TED Radio Hour - We Contain Multitudes

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Original broadcast date: September 9, 2022. In an era dominated by labels, how can we fully embrace the nuances of being human? This hour, TED speakers share ideas for reconciling conflicting emotions and circumstances to make art and find joy. Guests include authors Gabby Rivera and Susan Cain, musician and podcast creator Hrishikesh Hirway, and Olympian Allyson Felix.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From TED and NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. And we're going to start with a story about a superhero, Marvel Comics, America Chavez. Okay, so here we are, right? America Chavez is kidnapped. She is attacked, right? And she wakes up and where is she in the middle of a boxing?

This is the series author Gabby Rivera. She knows that the last thing that she remembers is that she was kissing her ex. And who's across from her but that same ex? Magdalena, La Sirena, ready to box her out, ready to punch her out. And what happens? Bam! Magdalena throws the first punch. And America's like, but wait, we can work this out.

And Magdalena is like, nope, they've got my dad. America tries to dodge, but Magdalena is landing right and left hooks. Bam, bum, bum, bum. Then all kinds of other bad guys show up. All this chaos ensues. You've got folks like whipping out their change. Is this the end of America Chavez? Crash.

Heck no. Because America's grandma, the luchador, Madrimar, land in the ring to save the day. America and her luchador grandma lock arms and leap into the air. Boom! For the power stop. And it flattens and decimates.

And they save the day and each other. Ha ha ha. Go America. Go grandma. I love it. Oh, Gabby, this scene makes very clear that America has superpowers. But should we also add that she is the first Latina queer superhero in the Marvel universe?

Yeah. But what makes her stand out is people want to say it's like the identities, right? The queerness, the Latinidad, like, you know, the identities. But America Chavez is about, like, heart. She is about discipline and her own way. She wants to do things her own way. America, Chavez is like sharp on the outside and so soft on the inside. We all wish we were superheroes, able to fight off the meanies, protect our loved ones, and be true to ourselves.

But for many of us, that's just a fantasy. Dealing with self-doubt is a constant battle. And openly talking about identity can quickly turn into a polarizing political debate. How can we embrace the nuances of being human beings. Today on the show, we contain multitudes, stories and ideas from mere mortals who've managed to reconcile their conflicting emotions and circumstances to make art, find joy, even break Olympic records. Back to Gabby Rivera. As a child, the world was a scary place, and she felt like she was an easy target. at no point did I think superheroes would become such a huge part of my life. Here she is on the TED stage.

As a kid, I looked at them and I saw everything I wasn't. They had big muscles, supermodel good looks, and phenomenal cosmic powers. And me? I kind of looked like this, except shorter and with frisier hair. and I never felt powerful. I was always just one big ball of nervous, soft energy and superheroes, much like the bullies at school, didn't seem to have a lot of room for that, for me.

So I stayed away. And besides, who needs superheroes when you're surrounded by Puerto Rican women from the Bronx? My tias were cops and paramedics, My abuelas were seamstresses and sold jewelry up the street. And my mom got her master's degree in education and taught kindergarten in New York City public schools for over 30 years. So my superheroes were sitting around the dinner table with me.

And I don't know how much time you've spent with Puerto Rican women from the Bronx, but we're also some of the world's greatest storytellers. And I'd sit there at my grandmother's dining room table and I'd listen to you. to the women in my family tell these wild, rambunctious tales about navigating their lives in the Bronx. And I wanted to be them so bad. But I wasn't tough like them either. So mostly I listened. And I soaked it in. And I found myself gravitating to the soft threads in their stories. And I wrote those down. The funny, the goofy, the gentle. Those were my end, the story. storytelling. So much so that I wrote a young adult novel.

Yeah, so Gabby, you started writing in your teens, but it wasn't until 2016 that your first novel came out. It's called Juliet Takes a Breath. And the main character, well, it kind of sounds like how you describe yourself a chubby queer Puerto Rican girl. I know, what a stretch. Right? Well, right what you know. Was it an autobiography? I mean, sure. right? Like for me, I write what I know. I mean, maybe with America Chavez, I was able to like go bonkers, right? But there's still a lot of what I know in that story. And with Juliet, it was just kind of, it's almost like a fictionalized memoir of sorts of what it was like coming out and finding feminism and coming from the Bronx and being at odds with my mom and like feeling also free. Like at 1819. if you're able, if you're lucky, you finally like get a handle on yourself and you're out in the world in a way that you've never been. You don't have to report back to your parents for the most part. You get to like make your own choices. And so there's something really sacred and special and beautiful about that moment in all of our lives. And Julia takes a breath as like a love letter to that time. In so many of our.

our lives, you know. So yeah, it comes from my experience. When you start to understand that it's okay to be complicated and that's what being a grown up is in some ways. Mm-hmm. Yes. So your novel does really well. Author Roxanne Gay tweets about it. It totally takes off. People love it. It kind of changes your life. Oh, yes. And then you get a call. I got an email. What did the email say and who was it from? This email. was from Will Moss, an editor at Marvel, and was just like, hey Gabby, we read Juliette. Would you ever consider writing from Marvel? That's it.

That's the email. And I'm at my like little LGBTQ nonprofit job working, quote-unquote. And I get this email and I just was like, what? Like, is this real? You want to talk about changing the life. Marvel and America Chavez changed my life. And people were so excited because finally, someone who shared her identities, queer and Latina,

would be writing her story. And I saw that, right? And also when I looked at America, I saw a young Latina in survival mode. See, because her moms had sacrificed themselves to the universe when she was a kid and she'd been on her own ever since. no wonder she had to be tough.

And that link, that link of having to be tough, that rested heavy with me. Like I said, I'm from the Bronx, and the Bronx is tough. Tough like walking past sidewalk memorials and dodging cop towers on your way to the train type of tough. When stuff happens, that's bad. People are like, yo, you got to keep it moving. You got to keep trucking. Don't cry. Don't let it get to you.

And my mom and my tias and my abuelas. I never saw them take a moment to rest or to invest in self-care. And they're soft. It never left the house. And so that was the first thing that I wanted to give to America, the thing that I wished I'd been able to give to my abuelas and my tias, the thing that I'm trying to give to my mom now, permission to be soft.

Like, it's okay to sit in silence and go on a journey just to discover yourself, and your pain will make you crumble and you will fall, and you will need to ask people for help. And that's okay, and that being vulnerable is good for us. And so when it came to America's story, I wanted to give her the space to be human, to mess up, and to find soft on her own.

So she kind of had to quit her day job. You know what I'm saying? I had to give her a superhero sabbatical. And the first thing I did was enroll her in Justice Sonia Sotomayor University. Because where else would she feel safe and represented and liberated, but a university dedicated to the first Puerto Rican woman nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States? and her first class is intergalactic revolutionaries and you. And America is so excited.

She's ready to show off her strength. She's ready to show off her portal punching skills. And I stripped that safety net from her right away. And I limited her powers. And I changed up her location and shook up her world because that is what college is like, especially if you're alone. So when you got the assignment from Marvel, you went away and worked on it. But what was their response when you handed them your first draft?

Were they like, yeah, abuela time, softness and the first Latina Supreme Court justice? Or what did they think? Yo, listen, this is like my favorite part, too, of the Marvel story because that editing team, like, well. and Sarah were so game for all of it. They loved it. They ate it up. Especially when I was like, I want Storm to come in and mentor America Chavez because I had mentors and without them, I wouldn't be where I am.

They were like, we love that. Here's 40 PDFs of Storm from the 1980s. Let's give her the Mohawk. See what we've done and then see what you can do to build upon it, right? and I am super thankful for that. And I feel like any team or company or creative entity that is hiring someone based off of like their work, their identities, their queerness, their race, whatever it is, when you bring them in, you got to support them like that.

In a minute, the mixed response that Gabby Rivera got from Marvel fans for her America Chavez comic series. Literally two types of fans, right? fans that love the series and were just happily enjoying the ride and fans that were so obsessed what they hated, what they didn't think was right

with every bit of My America Chavez that they spent so much of their lives writing comments and making videos about it. I'm Anousa Zameroidi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Hey, Ted Radio Hour listener,

before we get back to the show, I want to let you know that we are working on a very very special series, investigating the relationship between our technology and our bodies, looking at how our digital habits affect us physically. It is coming this fall. You're going to get it right here down your TED Radio Hour feed in addition to our regular Friday episodes. I'm very excited about it. But I really need your help. I want to hear from you. How do you feel after a day spent working on your laptop or your computer.

Does it affect your shoulders, your neck, your back, maybe your mood or your energy? I have to say that I have to describe my days as a cycle of type, tap, and collapse. I would like to know how you would describe your body. Use the voice memo app on your phone, record yourself. Tell me, how does your body feel after a day of being on technology? Be specific. email it to us at bodyelectric at npr.org. Don't hold back. Give me the dirt. I want to hear from you. And thank you. Stay tuned. Body Electric, special series coming out this fall.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Inouche Zamorodi. And on the show today, we contain multitudes. We were talking to writer Gabby Rivera about her comic book series following the adventures of Marvel character, America Chavez, the first queer, Latina superhero with her own series. So America Chavez is essentially like this intergalactic, like, orphan who can punch portals into other dimensions. She has, like, super strength. And here she is, like, on her own. This series was a big deal for the comic book genre and a big deal for Gabby, too, because Gabby is also queer and Latina. What can I offer her? So much has been taken from her, and yet here she is, like, super powerful.

Gabby was thrilled at the support she got from Marvel Comics and most fans. She was horrified, though, by some of the hate and threats targeting her online, even before the series debuted. People who told Gabby that someone like her had no place in the Marvel universe, or even on planet Earth. So I'm a masculine presenting, like, Bush tattooed. Latina Dyke, essentially. And that's the kind of lesbian that ruins the party.

You know what I'm saying? And so people are always going to pick on that. People are always going to fight that. Men always, not all men, obviously, but like men predominantly will be more aggressive when I walk into a space. And so me doing America Chavez was essentially me walking into a very like white male dominated all-American type of space. And that like ruffled people's feathers.

You sound very calm about it now, Gabby, but it was more than just ruffling feathers, right? I mean, you were doxed, your address was put on the web, you got death threats. I mean, it sounds like the attacks online were pretty relentless. Did you think about quitting? Oh, yeah. I 100% thought about quitting, writing altogether, not just America Chavez, but I was like, I'm done. And like, I tried my best and this is what happens and the world doesn't want me here. Like, these people represent a great majority of this country and they don't want me.

And not only do they not want me, they want to, like, violently eradicate me from the earth. Why would I even bother doing this ever again? And, you know, that was such a, like, hard place. That was such an ache. and I honestly don't know how I made it through to the end of the series. Like Joe Volpe, my agent, just wrapped a huge blanket of protection around me and was like, whatever you need, we are going to help you get through this. And if you actually do want to stop, then we will figure it out.

But you didn't stop, obviously, and the comic did come out. And it was mostly really well received. Like, what kept you going? Actually, this is like one of the best parts of my writer experience was all of a sudden, right? Kind of towards the middle of America's run, mom and pop shops and comic book stores across the country started inviting me to do in-store signings. And it was beautiful. I'll never forget this one family, like, tattooed. I think they were Mexican.

and the dad hands me his baby and is like, I just want my son to be a feminist and be a good person. And your America run is part of that. And I was just like, it hit me with such a burst of joy. And it was like, no, remember, your people are right here. From the white boy comic fans to the little nerdy, non-binary, like, mixed-race kids who had never bought a comic before in their life and had bought America for the first time.

The, like, chubby, effeminate Latino men who are reading America and living for her, right? Like, all these points in the comic book shops is where I fell back in love with what I was doing. Yeah, so I know you just had a baby who we just, her, are hearing squawking. Oh, my little mama. Do you think it's going to be different for her? Do you think, like, who gives a crap that she's Latina, gay, all these, like, labels that we put first before we talk about what someone can offer to the world? Like, are we getting to a point where this is a generational thing that's shifting? I hope so.

I hope so. When I have done work and when I'm in community with, like, LGBTQ youth and even just, like, youth that is focused on justice, right? like coming up in the world, fighting for truth and what's right. I believe that there is a greater world possible. I believe that my little baby who is like screaming her head off out there will at least know that she is loved, right? She will know that she is loved and that she can be anything she wants to be and that just as she is is enough.

That's writer Gabby Rivera. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, we contain multitudes, which can refer to the various ways we identify ourselves, and also to how we see the world, personality and perspective. It's something that psychologists have been trying to understand for decades. Back in 1910, for example, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduced, the concepts of introversion and extroversion. And the world in general, particularly America is extroverted like hell.

The introvert has no place. Because he doesn't know that he beholds the world from within. And the world latched onto these binary terms, taking them to mean that we each fit into one of these two boxes. Either you are an introvert or an extrovert. But that's not. what Young intended. There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure importure.

Those are only terms to designate a certain banschant, a certain tendency. For instance, the tendency to do we do this? Why do we find comfort in labeling ourselves? It's such a difficult thing because as humans, you know, we naturally kind of sort people into categories and types just as a way of making sense of the wish of information coming at us. This is author Susan Kane. She's best known for her 2012 book, Quiet, the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking.

It offered a modern analysis of Carl Jung's ideas. Quiet was a book that looked at the bias that we have in our culture in favor of a very kind of extroverted self-presentation and the way in which that is a colossal waste of talent and energy and happiness for the a third to a half of the population who are actually introverts. So you explore this idea that two conflicting labels or emotions can both be true. In your new book, which is called Bitter Sweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Yeah. So what bitter sweetness is is it's this deep recognition of the way in which joy and sorrow

in this life are forever paired and that everything and everybody we love most will not be here forever but that what comes with this deep recognition of these truths there comes a kind of piercing joy at the beauty of the world and a kind of gateway to creativity

and to human connection like the sense of us all being humans together who are all in this sort of strange situation together and then occasional moments of transcendence. I mean, to me it's very similar to quiet in that you're saying you are not one thing or the other. You are not introverted or extroverted. You are a mix. You are not experiencing just sadness or just happiness, that there is so much, nuance to the human experience and to each of us who we are. We contain multitudes.

Yes, exactly. We contain multitudes. And the problem that we have had in our current situation is that we're not supposed to contain those multitudes. You know, there's a very strong message that's delivered to all of us that we should be perpetually. smiling, and if that's not how we feel, we should act as if we feel that way. And we should only express the most optimistic points of view and really only talk about kind of that side of our emotional ledgers. And my argument here is that there's no human who feels that way all the time, number one. And so when we're not telling each other the truth, then we can't truly be connecting with ourselves and with each other.

You spend the book exploring this idea of experiencing these two things at once, longing, sorrow, and the beauty and creativity even that that can spark. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this paradox of tragedy as the philosophers refer to it you write and what they've been puzzling over for centuries. Yeah. So the paradox of tragedy is the question of why it would be that we listen to sad music. Why do we watch movies that make us cry? Why is there a tradition of tragic drama where you actually get yourself out of your home and go to watch performed on a stage very difficult and tragic events? Why would we do that?

And I in particular had been puzzling over my extreme, intense, positive reaction to sad music that I have felt all my life. I dedicated this book to Leonard Cohn, who I love beyond all reason. And have always experienced when I would listen to that kind of music, a kind of sense of uplift and joy and love and connection, you know, and not sadness at all. Here's Susan Kane on the TED stage. Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow when the rest of the time we will quite naturally do anything we can to avoid it? There's actually a scholarly debate raging over this question, but I have come to believe that really what we are craving at bottom is that state of longing, that joy that's laced with sorrow, which is often triggered when we experience something so exquisite, that it seems to come to us from some other world. And this is why we give painters and rock stars

such exalted status, because they're the ones who bring us the breath of magic from that other place, except it only lasts a moment, and we really want to live there for good, because we know that we live in a deeply flawed world, and we have this stubborn conviction that we come from a perfect and beautiful one

that remains forever out of reach. And maybe that sounds depressing to you, but this state of mind, this longing, is actually the deep source of all our moonshots and our loves. It's because of longing that we play Moonlight Sonatas and build rockets to Mars. And it's because we're all in this same strange state of exile that we have the capacity to emphasize with each other in the first place. You trace it back to the ancient Greek and Plato who called it Pathos. Is that the same as empathy? Is that what that is? It's a deep empathy for the humanity, the eternal struggle? Yeah. One of the really cool things is that this longing impulse that we were just talking about, you see it expressed across time and across cultures.

So, for example, with the ancient Greeks, that meant the longing for everything that is most good, most beautiful, most true, and that is fundamentally unattainable, and yet we long for it. But the lesson that's embedded there is that the very act of longing for it is what brings you a little closer to that for which you long. And so, for example, in Homer's Odyssey, the whole epic adventure starts with Odysseus weeping on a beach out of homesickness, because he's long. for home. That's the fundamental human state of his longing for home. And it's understood that he's been away from his home for 17 years and it's the longing to return there that propels him on the adventure in the first place. I mean, as you, when you put it that way, like, and once you talk

about it, you start to see it everywhere and in movies and music and books and art. And yet we're in this sort of denial about accepting the sadness with the joy. Is that an American thing? Is that a cultural thing? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a cultural variation. You know, and there are studies, for example,

that look at the difference in smiling among different cultures. And like in the U.S., people smile way more than they do in others. And there are certain countries in which people would view excessive smiling as either, you know, foolish, Like, you must really not know what's out if you're smiling that much.

Or insincere and dishonest. You know, because, again, if you're smiling that much, you're not telling the truth about what you truly feel. So there's definitely a lot of variation there. And in this country, in the U.S., a lot of it can be traced to the rise of business culture in the 19th century. you started to have this language of winners and losers. And you can trace the rise of the word loser, to the point that even in the Great Depression, there were newspaper headlines

somebody would lose their fortune and kill themselves on the street. And the headline would be, loser kills himself on the street. And it's like if we, if we truly see people and ourselves with that kind of a false dichotomy, then you want to do everything that you can to not have the emotional affect of a loser. So you don't want to engage with loss. You don't want to talk about it.

You don't want to express the emotions associated with it. You want to show that everything's going well for you. You're cheerful, you're optimistic, you're forward leaning, all of those things. And you end up getting a very flat emotional landscape. these labels, winner and loser, all these labels, they bring us back to our theme, this idea that we are all so much more nuanced than we often give ourselves credit for. Yeah, I think that is so true. And I'll tell you, it's also something I have really struggled with in terms of how to talk about questions like introversion and extroversion, you know, and being bittersweet. because on the one hand, I do believe that these tendencies or these orientations or whatever word we want to use for them, they are meaningful. And they do explain some of the amazing variety of differences between humans.

And at the same time, as you say, like, I mean, humans are gloriously complicated. and we contain these multitudes. And so how do you make sense of that? And I guess I just keep coming back to the idea of holding two truths at the same time, you know, that there are differences in temperament, there are differences in ways of being, their outlooks, their sensibilities that we all have that make us who we are and distinguish us from each other in these,

really wonderful and fascinating ways. And we're not ever all one thing. That's author Susan Kane. Her book is called Bitter Sweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And you can see all of her talks at ted.com. On the show today, we contain multitudes. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to tell you about our

next bonus episode for Ted Radio Hour Plus listeners. It's coming out soon and it's a conversation with the incredible theater director Amir Nizar Zawabi. He created a nine-year-old Syrian refugee who's actually a huge puppet who journeyed across thousands of miles in Europe to draw attention to the refugee crisis. You're going to get an update on a mall and you will hear about his new project that is coming soon and is even bigger. That's coming out Wednesday. Not a TED Radio Hour Plus supporter yet. We'll join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content and all our episodes sponsor-free. Go to plus.npr.npr.org slash TED, or you can give it a try right in the Apple podcast app. And thanks. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. Today on the show,

we contain multitudes, which brings us to a very personal story about success and failure and feeling like you can be both at the same time. I mean, I started making music when I was in high school with piano lessons when I was a little kid. I started playing the drums instead of piano, and then I started playing in bands. And then from playing in bands, I started to learn guitar, and then from playing guitar, I started to write. songs. This is Rishi K. Heirway. And in college, that was kind of my second major. My unofficial second major was playing in a band and playing shows. And that was when I first recorded an album and music was my whole life. What did your parents think when you told them

that you wanted to be a musician, a professional musician? Their first reaction was really, that's a great choice for a hobby. But yeah, when I said, this is what I want to do for my job. I think they kind of had a, whoa, okay, hold on, hold on. Despite his parents' misgivings, Rishi did become a musician. He and his band put out several albums, and they did okay. But when they put out another one in 2012 and it didn't hit big, Rishi decided to take a break from songwriting. I think some part of me hoped that it was just a pause and that maybe someday I would get back to it. But there's also some slice of the pie that also thought maybe I'll never get a chance to.

Maybe that'll be it. For a little while, Rishi figured he would make a podcast about music. You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. In every episode of Song Exploder, Rishi coaxed a musician to break down the elements of one of their songs and share the backstory of how it was made. Soon, some of the most famous musicians in the world were coming on the show. Like Bjork, Metallica, you too. Carly Ray Jepson, Lord, R.E.M. Yo-Yo Ma.

And Song Exploder? Exploded. My favorite episode is the Fleetwood Mac episode. I mean, you had such an intimate conversation with Lindsay Buckingham. I sort of was coming to terms with the fact that, I may not be over this person, and at the same time, I'm aware that I've got to accept what's happened and move on. Because it made me think about a song that I thought I knew completely differently. And that's definitely the hope that after you listen to an episode, whether it's a song you've never heard before or whether it's a song you've heard many times before, that you'll come away with it, listening to the song differently and appreciating what went into it. What did you start to learn about yourself as a musician, the more you made Song Exploder?

I'm assuming there was both positive and negatives to this. Yeah, there were. I think the negative part I started to feel the effects of pretty quickly, which was when I would try to write a song of my own while I was making the podcast, I really felt discouraged about my own music because I had just, the week before talked to somebody I really admired, an idol of mine maybe, and I would start to write a song and I'd think, what is the point of me trying to write a song when there are so many musicians who can achieve the feeling that I'm trying to achieve so much more articulately and

so much more precisely and beautifully than whatever I'm doing? I would feel like it was a little bit pointless and, you know, it was much easier to kind of turn back to the podcast and say, well, here's a chance for me to tell a story about this important artist and their journey. And maybe that's more important work than me doing something of my own. It really reinforced that the kind of writer's block and self-doubt that I was in that started the show. Oh, that's frustrating. Did that mean that you couldn't even enjoy the success of Song Exploder? Because I don't know, part of me thinks that maybe you were annoyed by how successful Song Exploder was.

because you're like, well, this is not my first love. Music is my first love. It was complicated for sure. Yeah, because it was more popular than my career as a musician. So this leads up to your TED Talk, the one that you gave in 2021. It was a talk about your love of unraveling music, of song Exploder, of learning to be a good interviewer and a good listener. And then in the talk, you got really personal.

You basically exploded and explained your song, a new song that you had written. This was a big deal for you, right? Yeah. It felt like a way for me to raise the stakes of what I was talking about. And I thought, well, I could talk about this in a really personal way. if I used an example of one of my own songs. Whenever I put out a song, I was always a little sad that no one else was going to get to hear

the things that I had heard when I was making it. Here's Rishi K. Sheerway on the TED stage. Let me show you what I mean. Here's a clip from a song of mine. Okay, what's your experience when you listen to that? You might like it, maybe. Or you might hate it. Or you might say, I don't know, dude,

it's 20 seconds of a song. What do you want for me? Which is fair. What I hear is impossible to expect anyone else to hear. It's not just the cello part and the guitar part and the drumbeat. It's also all the things that I lived through in order for that music to exist. Years ago, when I was making my first recordings, I would play my songs over and over and over again in my bedroom.

My music career wasn't really something I could talk about with my parents. They were hardworking immigrants, whose dream for me had been to become a doctor or a lawyer. But every now and then, I would hear my mom humming one of my songs, just to herself in the kitchen. And that felt like some kind of unspoken approval. And over the years, whenever I would hear my mom humming one of my songs, it made me so happy. Last fall, my mom passed away. And a few weeks after her funeral, I had a dream where I got to see her and talk to her and visit with her for a little bit.

And I woke up filled with longing and sadness, but also gratitude for this moment and this dream. And I ended up writing a song about it. It's so good to see you. It's so good to see you. In the bridge, I stopped singing for a little bit, and I just hummed a melody. I was thinking about my mom.

And I wanted to try and represent her in the music in some way. One of the people who I talked to about the song while I was making it was Yo-Yo Ma. I told him, this is what the song is about, and this is what the music is supposed to do in this part. And I asked him, do you think that the cello could represent my mom's voice? And he listened to everything that I said, and then he played those notes. Okay, here's everything together again. So now, what's your experience when you listen to that? every conversation has the potential to open up and reveal all the layers and layers within it.

And personally, I hope that I can keep looking for those ways in so I can experience the depth and the richness of someone else's ideas every chance I get to hear them. Rishi, the reason I wanted to include you in this episode was because I felt like what you did on stage really unpacked all your multitudes as a person, as a musician. that that's what your song did. And it really moved me. I really, really appreciate that. I think for a while I felt like I left my own personal music career behind and started this other project and ended up going down this path. And they felt like they were kind of mutually exclusive. But then I started to realize like actually doing this other project had been this incredible gift because it let me

learn from now hundreds of other artists about their insecurities and their feelings and the things that they wanted to express and the kind of people they wanted to be. And after my mom passed away and I decided I was going to start writing music again, I thought, well, I was going to write this song about my mom. Nobody else is going to write that song. I just thought, okay, well, maybe there is no point in making music in terms of what it might serve the world. But, But it's going to be important to me, and that's enough of a reason. That's Rishi K. Shirway. He's the host of Song Exploder and a professional musician. You can hear his full talk at TED.com.

On this episode, we have been talking about reconciling our conflicting emotions and the various ways that we present ourselves to the world. But what happens when our identities are at odds with our ambitions, maybe even jeopardize our livelihoods. This summer, track and field Olympian Allison Felix raced for the last time, winning her 19th medal. A few months earlier, she gave this TED talk about how hard the sporting world made it for her to become a mother

while also competing. One of the scariest moments of my career started on a dark October morning in 2018. I'm a professional athlete in my training schedule, can be a lot. Six days a week, five hours a day. Still, I never trained that early. But on this day, a special type of fear brought me out at 4 a.m. before the sun. A fear that someone might discover a secret I'd been keeping. I was six months pregnant, and I was scared enough to train in the dark, so that no one would see the life that was growing inside of me. I fear that if a fan or someone posted a photo,

that my sponsor would immediately change their mind about wanting to work with me. I feared that I would be forced to choose between motherhood and being a competitive athlete. Getting pregnant in track and field has been called the kiss of death. I have been watching women that I respect and teammates of mine, high pregnancies since I was 19 years old. I've seen women have to make gut-wrenching decisions, like deciding whether to recover their health or return to the sport. I know what some of you might be thinking.

We all choose to get pregnant, right? If a sponsor doesn't want to pay an athlete who's not out on the track winning, that's just part of the deal, right? Well, I think the deal's rigged, and I think it's timely change. Sports companies love to tell women that they can have it all.

I remember meeting with Nike leadership in 2010, and they said they believed in women and girls, and if I joined Nike, I could empower them. And I believe that. But guess what? Girls come from somewhere. And women having babies during child-wearing years is something that should be celebrated, not punished.

It should be a part of a normal, thriving, professional athletic career. And women in all fields should never feel the need to hide a pregnancy at 4 a.m., in the dark, so that they won't be photographed during that. thing that they love. When I was on the track that day, my mind was racing with the consequences of my decision to start a family. I had already been going through a difficult renegotiation period with Nike, and they were already offering me 70% less than what I had previously been making, and that was even before they knew about the baby. So, when I told them about my pregnancy,

I asked for a clause in the contract that specified they wouldn't reduce my pay within 12 months of giving birth. They said yes. But it was only a yes for me. They weren't ready to offer that same protection for all female athletes. They weren't ready to set the precedent. A couple days later, my agent called me. Nike wanted to use me in a commercial for the Women's World Cup. I couldn't believe it. Nike wanted to use me to tell women and girls that they could do anything, even though the contract before me said the exact opposite. I knew what I had to do. I knew I had to leave.

I knew I was afraid, but I did it anyways. I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling out Nike's maternity policy. And I wasn't the only one. My teammates and I, we helped turn the tide. Now Nike offers 18 months maternity protection.

And other sponsors came forward and they announced their new guarantee for female athletes who start families while being sponsored. Too late for me, but amazing for the women coming up now. I didn't resign with Nike, and I'm here to tell the tale. But more than that, I'm here to tell you that you can do it too. It's when you take a stand that you start to understand how to overcome that fear and how to make a change for yourself

and sometimes for others. I made it back to the Olympics two years after giving birth, I won a gold and a bronze, and I became the most decorated American track and field athlete of all time. All while my daughter was watching. I was running for so much more than for medals or for a time on the track. I was running as a representation for women and for mothers and for anybody who had been told that their story was over. We have got to stop forcing people to choose between people,

parenting and doing the work that they love. And we've got to stop pretending that we're not making those decisions because the results affect us all. You don't have to be an Olympian to create change for yourself or for others. It will typically happen in moments of fear when you don't see the path forward. You have to acknowledge those feelings and you have to fight to move forward. It won't be easy. But what I can absolutely promise you is that it will be worth it. Thank you. That was Olympian and mother, Alison Felix. You can find her talk and hundreds more at TED.com.

Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about our multitudes. This episode was produced by James Zalhouci, Katie Montalione, and Catherine Seifer. It was edited by Katie Simon and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner, Sanaz Meshkampur, Fiona Giron, Matthew Cloutier, Julia Carney, and Beth Donner. Our audio engineer is Stu Reshfield. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Danielle Ballerzzo.

I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.