Transcriber: Claudia Maria Silveri Reviewer: Ilayda Gokgoz
Okay.
Do you consider yourself a happy person?
Are you happy with your life or is there anything you want to change? If so,
do it now. Don’t wait for anything tragic to happen to you.
Take over the steering wheel of your own life and do it.
The day I started the script for this TED Talk today,
something really inappropriate happened.
I found out that I lost all my data on my personal laptop.
Everything erased just like that.
It must have happened the day before when working as a photo editor for my magazine,
and I was downloading and uploading all sorts of data onto the servers and
I cleaned up everything after.
I'm not a bright light in I.T. issues. I know. And I didn't do a backup.
Everything gone. So all this work during the very productive time of the pandemic,
the pandemic was gone, which was
the writing process of my book there that are released last year,
and the immense work of scanning my color negatives of my analogical photography
archive. A lot of work. And to the very unsexy data of accounting.
Irreversible goal.
But funnily enough, I stayed very calm and didn't get upset.
Instead, I jumped on my motorbike, drove to the sea and had a very long swim.
And I recall driving back home screaming out loud, suddenly saying,
What the fuck? It's only data.
It's really only data and nothing to worry about. Not at all.
Because I would lost something which was way more important than anything else.
Which was my health.
It was six years ago when I received the incurable and degenerative disease,
which was Parkinson. What does that mean?
It means that the dopamine producing nerve cells in our brain are dying away.
They are attacked by some nasty little protein called Alpha α-Synuclein.
And it's not just Mia. Parkinson is becoming very fashionable.
We're getting trendy all the time because there are so many people all over
the world are getting Parkinson's.
Actually, the number has increased to over 6 million globally between 1990
and 2015. You can actually call it a little bit like a Parkinson's pandemic.
You need to know that without dopamine, we can’t move.
We need the neurotransmitter to send the commands from our brain to
the extremities. And actually to our whole body.
And we have in mind with Parkinson's,
and elder people shaking around like hell.
In my case, I'm just getting stiff. Stiff as a stick.
Moving like a robot, as you can see, tripping over my own feet, falling around.
And this is what makes me very insecure because I'm losing my balance.
And that's why I'm holding on to this.
My mobility radius. Thank you.
My mobility radius is constantly decreasing.
And by the way, I lost my sense of smell.
Many years ago, already ten years ago, in fact,
when that was already the first sign of this degenerative destruction in my brain,
which I didn't know.
I constantly burn the food in my kitchen because I don't smell anything
and I'm not really a great cook, so I don't care. But I'm burning the pots.
So what happened when I found out about the diagnosis?
I recalled the day stepping out of the neurologist's office on
a very summer nice day in Berlin and felt very relieved. Why?
Because I didn't have to think about my pension anymore in the future.
I knew that life was going to be very short and intense.
And from that moment on, aged 41 years, I knew that I was going to change my life.
Because time has come more precious than ever before.
Soon after I found myself hiking around in the back lands of Portugal.
Thinking about how I'm going,
what I'm going to do with the remaining time of my life.
And during those six weeks or hiking, I decided to
I was thinking about all the energy I spent in my life before,
which was very hectic and stressful,
and I was giving far too much attention to chasing my own ego,
caressing when I actually was caressing my ego,
chasing a career to become someone and gasping for recognition from
a society surrounding me and wanting to be a cool chick in Berlin.
Sorry.
But that was absolutely useless.
I knew that from that moment on, not doing any parties anymore.
Everything completely over.
So on the road in Portugal, when I was collecting
my grapes and the figs and the almonds that I got along the way,
I decided to get rid of all my belongings and start to live
a very minimalistic lifestyle.
I quit my apartment, passed on the gallery that I ran beside with
a colleague. I passed on the ghetto to a colleague of mine
and decided to only work half time, less work, less money, less consumption.
No husband anymore. No kids. No apartment. Nothing.
Just myself and I lived out of a single back,
keeping all the other stuff in a little storage room, including the negatives.
I went back to my roots to live on a small Spanish island,
which is called Formentera in the Mediterranean,
where I had spent a big part of my childhood and I was very happy there.
Being in this funky house with solar panels and a well growing tomatoes
and broccoli and immersed in nature was really something that
I wanted to do from now on. You need to know
I've always been used to changes in my life
because of my unconventional upbringing.
I started living on the Pacific Coast,
in the jungle in Ecuador as a young child in the late seventies.
Went on to Munich to live there, speak a little bit of everything.
And then my mother suddenly decided to go to Formentera
because we wanted to live in a hippie community where I met
the most interesting people I've met before. Amazing time.
Shortly after the wall came down, I went to Berlin
and I lived the most exciting decade as a young and curious girl in
a Prague playground, which was the unfinished city of post-war Berlin.
That's where I started my career as a journalist and as a photographer.
Then I spent five years in Madrid and went all over
the world doing lots of hikes,
trying to be as self-sufficient as possible and live in tents
as possible.
What I'm saying is that it has been really easy
for me to always change that out of circumstances. Right?
It was actually very exciting
and necessary sometimes to get rid of something and start a new life.
It was exciting. But then it happened this summer.
I took the full compost bin out into the garden and suddenly I tripped
and fell and found myself with all the rotten tomatoes in my hair and
a thorny. And that's when I decided to finally start the medication.
Because the physicians told me from the beginning onwards
I should take them. And I refused totally.
I felt instinctively that I had to try as long as possible to be without
the external help of artificial dopamine.
Instead, I did all sorts of experiments,
even though the health care profession denied it,
I thought that I had missed a P in my life due to exposure to environmental
pollution.
So detox, detox and detox was my credo.
I wanted to get rid of all this heavy metals in my metabolism. I did.
I've had a cleansing in India and Sri Lanka,
tried some ayahuasca sessions and later started yoga to stretch
and strengthen my body as much as possible.
My hips and lower back are suffering due to the compensation work because of
the limping because one side of the body is not working as the other one, right?
And my osteopath is doing a wonderful job, but he's expensive and so is the rest.
Because
my health care insurance does not pay for alternative methods.
Actually, for nothing but the bloody pills.
So it changed my focus on Mediterranean healthy cuisine diet.
I learned surfing only having to quit a day soon after
because of my degeneration,
but started swimming again as I used to be very good at it as a kid. Anyway,
I started medication recently
and getting my metabolism used to little by little because it causes nausea
and insomnia, and I puke every single day.
Today, I didn't take the second pill to not give you
the pleasure of puking in front of you.
This adjustment to the medication will hopefully soon be over,
but that sleeplessness is really painful.
I really take massive loads of high percentage CBD oil to sleep
a little bit more calm. By the way, those pills have many other side effects, which
I won’t mention to you. It’s not the moment for it.
Besides three of them, which are the most common, which is gambling,
shopping and sex. Yeah.
And me, I’ve just noticed getting obsessed with fishing.
I have to get out on my boat onto the sea and catch one fish after
the next if possible. Well, at least it's healthy and fun.
Why I’m going through this medication process?
Because I would love to gain back my mobility and have a focus in mind,
which is getting back to the hiking,
which is something that I'm dying for since many, many years.
It's really my passion. So let's hope everything will be good in
a few weeks when I get used to the medication.
When I visited the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases with
a couple of friends, which I call my “Parki buddies”,
we found out about the latest researches on scientific issues
and we were told that there is finally
a scientific evidence of my theory that it is environmental issues.
My doctors did not give a damn about alternative methods
or believe in anything other than pills. Right?
And now you have all sorts of statements from those scientists confirming that
a healthy Mediterranean diet, exercise, detox,
even ayahuasca treatments and nutritional supplements are
beneficial. Yeah.
And I'm so happy that I believed in myself right from the beginning onwards.
To deny or to not listen to the specialists.
But only following my holy method.
And I think it had to do with fearlessness and with
staying stuck to my own, to believe in my own and my own myself.
So now that you've listened to all these things,
you have to understand that despite everything you've listened to,
I'm still now happier than I ever was before.
Having gained an immense gratefulness for what I have lived through and for who
I have become living the here and now as intense as possible
and not wanting to change a single thing. And it's just all good the way it is.
I rest within myself. Thanks to Mr. P, Mr. Parkinson,
my most faithful boyfriend I ever had,
because he’s never going to leave me anymore.
But enough about me. What do you want to change in your life?
What do you desire?
What would make you more fulfilled? What would make you happier?
What have you never dared to do due to certain circumstances,
or maybe to lack of bravery? Where is your fearlessness?
Ask yourself, what keeps you away from just doing it? Here and now. Go for it.
Please don't hesitate for anything dramatic to happen to you.
Like I did before. Asking yourself what is really
the most important thing in your life.
And stop playing a supportive role in your own life because you are
the main role. You are the master of disaster. Enjoy.
Because life is so beautiful. Thank you very much.