Gillian Nycum

Transcript

I shouldn't be here, but it's not what you might think. I haven't survived some plane crash or lion attack, although that might have been a better story. Three weeks ago, I'm in my little home office. I'm fairly recently self-employed following a reinvention, and I'm anxiously trying to reconnect with what exactly it is I've reinvented myself into. I'm rewriting a chapter of my book for like the third time, and I think, "Hmm, this could be a keynote." So, impulsively, I write to Rina, the mother hen of Speaker Slam, to see if she's had any last-minute openings.

Within an hour, I am signed up. And within 3 days, that keynote idea feels really boring. Then, one night just over 2 weeks ago, I wake up with an idea. I record it into my phone all slurry and yawning, and go back to sleep. I dream I am standing right here telling you this exact story, except I hadn't written a single word. The plan was to wing it. It sounds like a nightmare, but it had all the ambiguity of a dream where it was at least as likely that my slam would slay as it would suck.

The next day, I waited through my recordings to remind myself of that midnight stroke of genius. Do you guys want to hear it? Yes. The brilliant idea is writing this story about writing this story. What? It's so random. But something held me there. It was the first four words of that otherwise unwritten story. I shouldn't be here. And then, the most amazing thing happened. The story wrote itself while I sat there and let it become. We tend to think of reinvention as something we author or effort.

Get clear on what you want and then make it happen. But we don't always make change. Sometimes we discover it. And it's right there in the word. The Latin invenire means to come upon, to find, to discover. Reinvention then may be finding yourself again. Now, finding requires us to notice. And nothing quite gets our attention like a crisis, does it? A loss, a layoff, a near-death. Something loud enough to stop us in our tracks and maybe even justify the strange things that we do next.

But life doesn't always speak loudly. Nothing was wrong. I had simply outgrown what was right. A burning fire up against a pretty high glass ceiling. And oh, the guilt for not being grateful. My inspiration to grow too big for the place I was in. Which brings me, well, obviously, to snakes. Before a snake sheds its skin, a new skin has already formed underneath. The old skin dulls, its eyes cloud over. It actually sees less clearly right before it molts. And then it seeks out friction.

Rocks, branches, rough ground, and it moves with it until the old skin peels away. It doesn't escape the friction the way we do with our busyness and our scrolling. It uses it. The danger with me wasn't that I couldn't see who I was becoming. Maybe I wasn't even supposed to yet. The danger was that I would drown out or jump out of the friction. That I'd wait for clarity or worse, crisis, to give me permission to listen. Maybe we don't need to figure things out.

Maybe we need to stay what's here long enough to find out, especially when it sucks or doesn't make sense. I woke up in the middle of the night with four words. I shouldn't be here. I didn't know what they meant, but I stayed with them and they brought me here. Thank you.

Transcript generated from the recording and lightly cleaned. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.

Transcript

Well, that's what my teenage son asked me. I just come home from work. I'm trying to get dinner on the table. I'm chopping carrots, flipping meat, sorting recycling, washing dishes. My jaw is tight, my shoulders are raised, my nervous system is humming. Be efficient. Any parents in the room? This scene ring a bell? You know what I'm talking about. And Henry, my brilliant, charming, autistic son is sitting at the kitchen island narrating his entire inner universe. He's been telling me about his wife.

She's a shark. Actually, everyone is a shark except for him. They walk upright, they wear suits, they go to the office. How do they push grocery carts? Do they have lungs or gills? It's imaginative. It's intricate. And I am barely listening. And then he asks me, "How many elephants do you think are gay?" He's got that sideways little smile. But not me. I'm wound so tight, I'm like a guitar string about to snap. I take a breath through the overwhelm, through my irritation, and in that pause, oh, actually, hang on just a sec.

I want to leave a message for Henry. Hi sweetie. I know you're listening. I just want to say this is not a story about you being annoying. This is a story about me finding my way to you. [snorts] And in that pause, something loosens. I've been learning about autism, about the different ways that minds organize the world, and about how connection doesn't always appear in the way I expect it to. And suddenly, it's not just information in my head. Like a download, it drops into my body.

These long narratives, these random questions, they're not disruptions, they're bids for connection. How many moments of connection do you miss every day simply because it arrives in a form you never thought to recognize? And not only is my sweet guy reaching for me, he's showing me how to reach back. So, I turn to him. How many elephants are gay, Henry? He grins. And as randomly as he asked the question, I reply, "Purple!" We both burst into laughter. And in that tiny, ridiculous moment, I meet him in his world, and we create a moment of belonging together.

It only took me 15 years to fully recognize the potential for belonging he'd been offering me all along. What about the teacher who has him in class for 10 months? The colleague you quietly label as a lot? The person whose way of communicating slows your meetings down? Roughly one in five people are neurodivergent. That's millions of minds organizing the world in ways that don't mirror dominant expectations. I think about how much time people like Henry spend navigating spaces that weren't designed for them.

Masking, shrinking, being misunderstood. Imagine what those minds could build if they didn't spend so much energy just figuring out how to belong. And it makes me wonder, what if the problem isn't that people like Henry struggle to fit into the systems we've built, but that the systems we've built fail to recognize how many forms brilliance can take? Because sitting at my kitchen island is a mind that sees the world and senses patterns in ways many of us miss. In a future that's getting more complex by the minute, we're going to need all that intelligence.

When difference shows up in front of you, are you willing to meet it? Or do you only see what feels familiar and miss the brilliance standing right in front of you? When we pause, when we come with just a little openness and curiosity, we don't just change a moment in the kitchen. We create the conditions for belonging one interaction at a time. And that's not just a parenting lesson. It's a human one. Because belonging doesn't always appear, and connection doesn't always appear the way you expect it to.

Sometimes it's disguised as a purple elephant. So, I'll leave you with the question Henry asked me. How many elephants do you think are gay? [screaming] Purple. Thank you.

Transcript generated from the recording and lightly cleaned. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.