Alone On The Inside | Liz Pryor | TEDxBerkleeValencia
The speaker, Annet Johnson, argues that self-acceptance and moving past self-judgment are crucial for navigating life's difficulties. She recounts her experience of being forced to keep her pregnancy secret in a facility, learning that the removal of external judgment allowed her to eventually confront and heal her internal judgment. This process leads to the conclusion that finding an internal ally is necessary for resilience.
## Speakers & Context
- Annet Johnson — Speaker who recounts personal history and speaks on emotional processing.
- Setting: A public speaking engagement, suggested by the mention of a memoir, "Look At You Now."
## Theses & Positions
- A person's emotional disposition and life management are determined by how they navigate difficult experiences internally.
- The removal of judgment is vital for inner peace and emotional opening, allowing one to see others and oneself clearly.
- The core battle in life is internal: managing self-judgment versus fostering an internal ally.
- Being open means feeling "really good about being who you are when you're around them"—a feeling characteristic of open people who lack judgment.
- The only voice that matters in one's life is one's own.
## Concepts & Definitions
- **The Saying:** "You come into this world alone and then you go out alone."
- **Self-judgment:** The internal, often unnoticed habit of criticizing oneself, which can be dangerous because it is perceived as a "virtue" that does not hurt others.
- **Internal Ally:** The necessary internal voice that reminds us of our past endurance ("reminding you you've been through stuff before and you're going to get through this").
- **Openness:** A state achieved when judgment is gone, allowing the mind and heart to open, leading to feelings of safety and improvement in one's surroundings.
## Mechanisms & Processes
- **Emotional Processing Model:** Hard experiences lead to internal restructuring of self-perception.
- **Deception and Secrecy Cycle:** Being forced to maintain a lie (hiding the pregnancy) leads to an internal experience of secrecy, guilt, and shame.
- **Judgment Removal:** Observing the removal of external judgment (the assumption of her situation) allowed the speaker to see the true nature of the people in the facility.
- **The Test:** When faced with a challenge, one must discern between the internal "asshole" (which brings doubt and fear) and the internal ally.
## Timeline & Sequence
- **Summer of 1979:** Speaker had sex with her boyfriend for the first time.
- **Four and half months later:** Speaker learned she was pregnant.
- **Period of Pregnancy Decision:** Parents agreed it could not be known; speaker would "go away and hide in a Catholic Home."
- **Lying Phase:** Parents told family she was "sick and living in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota."
- **Facility Experience:** Speaker arrived at a locked, government-run facility for delinquent, underprivileged, wayward, pregnant teenagers and lived there for five months.
- **Memory Sealing:** Speaker promised her mother she would never tell the story, keeping the promise for **38 years**.
- **Publication:** Writing the memoir, "Look At You Now," recently.
- **Graduation Day:** Arrived at high school graduation, facing peers who had formed their own ideas about her absence.
## Named Entities
- **British Virgin Islands:** Location where the pregnancy was discovered while the speaker was on vacation with her father and siblings.
- **Catholic Home:** Initially thought to be the destination for the baby, but was not the reality.
- **Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota:** Location fabricated by the parents to mislead family and friends.
## Numbers & Data
- **Five out of seven:** Speaker's ranking among her siblings.
- **1979:** Year the speaker had sex with her boyfriend for the first time.
- **Four and half months:** Time elapsed between the sexual encounter and finding out she was pregnant.
- **38 years:** Duration the speaker kept the secret about her time in the facility.
- **Five months:** Duration the speaker lived in the facility.
## Examples & Cases
- **The Pregnancy/Adoption Crisis:** Forced to fake illness and hide her pregnancy while on vacation in the British Virgin Islands.
- **The Facility Experience:** Living in a locked, government-run facility for delinquent, underprivileged, wayward, pregnant teenagers, bonding with misfit peers.
- **Graduation Confrontation:** Facing peers at graduation after five months' absence, where the initial lies were questioned through "whispering and pointing and gesturing."
## Examples & Cases
- **The Lobsitermen Documentary:** The speaker struggled to elevate her footage past *"a glorified fishing montage,"* but the professor's question guided her to asking *why*. (This specific example is from the preamble of the provided context, but the core content here is solely about the personal story, so only self-related examples are included).
## Counterarguments & Caveats
- The initial belief that her parents' need to keep the secret was absolutely necessary to "ruin [her] life."
- The struggle to articulate *why* storytelling is powerful until the direct confrontation of the lie at graduation.
## Conclusions & Recommendations
- Think about letting go of judgment, especially the judgment directed inward.
- Create an internal "place that you can turn that will hold you up and root for you," viewing this as a gift.
## Implications & Consequences
- Surviving the lie and the judgment of the community forced the speaker to develop an internal resilience that helped her face later life challenges.
- The capacity for deep connection and emotional safety can arise from profoundly difficult and hidden circumstances.
## Verbatim Moments
- *"You come into this world alone and then you go out alone?"*
- *"it's not on the outside; it's here, sort of alone on the inside with yourself."*
- *"The quietest drive in the history of the world."*
- *"a locked, government-run facility for delinquent, underprivileged, wayward, pregnant teenagers."*
- *"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..."*
- *"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."*
- *"There is something about the removal of judgment that brings this indescribable meaning to the word 'openness.'"*
- *"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?"*
- *"I sort of just waited there... and none of that happened."*
- *"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."*