Paula and Gerry - I Thought My Anxiety Was Who I Was

Available for over a year

Fi Glover introduces a couple talking about whether overcoming the crippling social anxiety that constrained her life - by tackling all 17 sports included in the Commonwealth Games - means she is no longer the woman her husband married. Another conversation in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen. The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject Producer: Marya Burgess.