It all started with a couple of posts about my experiences of interning as a counselor at Planned Parenthood, and the utter failures of sexual education from parents (and truly, society at large) that had brought women though our doors. A reader confided in me that she had been raised without access to medically accurate information about sex, reproduction, and the human body, and offered that perhaps I’d like to interview her for Candid Uprising’s readership. The resulting conversation, encapsulated in Sex Ed Fail: The Interview was the most read, most viewed post at the time of its publication. The comments thread on social media thanked the subject for openly discussing her experience of being “old enough to know better”, yet under-educated, shining light on an important issue.

Next, I shared a deeply personal account of the last time I was drunk, in celebration of six years without alcohol. I hesitated to publish it wondering if revealing such a sordid, angst-ridden, raw account of myself would be too much, or turn our readership off. I clicked “publish” on the day of my six year anniversary and watched as within hours the post blew up, garnering the most readers, views and shares of anything previously published on Candid Uprising. Comments and personal messages poured in, thanking me for telling my story.

We understood the response to mean you were asking for more stories about real people facing the myriad challenges life throws at us, in a judgement-free, exploratory context. I reached out to our community via social media, asking people to volunteer to be interviewed, their stories to be written up and shared on Candid Uprising. We chose a topic for each person and asked them to elaborate on a facet of their respective lives, free-form. The result was an extraordinary outpouring of human experience, an unexpected level of candor, and in some cases, a new level of understanding reached simply in the telling.

Beginning Tuesday, March 3rd, we are honored to present you with The Interview Series; stories about parenting, entering a new decade of life, divorce, depression, and rape, to name a few. We will post two interviews a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout March, with special guest posts on Fridays that provide first-person accounts on a variety of topics. Please join us for this exploration of stories about people in the Candid Uprising community, and chime in.