April 2026
New York, New York

Dear Listener,

For a long time in my young adult life, I felt confused about who I was, where I belonged, or if I belonged anywhere. In my mind, I believed that feeling of isolation would heal if only I could get others to see and validate me. This backfired: I only wanted to be seen on my best days, and only wanted to be heard if what I had to say would garner a positive reaction. If I wasn’t doing a good job, I wanted to hide it as fast as possible.

Looking back, I wish I could tell myself that the most important person to see and hear me is myself. After that, others may begin to listen.

In the fall of 2017, I lived through a traumatic personal event that involved defiantly running away from home, my friends, and my family to travel to Laguna Beach, California. In my mind, the scheme I came up with would make me famous, but in reality, this experience was riddled with a declining mental health due to the bad choices I was making in my early twenties.

Shortly after I came back home, I decided to write about what I went through. I knew that what I had just lived through was significant, and I knew it had changed my life and myself. But what I didn’t know is what it all meant.

The "knowing” that something is significant is just intuition, and it wasn’t enough for me. I was looking for the “knowing why,” which is where the meaning, the learning, and the healing comes from. Finding this meaning through the act of writing transformed a mere recounting of events into the audio drama TURN.

TURN is an unapologetic work of autobiographical fiction, a way of turning the most traumatic and ultimately transformative period of my life—a runaway journey through escalating manic despair in young adulthood— into art. Staring at the breakdown, TURN chronicles the tragic distance between the person I wanted to be and the person I was becoming. An audio-first spoken word experience, TURN is the sound of the mask finally cracking, but it is also a celebration of the person who ends up standing there, cracked mask and all, and takes the permission and opportunity to turn around and look at themselves in the mirror.

For me, creating art from life is one of the best paths toward understanding it. My hope in sharing this visceral and immersive spoken word experience is for you, too, to keep searching for your voice and use it to turn the world into a richer place.

Sincerely,

Paul Halley
Author, Narrator & Producer, "TURN"