Transcript

Maybe We’re Fictional | Shaikha Al Ketbi | TEDxZayedUniversity

good morning everyone okay when I was a child I used to always try and make sense out of everything around me so I was that kid who ask asked about 400 to 500 questions a day and made everyone insane and when I was not offered an explanation that I was convinced with or an explanation that I understood I would just make up an explanation and believe that like most kids do so one of the things that I used to wonder about was how a traffic light works so I asked my parents Mom Dad how does a traffic light work and they said sweetie it's just automated it works on its own but if you tell a 5-year-old that something is automated and works on its own they probably would not really understand that so what do I do I make up an explanation that there is a very skinny man he's so skinny he's trapped inside the pole of a traffic light with a tiny remote that has the colors red green and yellow and he used to actually manually operate the traffic light and he used to be so anxious and so stressed out because if he made a mistake then all of the cars would crash into each other so every time we stopped at the traffic light I used to think that I used to get stressed out because the man inside the traffic light is stressed out and I was feeling his stress and that was when I was five but now I'm 21 and I drive and I still get so stressed out at the traffic light because I I can feel his stress you know and another thing that I used to wholeheartedly believe in was that do you ever laugh so much that your laugh goes mute and then you just sit there and your whole face becomes Frozen because your your laugh is muted but you're still making a laughing face so you just sit there and look sort of stupid but then there's a tiny tiny voice coming from the bottom of your throat and that voice is like a tiny dwarf that is trying to give you that afterlife it's the voice of that dwarf that lives in your throat because he wants to save you the embarrassment of looking stupid with a mute laughing face so that dwarf is a very nice dwarf and I think all of you have it you should thank that DF next time you laugh so hard another thing that I used to believe in and I was that under every Fountain there is a whale and the whale would Sprout the water that comes out of the fountain so I has to actually believe that when I'm standing next to a fountain I'd get get so excited because there's a whale right under me but if I come to the Fountain the next week and it's not working I get so sad cuz the whale probably went to another Fountain to operate it so I think that would be scary if there are whales under us right now that would be very scary so I used to be that kid who always every single night demanded a long elaborate very detailed bedtime story full of plot twists not one climax I want 10 climaxes I want 100 characters in the story and of course my mom had to do that and my mom was a working mom so probably 15 minutes into the story she would be asleep but 2 hours later I'd still be awake trying to make up characters and adding it to that story so I was that kid who slept last at home woke up first thing in the morning went to school and draw all the characters that I thought of before I went to sleep so this tendency to use my imag oops sorry this tendency to use my imagination to try and explain everything around me never really stopped it started when I was young and it still goes on until today and at some point in my life there started to appear a character in my head sort of like an alter ego and she was a queen of a quom yes A quom not a kingdom because there is no word in the English language that describes an Empire ruled by a female which sort of makes me sad so I just made a word up and I Nam did Queen them her name was Queen shush shush was my nickname when I was young and I think I'm not sure when this character started to appear but at some point in my life I think I just irritated my friend and started fighting with her and he was like listen who Do You Think You Are Queen of the world and I'm like maybe I am queen of the world I'm like yeah yeah yes I am you know what I am queen of the world and it dawned on me one day like an epiphany you know that when the Halo appears behind your head and you know that this is what you you're always meant for and I'm like yes I am the queen of the world at least in my head I am the queen of the world so so I'm a separate person person and queen shush is another person in my head and I started to imagine all the details that are related to Queen shush so for example I'd imagine how her Palace looks like the Interiors of her Palace even her Cutlery is different than normal people cut Cutlery she uses different Forks different knives and she even has her own wardrobe and her own dresses and I used to always draw her dresses and I'd like to show you a dress that was actually inspired by the story so I made this dress where it it has the Queen and all her solar system and this is the friend that got irritated by me thank you you are dismissed and so I used to actually create fictional equivalents to the the people in my life In My Kingdom so my sister who I always fight with was actually the evil sister in My Kingdom who wanted to take over queen shu's throne and my relationship with you in real life would actually dictate how I treat you in my kingdom so I mean Kingdom so let's say you give me a compliment in real life I'd be mentally showering your fictional character with gifts I'd be signing off on Treasures to send to you I'd give you an island you know I have a whole quom might as well give you an island so so as you can see that Queen shush is a very easy person if you just compliment me I give you an island so that's cool you all give me compliments after this talk and if you for example bash my favorite movie then guess what mentally I'd be just throwing you in a dungeon putting on Teletubbies on fo full volume on repeat and imagining how much you're suffering watching that so I never concerned myself with you so you bash my favorite movie and I'm like okay you're watching Teletubbies I'm so much better than you right now so so as you can imagine life became more entertaining as much as Queen shush was present in my mind while most people would be walking into a waiting room or lining up in a queue and they would be thinking man I don't want to spend the next hour waiting here or they'd want time to pass faster but when I walk into a waiting room I walk in and say oh my God look at all this material look at all these strangers that I can actually include in my kingdom and I can dress up as much as I want and I can imagine their lives so if I'm in a waiting room and for example some woman is sitting next to me scrolling on Instagram looking at pictures of food all I'd be thinking is that she's probably a chef in My Kingdom she's probably thinking about making this at home today and I just assign her that role and suddenly the woman next to me isn't a stranger but she's a character in my kingdom and while I'm queuing up for coffee in Starbucks I'd be looking at the starbu Barista making my coffee and I'd be thinking man this guy is a potion mixer he's actually making the elixir of life after I drink this coffee I'm going to be such a magical person and I think everyone here who drinks coffee would agree that coffee is magical and all you non- coffee drinkers just stay in your lane I also used to not believe in taking exams and tests and quizzes Which I used to have to do for most of my academic life like most of us have to and I used to sit in an exam and I'm I'd be thinking you know I'm a queen I shouldn't be doing this I'm not meant to just spend my time you know just writing this test so I decided that I needed to change my perspective on exams and tests because I had to do three of them a day and I used I convinced myself to sit happily in an exam or test by imagining that since every institution in the world needs a quality control check even the queendom needs a quality control check and what better way to have quality control checks other than make the queen take these tests so the queen cannot fail in a test the queen cannot get less than an a in a test so that's the only way that I convinced myself to sit in every test and get straight A's all through high school all through University and I never ever or rarely ever get mad or lose my cool over something and usually when all my friends would get mad at something they'd get mad at something that happened to me and I'd be the chillest person in the room and they're like why aren't you mad but what they don't know is in my mind I'm like you know I'm a queen I need to keep my composure if I lose control then the whole Kingdom loses control so that's the only way I actually managed to convince myself to keep my cool in so many situations where every one of my friends got really man but does are there any instances in the Kingdom or in the Kingdom I'm sorry um where chaos strikes or for example a war happens or a natural disaster perhaps well there are plenty of times where things can go wrong in the quom like any other country in the world or any other quom something has to go wrong a few years ago I started having anxiety it was panic attack after panic attack after panic attack and what really confused me and baffled me about having anxiety was the kind of person you start to become so I started going from a person who would so confidently stand in front of 300 people and act a role in a play to someone who cannot even order a coffee without having crippling anxiety and self-doubt and I'd always shut myself away from people I'd go for the minimum social interaction required required but how how did that even happen I was the person in my group of friends who you would go to for motivational talks but then I was the person in my group of friends who couldn't even have a single positive thought to get her through the day I used to be the artist who filled a whole Sketchbook in a week a whole Sketchbook over 100 pages but then I became the artist who only managed to draw a single sketch in five months the queendom was disappearing from my mind Queen shush felt like she was mourning me it's like she was saying goodbye to me because I'm not the same person anymore because of my anxiety and suddenly another shush appeared but she was not a queen she was called Shadow shush Shadow shush is a very bad person she used to tell me me that I was stupid that I was ugly that I couldn't do what I want to do that I couldn't achieve my dreams and that I wasn't deserving of the things that I had in life she was a constant radio of negativity of self-criticism she destroyed me and when I hit rock bottom something told me that the only way to combat this anxiety was to take out some charcoal some black paint and and start painting the room the walls of my room and who's the first figure that appeared when I actually started drawing 5 months after not drawing it was Queen shush she came back and suddenly drawing became the portal between me and queen shush it's like the entrance between my world and her world and she was starting to come back to me and the confidence was starting to come back to me and suddenly Rock Bottom wasn't such a bad place Rock Bottom is actually a cool place in My Kingdom if you want to visit it one day so after I finished drawing on my wall I realized that I went from a person who used to draw on sketchbooks this big or this big to a person who only can only draw on walls okay and more Walls and More qu and then she didn't even have a quom anymore she had a whole solar system why not if you can make your own planets just expand your solar system and then I started drawing on Floors as well so this was a 7 m space so about from here until the podium just a drawing on the ground of my solar system so had I not hit my lowest point of anxiety I would never have discovered my potential sometimes for us to grow we must break because our capabilities are much larger than us so I stand here in front of you my wonderful subjects and I urge you and invite you to discover the side of yourselves that you have never discovered to look into yourselves for that child that never actually grew up but you just forgot about because that child has the solutions to your everyday problems that child can actually change your perspectives about things you thought are obstacles and you know this very well because every time you talk to a kid you feel a lot better but what you don't know is that kid is right here thank you [Music] [Applause] everyone