semester began.

The Socratic method helped shape that process. Good questions have a remarkable way of slowing a conversation just enough for everyone in the room to think more carefully. They expose assumptions, invite clarification, and encourage us to follow an idea further than we expected. More than once, a single student’s observation changed the direction of an entire class, sending all of us—including me—back to reconsider ideas we thought we understood. There were moments when the room fell silent because we realized an assumption no longer held. We groaned when an idea collapsed under closer examination and laughed when an unexpected connection opened an entirely new way of thinking. Every breakthrough belonged to the room.

Those moments changed the way we all thought about Meta-Absurdism.

Those moments changed the way we all thought about Meta-Absurdism. More importantly, they convinced me that meaningful artistic ideas can emerge from communities willing to think carefully together.

As our conversations continued, another realization slowly came into focus.

Theatre has always advanced this way.

When we look back at figures like Stanislavski, Meisner, Viola Spolin, Peter Brook, or Jerzy Grotowski, it’s easy to focus on the systems, exercises, and vocabulary they eventually became known for. History tends to remember the finished framework: the published books, the named movements, the exercises, and the vocabulary. It rarely preserves the years of uncertainty that came first, when artists were still observing, experimenting, revising, and searching for language equal to what they were discovering.

Stanislavski spent decades pursuing a simple question: Why do some performances feel deeply truthful while others do not? Meisner explored what it means to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances. Spolin investigated spontaneity through improvisation. Brook asked what is fundamentally required for theatre to exist at all. Grotowski continually stripped performance to its essentials in order to understand what theatre uniquely offers.

Although each pursued a different question, they shared an important conviction: theatre advances through collaborative inquiry. The rehearsal room is never the work of a solitary thinker. It is a community of artists testing ideas together: listening, responding, refining, discarding, discovering, and slowly giving language to insights that no one person could fully arrive at alone. Theatre has always been a profoundly communal art, and its greatest innovations have emerged from communities willing to investigate difficult questions together.

Each artist began with a question.

Each pursued that question with discipline.

Each allowed rehearsal, collaboration, and practice to refine understanding.

Only then did a recognizable framework emerge.

Watching that process unfold in theatre history gave me confidence to let Meta-Absurdism develop in the same way. Rather than rushing toward tidy definitions, we continued to ask questions, test ideas, and allow the language to become more precise over time. The framework continues to evolve because the conversation does.

Where the Conversation Is Leading

As our conversations continued, one observation kept resurfacing.

The Theatre of the Absurd emerged from a generation asking whether life possessed any meaning at all. Again and again, my students described a different experience. They felt an overabundance of meaning. Every event seemed to arrive already interpreted, commented upon, branded, analyzed, and absorbed into competing narratives before they had the opportunity to encounter it for themselves.

Somewhere during the semester, we realized we needed language for that condition. The name Meta-Absurdism gradually emerged from those conversations, not as a declaration that we had discovered a new movement, but as our best attempt to describe a cultural experience we all recognized but had not yet learned to articulate.

In all this meaning, what is true?

That question continues to shape every essay I’ve written and every conversation we’ve had since.

The Next Step

One of the most exciting outcomes of this project is that the conversations themselves have begun suggesting a new kind of theatre laboratory. Students would study the great practitioners who shaped modern theatre while exploring the questions that shaped their work. Stanislavski, Meisner, Spolin, Brook, Grotowski, and other influential artists would provide the historical and artistic foundation, inviting students to see how theatre continually grows through careful observation, disciplined experimentation, and thoughtful collaboration.

From that foundation, the class would explore the questions shaping today’s artists. Through improvisation, devising, ensemble work, contemporary theatre, and conversations that draw from philosophy and psychology, students would investigate the cultural conditions that gave rise to Meta-Absurdism. Together, we would continue refining the language, testing the ideas, and exploring the questions that first brought the framework into being.

Throughout the fall semester, the ensemble would create original scenes and collaborative performances inspired by those discoveries. In the spring, that work would deepen into a larger devised production, allowing the artistic and philosophical questions to continue developing through rehearsal, revision, and performance.

What excites me most is the opportunity to invite students into a process that few artists experience firsthand. Theatre students spend years studying the movements that shaped the past. This lab would allow them to witness how artistic frameworks gradually emerge through observation, collaboration, rehearsal, and thoughtful conversation. They would inherit the rich traditions of theatre while contributing their own questions to the ongoing story of the art form.

Whether Meta-Absurdism ultimately becomes part of that story remains to be seen. For now, the questions themselves have proven more than worthwhile, and I’m excited to see where they lead next.

Below is the first concept flyer for the Meta-Absurdism Theatre Lab, a collaborative theatre program I’m developing for performing arts studios, colleges, and universities.

A few people have wondered whether teenagers are ready for questions like these. I suspect they’re already living them. My hope is simply to give them a place to explore those questions together through the collaborative art of theatre.

Meta-Absurdism Theatre Lab flyer introducing an emerging theatre framework for high school students through acting, devising, collaboration, and contemporary theatre
Concept flyer for the Meta-Absurdism Theatre Lab, an emerging theatre framework inviting high school students to explore contemporary theatre through acting, collaboration, devising, and original performance.
Download Flyer Here

If you’d like to read more about the Meta-Absurdism movement, here are some essays for you:
What is Meta-Absurdism?
From Realism to Meta-Absurdism: The Evolution of the Modern Stage
Today’s Students Want to Be in the Room
The Ordinary Infinite: Annie Baker and the Meta-Absurdist Stage