Curious stories of coexistence

0:00This message comes from Invest 529, helping families save in the new year for their education goals. Learn how you can start 2026 strong with a 529 account at Invest529.com. This is the Ted Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking Ted Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Deliver it at Ted Conferences. To bring about the future we want to seek. Around the world. To understand who we are. Those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From Ted and NPR. I'm Manouche Zamorodi. These are the sounds of a family of otters. They're in a river.

1:01Some adults with their pups. Chattering and playing. And then they start to form sort of a line. A chain of otters. Corraling the small fish swimming amongst them. They herd fish with their pups. They technically corral them because they're often corraling them against a fixed surface like the side of the canal. This is Philip Johns. He's a biologist and geneticist who studies animal behavior like those in these otters. And I think what's going on is the pups are following really simple rules that might go swim next to mom if there's a fish in front of me eat it. And the adults are coordinating things through their vocalizations. So, you know, there's one vocalization that somebody's saying that's like, okay, dive. Here we go. And they all dive together. And that's really cool. Otter behavior is, of course, fascinating.

2:02But what's more surprising perhaps is where exactly these otters are. Not off the Pacific Coast or in North American rivers. These otters are living and thriving in the middle of one of the busiest, most modern cities in the world, Singapore. It's got this crazy, enormous architecture and it is kind of a city in the jungle. A city state home to six million people and all kinds of high-tech companies all surrounded by trees and waterways. And because of this geography, the city is a mix of steel and glass skyscrapers and wildlife. Some of that wildlife is extremely charismatic. We have pied hornbills, these birds with really, really large bills. We have things like flying lizards. They're in the genus Draco. We have collugos, which is one of my favorite.

3:02These strange, nocturnal and gliding mammals. And then there are tons of snakes in Singapore. Some of them are quite beautiful. And I remember when one of my early outings, somebody said, oh yeah, when you walk over there, just keep your eyes open because there's a cobra that hangs out around there. Yesterday I was walking home and I walk home between these brand new giant condos. They're over 30 floors high. They're glass and steel. And I look up and there's a white-bellied seagull. This very large bird circling, one of the condos. And it's just incredible because it's kind of like the structured position of nature and modernity. Which brings us back to the otters that live here too. The Asian small-clod otter and the more common and larger, smooth-coated otter. This is a really social species of otter. They have multiple broods that live with the dominant pair, the matriarch and the patriarch. And so you might have a family of 20 animals. And this might be, you know, three successive broods of offspring that are still living with the parents.

4:05Harmonious, large families of otters sound lovely. But here's the problem with all these otter families prospering side by side. They defend territories. They defend the violently. They fight. And the fights are injurious. You know, otters get hurt. Sometimes otters get killed. It's not pleasant to watch. Philip remembers one particular beef between two otter families that played out downtown. And by right downtown, I mean right downtown at rush hour. The otters would swim toward each other and they're screaming at each other and they're swimming around their biting and the water is beat to a froth. And you look on the banks and they're literally thousands, tens of thousands of people who are on their way to work. You know, walking along the banks of the rivers and it's just incredibly dramatic. Every day we hear about nations, different groups of people struggling to get along. Humanity seems unable to overcome its differences.

5:08But what can we learn from more unusual examples of strange bedfellows? How are different species or provocative scientific ideas? Maybe even conflicting emotions, finding ways to live in harmony? Well today on the show, coexistence. Ideas about what we can do to adapt, make peace with, maybe even find pleasure in conflict. When biologist Philip Johns first arrived in Singapore, he learned that this wasn't the first time that rowdy families of otters had made their home there. All of this was just incredible to me. Here he is on the TED stage. And part of the reason it was incredible to everybody is that the otters were returning after a long absence. So we know that there were otters in Singapore sometime before the mid-20th century, but then Singapore started to change. It modernized, it started to industrialize, and all of a sudden the waterways got filthy.

6:12What happened was they started to fill with sludge, industrial pollution, and dead animals to the point where they sank. And otters live in water. They eat fish in water, and they couldn't eat and live in waterways that were that dirty. So they left. But things changed again. Singapore enacted policies to clean up their waterways, and they were really, really successful. So all of a sudden, instead of having waterways that were filled with filth, we had waterways that were filled with fish. And from the otter's point of view, they were feeding troughs, so they came back. And now we have lots of otters all over Singapore. How many otters are we talking here? Are we talking like you turn a corner and you look at water and there's an otter there? Yeah, the otters live in the waterways, and the waterways typically have some kind of park around them. I think they're probably 20 families, and if you're an otter, being an otter is pretty cool in Singapore, because you wake up, you fish, you roll around in the dirt, you play, and then you go back to sleep.

7:17And it's kind of awesome. And so I can be on one side of the river, looking across the river, watching a family of otters do its thing through binoculars or a camera, and they're absolutely unfazed. So they don't take any mind of you. But I have to ask you, if you put in the words otter and Singapore, there are some crazy headlines that come up. Yeah, so not all the interactions have been benign. There have been a very few instances where the otters have bitten people. And I think all of those were cases where either somebody was behaving unwisely or where the otters had pups. And when otters have young pups, they become defensive. They're less likely to be sort of sanguine about people getting close to them. Yeah, because I have to say, especially the British press, seems to love picking up stories like this one. Fearing for his life. Man attacked by a pack of otters in a Singapore park, said he thought he was going to die.

8:20So 26 wounds on his buttocks, legs, and fingers, while on his usual 6am walk. That case, as I understand it, was a case where the man was very close to a group of otters. And it was a big family. And another man jogged directly through the group of otters. And in this case, the guy who got bit, it was kind of an innocent bystander. But the otters got confused. You know, it's hard to think of a situation where running through a group of wild animals is acceptable. And the otters aren't small. They can hurt somebody. So that's been one issue and it has been an issue. And otters also have eaten a lot of fish. In a private home and killed more than 55. You know, people keep fishing in Singapore. People keep coy. And these coy are large. They're expensive. They're long-lived. They're pets. They've been with us for over 20 plus years. You know, and when I say expensive, I mean the coy pond might have tens of thousands of dollars of coy in it.

9:24You know, those kinds of human wildlife conflicts are things that we can't kind of sweep away. We have to be realistic about them. But within that context, I think there's room for people and animals to coexist even in some places that's urban as Singapore. And so people who might start otter watching because they want to get photographs of cute pups might continue to do other things because they've formed a connection with nature. And we see this all the time that people care about nature when they form some connection to nature. Whether that connection is to otters or to a pair of hornbills on campus or to a bird that visits them on their balcony. We need these personal connections and we see them all over the place. Singapore has enacted a lot of policies that make these kinds of connections a lot easier. There are over 300 parks and nature reserves. Singapore has a plan that no one should be more than 10 minutes away from some kind of park. One of the effects of this is that people will have more chances to interact with nature and they'll have more chances to care.

10:31I think we're trying to get away from something where nature is over there on the other side of a fence or a wall or something like that. Nature is something that's around us and above us and beside us and that's true in lots of places including in cities. So I think this also raises other questions such as can cities be wildlife refuges? Is this something that we can protect and maybe foster and grow? As cities grow and there are more humans on the planet and we spread and take more space. What are some of the lessons that other city dwellers or urban planners can take from how humans and otters are figuring out ways to coexist? We have to be realistic that we can accommodate all wildlife. Having said that, we can be remarkably accepting of a lot of wildlife. One of the most amazing things to me was the mountain lion that lived in Griffith Park in Los Angeles for years.

11:37Not everybody is thrilled about it and there's good reason to be concerned about having a large wild cat living inside the city of Los Angeles. But I think for the most part people were kind of proud of it. If you go to social media sites of people who have things like camera traps in their backyard, a lot of people are thrilled that they have bobcats periodically in their backyard or that they're coyotes that come and visit in their backyard. And again, there is the potential for human wildlife conflict. Coyotes eat a lot of cats and dogs. We have to be clear-eyed about that. But I think in many cases we can make some very modest concessions. And when we do, co-existence is certainly possible and it's maybe something that can be encouraged. So, you know, that's my hope. It really is kind of wonderful to do things like walk to work and see gliding lizards, seeing lizards that are living and gliding from tree to tree. Right, you know, just amazing things like this or to see, you know,

12:38eagles flying among the skyscrapers, you know, just crazy things like that. You know, if familiarity breeds empathy, then I think it helps us to have more familiarity. That was Philip Johns. He is a biologist and associate professor at the Yale National University of Singapore College. You can watch his full talk at Ted.com. On the show today, ideas about coexistence. I'm Manush Zomorodi and you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. This message comes from Capital One, presenting sponsor of the 2026 Tiny Desk Contest. NPR Music's annual Tiny Desk Contest called on musicians from all corners of the country

13:38to submit an original song performed behind a desk. The lucky winner will play a Tiny Desk concert and headline a tour with NPR Music this summer. While the judges are busy reviewing the entries, you can follow along and choose your favorites. Explore a variety of original talent with videos performed everywhere from bedrooms to staircases to rooftops. See where this year's entries will take you at npr.org slash Tiny Desk Contest and travel even further with the Capital One Venture X card, offering premium benefits like a $300 annual Capital One travel credit. Plus, earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. One, two, three, four, five. Can you hear me? I'm Manush Zomorodi. Hi, Avi. Hi, good to speak with you. And today on the show, Co-existent.

14:38It sounds like it's clicking in and out a little bit. Okay, let me see. Maybe the connection. With other humans, animals, and whatever is out there in space. Would you mind just introducing yourself? Tell us your name and what you do. My name is Avi Loeb and I have the privilege of being a scientist, meaning that I can follow my childhood curiosity without pretending to be the adult in the room. If you know a lot about astrophysics, then you know who Avi Loeb is. For the past four decades, he has been a leader in the field. I'm a tenured professor at Harvard University, and then I was also chair of the Astronomy Department at Harvard for nine years. Avi has published over a thousand scientific papers on black holes and how the first stars and galaxies formed. I've been the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard. I was the founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative.

15:40He's written nine books. I chaired the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academy. I chaired the Advisory Board for the Breakthrough Star Show Initiative. Yeah, he's a big deal. But over the last decade or so, he has put that reputation in jeopardy by searching for something else in the cosmos. I think it will be the biggest discovery in science ever made in terms of its impact on the future of humanity. Science of life. We are searching for artifacts that may have been manufactured by extraterrestrial civilizations. That's right. Avi is looking for aliens. Yes, that's my latest hobby. But why? Why go on a quest that to some of his fellow scientists sounds ridiculous? You know, one reason I search for higher intelligence in interstellar space is because I don't often find it here on Earth.

16:42As far as obvious concern, the scientific method requires us to ask questions and seek answers. So, why is he doing this? He says, why not? But exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life has created a huge rift between him and many of his colleagues. They are questioning whether his ideas should even exist within their scientific community, just as Avi wonders whether we humans coexist with other life forms. Space is vast. It's measured in tens of thousands of light years just within the Milky Way galaxy alone. So, to imagine, you know, there are other beings like us on similar rocks far away. It's very natural. I mean, you're right. Everyone, we love to watch movies about other beings that might be out there in the universe. We love to think about this idea that we might not be alone.

17:46It is fascinating to people. And you are saying, well, you know, let's use the science to see if there is a way that it might be. Exactly. Let's use the scientific method, which is basically, let's not imagine anything the way Hollywood does. Let's not assume anything to make progress. We need to collect data. And, you know, no knowledge does not fall into our lap. And so, you have to put effort, money, time in order to design instruments that will detect those very challenging signals. Here's Avi Loeb on the 10th stage. I'm just a curious farm boy. And I wonder about the world around me. And I hate to behave like the adults in the room. Because they often pretend to know more than we actually know.

18:47And that bothered me since I was a young kid. And so, I decided to become a scientist and answer the questions based on evidence, not based on prejudice. And for 70 years, we've been searching for radio signals. This is equivalent to staying at home and waiting for a phone call. That may never come. Because nobody cares that we are lonely. A much better approach is to check if there is any object in our backyard that may have arrived from a neighbor's yard. Like a tennis ball that may tell us that the neighbor plays tennis. People often say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But they are not seeking the evidence. So, let's just look around.

19:48To understand why Avi began his search for alien life, we need to go back to 2017 when scientists spotted a strange object in the sky. This was an object called Omo Moa, which means a scout in the Hawaiian language. It was discovered by a telescope named the Panstars in Hawaii on Mount Haleakala. Omoa Moa was unlike anything Avi and other astrophysicists had ever seen before. And it raised a lot of questions. Namely, what was it and where did it come from? At first, we just knew that this is an object from outside the source and because it moved too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun. And so it was clear beyond any doubt that it came from outside the solar system. So, everyone assumed that it must be an asteroid or a comet. The type of objects we find within the solar system rocks or icy rocks.

20:48But there was no cometary tail. Even more perplexing was the way that the object moved through space. The object showed a push away from the sun by some mysterious force. And so it's as if there was something pushing it away from the sun. It's a non-garvitational acceleration. But there was no cometary evaporation, no gas or dust around it. So the question was, what is exerting this force on the object? Scientists looked for an explanation, any explanation. You know, some of my colleagues argued, maybe you can explain these anomalies by imagining a hydrogen iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen. So then someone has said, well, maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg. And then someone has said, well, maybe it's a dust bunny. But Avi wasn't convinced. He suggested another hypothesis that perhaps umu-amua was not naturally occurring. Perhaps it was produced by something or someone from another planet.

21:51Perhaps it was alien technology. And just the suggestion that it might be artificial got me into trouble because I was not supposed to consider that possibility. How dare you even think about that? Uh-huh. It's a rock of a type that we've never seen before, period. Avi published a paper about his hypothesis, which launched a slew of criticism from his colleagues, who said that he was leaping to the conclusion that umu-amua was proof of aliens without exhausting every other possibility. All of the alternative explanations had issues. And I just said, let's keep the artificial origin on the table because we are producing space trash. Another civilization might have done the same. Then in 2023, two scientists published a paper in Nature with a new explanation for umu-amua. That it was simply a comet with no tail.

22:51Scientists now call this a dark comet, an object that moves like a comet but looks like an asteroid. The explanation does not satisfy Avi. Because the only way you define a comet is by detecting its cometary tail. That's what a comet is. So if you say that an elephant is an unstriped zebra, that sounds strange because it's not the same animal. And so my point is, when you don't see a cometary tail, don't call it a comet. In 2024, researchers found more objects that move like comets but look more like asteroids, calling them dark comets. By now, most scientists have moved on from the umu-amua debate. But the public has not. Ever since his suggestion that umu-amua could be a sign of alien life, Avi has gotten more attention and funding from people outside the world of astrophysics.

23:52He may have lost favor with his colleagues but he's gained a whole new audience. Yes, on the one hand, the public really was extremely fascinated by this possibility and I got a huge amount of attention from the media, something that I was not familiar with before. And I was also contacted by a literary agent to write a book which ended up being extraterrestrial, became bestseller. And I participated in about the 3500 podcast interviews. Netflix is producing a documentary. Thanks to all this attention in 2021, Avi co-founded the Galileo project at Harvard. The research program dedicated to searching for alien technology on and near Earth. Avi and his team have received millions of dollars in private funding from a long list of uber-wealthy donors. We built an observatory at Harvard University. It's a unique observatory.

24:53Usually astronomical observatories are focusing on a small portion of the sky and looking at very distant sources. But here we are looking at the entire sky all the time and in particular searching for objects near Earth that are just overhead. And we are using infrared cameras, optical cameras, radio sensors, audio sensors and analyzing the data with machine learning software using state-of-the-art algorithms to figure out if there are any objects that are not familiar. I'm not trying to imagine what might be out there. I'm just saying we know about birds, we know about airplanes, leaves, clouds, satellites, balloons, drones. These are things we know about. And is there anything else? And if we find an object that is maneuvering in ways that does not mimic the flight characteristics of non-objects,

25:54we will write a paper about it and share it with the scientific community. And for me, having more data is really a bliss because once you have a lot of data, it will become clear whether we are dealing with a rock of a type that we've never seen before or maybe some artificial object. And at some point it would be impossible to ignore it. There are probably going to be people listening who are saying, why, and these are scientists on Earth right now, who would say, why are you giving Avilob the mic? You have become a bit of a pariah in your field. I want to quote one astrophysicist, Steve Dash, who said, people are sick of hearing about Avilob's wild claims. It's polluting good science, conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room. So a lot of iron towards you, a field that embraced you for the longest time

26:57and now, what's it like having them call you names? Yeah, I really don't like that, but one thing I learned is that, you know, if you don't want to get dirty, don't mud wrestle. So I don't respond to those. I am still the director of the Institute for Theory and Competition. I work with students, I work with postdocs. I just gave a lecture at the Black Hole Initiative about primordial black holes. So I continue to work on other subjects as well. And the people who know me are very supportive because they know that I'm doing it not out of any other reason than advocating for something I believe in that should be studied. And you know, I borrowed the approach from the research on dark matter that I worked on early on in my career. You know, we don't know what 85% of the matter in the universe is. So billions of dollars have spent on the searches for dark matter specific types of particles

28:01that were proposed by theorists like myself were very much rewarded by attention and so forth. So I have that experience. And then for me, it's no different. But for some reason, this particular subject is making some people very upset. And those are people who are upset about the public attention that I'm getting. You know, when I gave my class at Harvard in the opening lecture, I asked the students, what is the strongest force in academia? Is it gravity? Is it electromagnetism? They were quiet and then I answered the question myself. I said, no, it's jealousy. Okay, can I ask you, how would you know? You've given us several examples of all the data and specimens that you're collecting and sort of sifting through all of this. How will you know, for sure, what would be the moment where you could tell the rest of the world?

29:06Yes, we are not alone. We are co-existing with something else that is alive. Well, that's relatively straightforward if you have good enough data. For example, if we had an image of an interstellar object you see bolts and screws and you see that it looks like a technological object. There is no doubt that it's not a rock. That would be clear evidence. Let's say this did happen. How would it change things for us? You must have imagined this scenario in your mind. Yes, I think it will change our perspective because when you find a partner, it changes the meaning of your existence. We know that from our personal lives. And here I'm just talking about finding a partner in the global scheme of the cosmos. These are all the earth's sun systems. There are 100 billions of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

30:08We see so many houses like our own. And to me, it's very natural to imagine that there are residents that we can learn from. So just paying attention to our cosmic neighborhood will allow us to mature and realize that what we usually care about is not as important as the bigger scheme of things. And we could do better by paying attention to our neighbors. When I look up at the sky at night, I see 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy. They look like lights in cabins of a giant spaceship, the Milky Way, sailing through space. And I wonder if there are other passengers in those cabins. There are 100 billion of them comparable to the number of people who ever lived

31:10on Earth. It would be arrogant to think otherwise that we are alone, that we are unique and special. Especially if you read the news every day. We are not the pinnacle of creation. There is room for improvement. And so the next Copernican revolution would be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. Not only that we are not at the physical center of the universe, but actually, we arrive to the play relatively late. We are not at the center of stage. The play is not about us. We should be modest. We keep thinking that it's about us, but it's not. And we better find other actors that will tell us what the play is about. That was astrophysicist Avi Loeb. He is a professor of science at Harvard University's Department of Astronomy.

32:14Since we spoke, Avi has put out similar theories about another interstellar object called Three Eye Atlas, which was discovered in 2025. It is still being studied, but for now NASA and the majority of the scientific community maintain that its origins are natural, not alien. You can see Avi Loeb's full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Coexistence. I'm Anush Zamorodi, and you are listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. This message comes from Capital One, presenting sponsor of the 2026 Tiny Desk Contest, NPR Music's annual Tiny Desk Contest, called on musicians from all corners of the country to submit an original song performed behind a desk. The lucky winner will play a Tiny Desk concert and headline a tour with NPR Music this summer.

33:16While the judges are busy reviewing the entries, you can follow along and choose your favorites, explore a variety of original talent, with videos performed everywhere from bedrooms to staircases to rooftops. See where this year's entries will take you at NPR.org, slash Tiny Desk Contest, and travel even further with the Capital One Venture X card, offering premium benefits like a $300 annual Capital One travel credit. Plus, earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anush Zamorodi. On the show today, we are exploring coexistence. And our next speaker tells us the story of her family. A warning we do talk about suicide. We really can't have happiness without sadness. We can't have joy without pain. We also cannot have bravery without fear.

34:18Instead of being opposites, those things are teammates. It took writer Laurel Braitman decades to understand this lesson. But the seeds were planted in her childhood. Quite literally, she grew up on an avocado ranch outside of Los Angeles. We are about 20 miles inland in a really gorgeous canyon that is lined with fruit orchards, so you can often smell avocados blooming or lemon trees blooming. Her earliest memories are of her parents teaching her and her brother how to work on the ranch. You know, pulling out orchards that were failing and planting new orchards, rebuilding the main ranch house, restoring the corrals, and really just rehabbing the landscape in a lot of ways. We helped spread fertilizer and prune, and we would just kind of take breaks and play and then come back and help them. Alongside those farming chores,

35:20Laurel's father also taught them some other life lessons. But they were really specific skills to what my dad cared about, so all the member nations of the UN, how the Dewey Decimal System worked. You really wanted me to beat men at things that were stereotypically male. That was a thing, a point of pride, so he wanted me to be able to outfish any guy who might dare underestimate me or repair a carburetor or be really good at pool. These were skills he wanted to pass on, because when Laurel was three years old, her father was diagnosed with bone cancer. It started in his knee, then metastasized and spread to other parts of his body. And so from that day forward, we lived between scants. So sometimes we would get, you know, six months. Sometimes we would have six weeks. Longest we ever had before he had a recurrence was about four and a half, five years.

36:20Oh, wow. So that was a great period of time, but that's how we lived. You know, we tried to fit as much life and memory making and togetherness into those periods of time between therapy or surgery or treatment or scan. So for most of her childhood, Laurel grew up with a constant feeling of dread, knowing that every one of those lessons and memory making moments was her father's attempt to make the most of the time he had left. So another thing my dad did was that he taught himself how to be a beekeeper and he knew that ancient Egyptians had used honey to treat wounds and for other medical applications, it's a really good natural antibiotic. And because of that, honey that the Egyptians put away is still good. Like in some cases thousands of years later. So he started putting away a lot of honey, like buckets and buckets of honey.

37:23And he knew that the honey would outlive him. And I think he hoped that, you know, we would start it into our coffee or our tea long after he was gone and we would think of him and we would know how much he loved us. He was so scared and heartbroken that he was going to have to leave us before we were ready, before he was ready. Amazingly, he lived 14 years with this disease. So he lived his prognosis many, many times over. And, you know, he always used to tell us like, when I can enjoy life with you and your mom and your brother, I'm going to die. And then I was a junior in high school and I found a pill bottle. And there was a little note tied around it. There was dosage instructions on the note. And I kind of immediately knew what it was. Suddenly everything clicked into place and I realized my dad had a lethal prescription.

38:24You know, right to die medication was not legal in California though at the time. And so I knew I wasn't supposed to know about this. And so I just wrapped it up and I put it back in the cabinet. And then I never spoke of it again. And so that added another sort of dread layer I'd say to the everyday where I knew he had this but I didn't know when he was going to take it. And he didn't know when he was going to take it. Tell us how it finally happened. About six months later, he and I got into a terrible fight on the phone. I wasn't at home and I had called home. And he was hassling me about my college applications of all things. They were doing a few weeks and he was telling me I had to get them in. And you know, I was a surly teenager. And I yelled at him and I was like, I don't know why you're giving me such a hard time. Like I was so mad and I hung up on him.

39:24And as I was hanging the phone back in the credit card, hear him say strongly through the phone, I love you. And I was just like, I am not saying that back. He needs to know he's being unreasonable and I slam the phone down. And unbeknownst to me, that was the last time we would talk. And the reason he was hassling with me was because he knew he was going to take his medical aid in dying medication. And he knew I was going to be upset and not be able to apply to college. And he wanted to make sure I did it. And by the time I got home, a few hours later, he had taken his medication and he was unconscious and I would never hear his voice again. That was your senior year of high school? Yeah, I was 17. I mean, it's kind of amazing what happened next. You, at least on the face of it, absolutely thrived.

40:24You went to Cornell University. You played Division I sports after being an all-American lacrosse player. You were a class president. You were a Summa Kunloudi. You wrote bestselling books. Like you went to MIT for a PhD. Like you, again, on the face of it, did your father proud? Yeah, you know, I did. You know, in the wake of his death, I felt so guilty. I lived with a crushing sense of guilt that, you know, someone who was good would not have hung up on her dying father. Would have said she loved him. Here was somebody who had sacrificed everything for time to teach me things, you know, like how to beat a man at pool, you know? I felt because of that that when it really mattered, I had let him down. And so I took his dreams for me. And rather than seeing them as like apparent dreams for their child,

41:25like I took them as a literal to-do list. And I went down the list and I was like, okay, he wanted this for me. I'm going to do this. He wanted that. He didn't get to see this place. I'm going to make sure I get to see this place. And I really approached his dreams for me as like marching orders. I dealt with his death by doubling down on the things he wanted for me. And then in my mid 30s, I realized I was just completely exhausted. Laurel Braitman continues from the TED stage. I had been living my entire adult life in a way to prove to myself that I was good. I was using achievement and all of the shiny things that come along with it as a way of anesthetizing my own bad feelings of shame, regret, and fear. Those feelings were so big. I worried that if I let myself feel them for even a minute, I would never ever feel anything else again.

42:26But you cannot kill negative feelings, sadly, with work and avoidance. And mine came back with a jolt. On the outside, I was successful and thriving. And on the inside, I was anxious, terrified, and questioning my worth. By avoiding all of the negative feelings, I was muting the fantastic ones too. I was so scared about missing out and losing more of the best things in life, joy, awe, love, wonder, that I couldn't even let myself experience them. I needed to find a new way to be. I wanted to find a new way to be. I had learned that when a young person has a trauma, they can get stuck developmentally at that age of whatever age you were when the hard thing happened. So I was kind of like, you know, a place to see an ant in amber,

43:30but as a 17-year-old. So I got sort of developmentally stuck in some ways at 17. And I felt like I needed some help moving past that and opening myself up to feeling everything. I mean, how did you come to that realization? Because you say it took you years to understand that your father expected himself to be superhuman. And by extension, you too, how did you figure out that like, I mean, that could be the end of the story. And my father died and I took everything he taught me and I had this amazing life, but you know. Yeah, if only. I mean, what happened was a little bit harder to understand. And I reached the end of the list and I wasn't happy. Immediately, you know, what I noticed kind of first was that it was getting really, really hard for me to be in relationships. And I really wanted to be in love. And I wanted partnership. And when I got close to people, I got really uncomfortable.

44:31I think I was just, you know, scared to this day. I hate falling in love. You know, it's terrible to love anyone or anything because it can be taken from you. So I did a bunch of stuff. I interviewed a ton of grief specialists and therapists, but it would hit me the hardest was becoming a volunteer at a grief support organization for kids. So many of them thought they were bad too. They'd been out of the room playing when their mom died. Or they'd said something in anger to an ill parent that they regretted. And I could so clearly see that the painful things that happened to these kids were not their fault. For the first time, I was able to see that that was probably true for me too. By blaming themselves, the kids were making their losses make sense.

45:34Even though it hurt to blame themselves, it gave them a reason for the terrible thing that happened, like losing someone they love for no reason at all. Maybe some of you can relate. Often when we feel difficult things, we blame ourselves because it's easier than admitting we have no control. That's what I had been doing for the 25 years since my dad died. But just because you feel guilt and shame does not mean you did something wrong. Because you feel regret does not necessarily mean you should have acted differently. It sounds very simple. And it is very hard to accept. Life is nothing except one long sushi conveyor belt of things

46:34that are going to test you and teach you at the same time. What struck you about the way these kids were processing or dealing with losing someone in their life that was different from what you had gone through? At a center like this, the kids are around other kids who have had similar experiences and was a really powerful thing for me to watch. One activity we would do is draw your grief. And I remember sitting next to one child who was drawing a sneaker wave of grief kind of like a tsunami. And I remember them getting pretty sad explaining it. And then two seconds later, like they're on the jungle gym, you know, shrieking with joy. And watching that really affected me profoundly because I realized I could do the same for myself. That the hard things could live alongside my joy

47:36that I could be working and I could take a beat and I could let myself have a moment and then I could get right back into it. What did happy sad or this coexistence of two vastly different emotions or we think of them as being vastly different? What did that look like for you? I had to learn how to do it. I think I saw the depth of my despair and it scared me so much that I needed to bury it. And it really wasn't until I realized that that grief that I had tried to lock away and that was masquerading as self-doubt and as shame and guilt was going to keep me from what I wanted most in life, which is to love other people well and to be of service and to connect with people and places and things. But I will say it's like a daily practice and it comes up in the damnedest ways. So like I have this thing that I can't add someone

48:39to my favorite list of my phone or something terrible will happen to them. And so I finally like, I think we'd been married for like a year. I like finally added my husband to my favorite list on my iPhone and was like, you can do this all. It's going to be fine. I guess what? He is still with us. You know, I live in an area too, for example, where wildfires are now a constant threat and I have to make peace with that. So I was so scared that if I hung the things I loved on the wall that they would burn down, that it would slow me down from grabbing them as I left the house. So this is a daily, daily practice where I have to live with the anxiety and the fear and somehow let my enjoyment and pleasure find a way in around it and through it. That was bestselling author, Laurel Braitman. Her latest book is called What Looks Like Bravery. An epic journey through loss to love. You can see her talks at TED.com.

49:41By the way, in 2017, a wildfire did reach Laurel's childhood home. The ranch burned down, and she lost many of the structures her father had built to pass on. But miraculously, the chicken coop survived, which was incredible, had a few other things, including one small shed. And I was going through it, and we found a bucket of honey, like a five-gallon bucket of honey. And it was fine. It wasn't even smoky. Even in the wake of the devastation of the wildfire, the million other kinds of losses that come for us and had come for me, the honey itself was just perfect, as if it had just been poured in the bucket yesterday. And so now,

50:41I don't have any family photos left or very few, but I have honey. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. This episode was produced by James De La Housi, Katie Montellone, and Harsha Nahada. It was edited by Sauna's Meschkin Por, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Girin and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Nuguchi. Our audio engineers were Jimmy Keely, Becky Brown, and Zoe Vanganhulven. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablui. Our partners at Ted are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Danielle LaBella Rezzo. I'm Anusha Zomerodi, and you have been listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.

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