![]() The photos my old accidental Kiwi friends sent over-cars, homes, entire histories buried in meters of silt and sludge-feel emotionally familiar. Our little lockdown farm town on the North Island, devastated. The first town I inhabited with Ash, my seven-year-old son, in New Zealand (we were Covid-waylaid there from March 2020 until recently) was recently hit by massive flooding. My family has grown, shrunk, warped, welcomed, razed, fizzled, fractured. I have not been able to untangle which parts of this tiredness are pandemic, which parts are motherhood, which parts are divorce, which parts are possibly due to having actually had Covid, which parts are due to two back-to-back bouts of culture shock-I shifted countries twice, circumstantially-and which parts are owed to my entire extended family changing shape during the course of all this. ![]() I have felt relentlessly exhausted since April 2020, one month into Covid, and the month I first asked for a divorce. This year’s TED theme, and every year’s theme, is. The theme of this year’s TED conference was: ![]() I took a Covid test the day before departing to make sure I was negative before getting on a plane. Talks about genetics and CRISPR, talks about bats, birds and murmurations, talks about racism, colorblindness and affirmative action, talks about the advances in prosthetics, poverty, power and powerlessness, talks about AI (and more AI, and more AI), and talks about how to apologize to your children after you accidentally fucking yell at them. This conference is where most of the TED talks are filmed. It takes place nowadays at the Vancouver Convention Center, where upward of 2,000 attendees spend a jam-packed week alternately watching TED talks and bumbling around the convention center and their various nearby hotels, trying to socialize and network while attempting to digest the amount of information that is delivered from the stage to your brain. The first was in 2013, when I delivered my TED talk “The Art of Asking” (which has since racked up close to 20 million views across platforms, thank-you-very-much), and after that, I started making an annual pilgrimage back to TED-land to see other people deliver their talks. This was my seventh (I think) time attending a weeklong TED conference. ![]() I have been listening to my old Frank Sinatra records. Some days, lately, I feel like Covid and the pandemic fundamentally changed my capacity to do and to be. Some days, lately, I can barely get to the breakfast dishes. Now? I couldn’t imagine having the time and headspace to prepare and deliver a TED talk. It’s not so much a talk as an intensely prepared piece of theatrical monologue, with lights and makeup and hundreds of hours of preparation and rehearsal. I spent five full days at TED, sitting in a semi-dark theater watching eighty speakers perform eighty talks.Īnd let’s remember what a TED talk is. The night before this, I’d slept for three hours. I managed to get only five or six hours of sleep a night at the conference. ![]() Why do I even have to feel these feelings? I stare at the offer on the little phone screen I feel a disorienting rush of blood to the brain and a cocktail of emotions: flattery, joy, sympathy, anger. I’m sitting in the airport in Seattle, waiting to take the red-eye flight back to New York from the weeklong TED conference, when I get the marriage proposal. ![]()
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