Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Wow.
So, are you guys familiar with the saying,
"You come into this world alone and then you go out alone"?
You know that saying?
When I hear it, I think,
yes, we come in alone, we go out alone.
What about all this space in the middle,
this space that is our life?
And how often in our lives,
we feel that same kind of alone that they're talking about in that saying?
It's a very specific feeling because it's not on the outside;
it's here, sort of alone on the inside with yourself.
And you know it's that kind of alone
when you're going through something
and suddenly you realize only you can get you through.
I'm just convinced
that so much of how we feel about ourselves
and how we sit in our lives
is a result of how we get through the hard stuff
and how we deal with this place on the inside.
I went through a difficult experience as a younger girl
and found myself having to reckon with this place inside.
I learned a lot from it.
I'm number five out of seven kids.
I was raised in an affluent bubble of the suburb outside of Chicago
in the top two percent of the overprivileged in America.
Our life did not see a whole lot of struggle.
We had an abundance of love and support and opportunity.
Like, in general, my life was a really safe and easy place to be.
So in the summer of 1979, going into my senior year of high school,
I had sex with my boyfriend for the first time.
Every time I say that sentence, it feels completely ridiculous,
but trust me, that's going to go somewhere in this story.
(Laughter)
After having sex for the first time -
This was not something that he and I talked about or planned.
This was something that just sort of happened.
And, honestly, I wasn't even quite sure that it happened when it was over.
You know what I mean!
(Laughter)
So, four and half months later, I find out I'm pregnant.
That is when I was sure that we did it.
(Laughter)
I was actually on vacation in the British Virgin Islands
with my dad and a bunch of siblings sailing on a big sailboat
when I learned this.
I decided to wait to get home to tell my recently divorced parents together.
Probably, still the least fun conversation I've ever had in my life.
You know, they were obviously shocked, disappointed,
and gravely concerned about my future.
The one thing that my parents agreed upon that day
was that no one could ever, ever find out that this happened to me.
So, it was decided that I would go away and hide in a Catholic Home
and have the baby and give it up for adoption
and get back to graduate from high school.
My mother was completely convinced, with all that she was,
that if anybody ever, ever found this out, it would ruin my life, truly.
So they told my brothers and sisters, my grandparents, my friends,
the dog, the mailman, everybody
that I was sick
and living in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
So a couple of days after that conversation with my parents,
my mom found a place and we got in the car
to drive a few states away to drop me off.
The quietest drive in the history of the world.
And when I arrived
is when I learned that this wasn't a Catholic Home.
It was a locked, government-run facility
for delinquent, underprivileged, wayward, pregnant teenagers.
A world completely foreign to me.
A world I didn't even know existed.
So, I lived there for five months -
no contact with anybody I knew -
had the baby
and made it home to graduate.
When it was all over,
I promised my mother that I would never tell anybody this story,
and I kept that promise to her for 38 years
until very recently, when I wrote a book,
my memoir called "Look At You Now."
It only takes about a two-minute version of this story
to see that it is fraught with lies,
secrets, deception, betrayal,
gossip, rumors, judgment, shame,
all of the things that we try so hard to stay away from in life
because they make it so difficult and so painful.
I wanted to mostly talk about, sort of, what I went through internally
to get to the other side of this experience.
So I arrive in this place,
and I meet the girls,
and I learn that they're on pregnant leave
from juvenile detention or failed foster care
or from the streets.
Of course my instinct is to just run as far and as fast as I can get,
but I had nowhere to go.
And I lived pretty terrified in this place for weeks,
until I started to question things.
At a certain point it felt like everything I thought I knew about the world,
all of the things I had been taught to believe about people and about life,
it felt like they sort of dropped off of me and vanished.
And I started to see that these girls and I
had everything in common that actually mattered.
We were teenagers and we were pregnant.
I started to get to know them.
They were very different than I thought.
They were interesting, funny;
in fact, they were hilarious.
They told me stories about their lives
and their "adventures" with the law.
And I shared my life,
about my family and skiing and sailing.
You know, they taught me how to play poker.
I read books to them.
They made rich-girl jokes.
I never quite had the balls to make poor-girl jokes,
but we were like soldiers in a platoon.
I mean, we bonded over this pregnancy.
These girls, who I thought were hardened teenage gangsters,
were really mostly these endearing misfit toys,
and I sort of became one of them.
You know, when people hear this story,
I often hear the word "strength."
Everybody talks about the strength and grit, you know,
it takes to get through challenge.
I really think it was the removal of judgment
that helped me get to the other side of this story
because looking back on it,
that is what dropped off and vanished -
the judgment I had of these girls and their lives and their poverty.
And once it was gone,
I was sort of able to see them for who they really were.
And then of course it trickled down onto me
and the judgment I had of myself, which was massive.
I was wrecked with guilt and shame
and hating myself for the mess I'd made of my life
and the disgrace I had become to my parents.
All of that stuff inside of me started to let up a little bit.
I stopped beating myself up
and actually imagined that maybe I could have a good life
even had I been in this place.
The things inside of me
started to feel just a little bit kinder and a little more forgiving.
There is something about the removal of judgment
that brings this indescribable meaning to the word "openness."
Your mind opens, your heart opens,
everything opens when judgment is gone.
Things around you feel so different.
They feel safer and better.
It makes you think -
You know, how you have a couple of people in your life,
if you're lucky,
when you're around them and you walk away,
you can't help thinking, "God, I really like that person" -
that feeling.
And you don't quite know what it is,
but the truth is you feel good around them;
in fact, you feel really good about being who you are
when you're around them.
That person is open, and they don't have judgment.
That's sort of what it feels like and what it looks like.
So if I were, I know I can't,
but if I were to ask everybody in here,
"How often do you think you judge yourself?"
Think about that for a minute.
I'm going to guess that whatever your answer is,
it's a whole lot more.
Because judgment is really tricky.
Because it's a habit, and it can go so unnoticed,
particularly self-judgment
because this, sort of, perceived virtue to it
that it's okay because you're not hurting anybody else, right?
So here's the test.
The next time a challenge comes in,
just notice,
pay attention to what goes on inside of you.
Is it -
Do you feel something is sort of rooting for you?
It's on your side,
reminding you you've been through stuff before
and you're going to get through this?
Or do you have an asshole in there?
Because an asshole is what reminds us
of all the things that we cannot stand about ourselves,
particularly when we're in challenge.
It is from where all the doubt comes.
Of course, when the doubt comes in, then comes the fear,
and the fear comes in to scare the crap out of you.
That is self-judgment.
We don't need an enemy in there, making the hard times harder.
We kind of really need an ally.
The only voice that matters,
the only voice that truly makes a difference in your life
is your own.
Three days after I had the baby at 17,
I had to go home
and actually walk in the ceremony of my high school graduation;
it was some rule.
And, today,
I can't seem to figure out what was scarier:
giving birth to a baby out of my body in that facility
or going home and facing my peers after five months of being gone,
knowing somewhere in my heart that this lie was not going to hold up
and the judgment and scrutiny I might have to face.
So I arrived at graduation.
And I was right.
The lie kind of didn't hold up all the way.
Lots of kids had made their own ideas of where I had been,
and there was whispering and pointing and gesturing,
and it was quite a lot worse than I thought it was going to be.
But what surprised me the most
was that I sort of just waited there
to feel like I wanted to burst out crying
or run away
or flip everybody off
or hate myself,
and none of that happened.
And I realized that day
that all I had gone through, internally, to survive in this facility
was exactly what I was going to need to survive my life,
and I knew I had.
So if there were one thing
that I could encourage anyone to do in this life,
it would be to think about letting go of judgment,
particularly the judgment you have on yourself,
because to be able to create and have inside of you
a place that you can turn that will hold you up and root for you
would be quite a gift.
Thank you.
(Applause)