TEDxDaytonYouth is an unimaginable, unprecedented opportunity. It’s something one encounters under the weighted blanket of a whitelined email, a blue-red PDF with a Google form embedded in brightly hyperlinked, sans-serif letters. Incidentally, the form is clicked, an application is sent, and, soon, an email makes an appearance in an already-brimming inbox, stating an audition time and date at the East End Community Services Center—three minutes to elaborate on the topic proposed, seven to answer questions. Suddenly, everything becomes real. TEDx becomes more than fantasy—it becomes a cold, hard possibility.
The evening of my audition was a cold one, murky with new rain and atramentous mist. My father drove us to 624 Xenia Avenue—he has always driven when an unfamiliar location is involved—and we found ourselves at the back end of a redwashed brick building. Now, being adequately bourgeois and perhaps a little skeptical of the entire thing, my mother made a number of complaints about the area and its kitchy, tattered exterior. She and I exited the car and began to pursue an indication of an entrance—a window into a foyer, a sign bearing words that could mean “go this way,” or the like. Something, anything. We scaled the perimeter of what seemed to be an impassable fortress, and I felt immediately hopeless. Who was I to even conceive of the fact that this could fructify, that it could bloom into something larger than life itself? That I could talk and people would listen in a way that did not concern obligation or necessity?
And then the glassy double doors materialized, surrounded by the yellow walls of what appeared to be a much newer, less rustic building. The whirlwind of it all was exhilarating then, flashes of white-walled halls with green chairs and wooden floors with a matte finish. The anxiety bubbling in my lungs as I sat waiting in a clean, bright-lit room with my mother, imagining the faces, the eyes, the pulse of my throat as it rasped words I had carefully typed on crumpled paper.
Soon, night was upon us, and my mother and I wove ourselves carefully through the parking lot, where our red Honda Accord, bright against the sky, lay lurking. Weeks later, while nestled in the pillowy comfort of my bed, I would receive an email telling me of my acceptance, with an attached document holding dates and times and places in which I’d be meeting with other accomplished soldiers—kids aged fifteen to nineteen with things to say, life to give.
I thought about what I wanted to say, the things I had faced in my timeline, which suddenly felt so inconsequential now, so small and unworthy. And then I had the epiphany: my TED talk was right before my eyes—in the mirror, on my hands, in my lineage. It was present in my South Asianness, in my immigrant parents and their sun-darkened skin, the way they spoke a language I knew I would never be wholly privy to. It was present in the labels of it all, the names and identities solidified in things that didn’t really matter. This is what I spoke about—the insignificance of labeling systems; the way in which the essence of one’s humanity took precedence over how it could be categorized. I wrote and wrote, more than once passing the ten-minute marker in my edits and recitations, but soon enough it all ended, like a diaphanous piece of time, gauzy and thin around my body.
TEDx was a difficult thing, a fragment of long hours, deep thought, and sleepless nights. And yet there is nothing in the world that could ruin the beauty of it for me—not even a misremembered line or an irreversible, on-stage blunder—because TEDx altered me. TEDx gave me community, passion, and love—a love I often perceive in theory, but never in practice. The wonderful thing about it all and my final takeaway herein is that TEDx inspires the kind of cultural resurgence one encounters perhaps only once in a void, in a lifetime. It is an allowance of not mere words, but of voice. Of spoken change.
