I Almost Backed Out of My TEDx Talk. I'm Glad They Didn't Let Me.

In 2021, I was invited to give a TEDx talk in Philadelphia.

My first reaction was gratitude.

Subscribe

My second reaction was panic.

The talk was called Square One at 60, and unlike most of the writing I'd done throughout my career, this wasn't comedy. It wasn't fiction. It wasn't a television script.

It was my life.

The story centered on a period when I had reached age 60 and found myself starting over. I was sleeping on a friend's couch, had no car, no credit card, and less than five hundred dollars in the bank. I was divorced, unemployed, and wondering how my life had veered so far from the plan.

Then the pandemic arrived.

Like many public events, the TEDx program was postponed. Secretly, I was relieved. In fact, I was hoping the organizers would simply forget about me.

I wasn't worried about speaking in front of people. I'd spent decades in television writers' rooms and around performers. What frightened me was something else entirely: telling the truth.

The talk was deeply personal. It included mistakes, failures, disappointments, and setbacks that I normally kept to myself. I worried about how people would react. Would they think less of me? Would they see me as a failure?

Months passed.

Then the TEDx organizers called and informed me that the event was back on.

Apparently, they had not forgotten about me.

I briefly considered finding a way out of it, but they encouraged me to move forward. Looking back, I'm grateful they did.

On November 14, 2021, I stood on the TEDx stage and told a story I'd spent years trying not to tell.

The central idea was simple. Many of us reach a point where we believe we're back at "Square One." A lost job. A divorce. Financial hardship. A dream that didn't work out. We convince ourselves that everything that came before somehow no longer counts.

What I eventually learned is that life isn't a straight line. It's a collection of experiences -- good, bad, embarrassing, triumphant, and everything in between. We are not defined by the order of those experiences, but by the whole of them.

When the talk ended, I honestly had no expectations.

Then something unexpected happened.

People began writing to me.

Some were in their sixties. Others were in their twenties and thirties. Many told me they felt stuck, discouraged, or convinced they had fallen behind in life. They said the talk gave them a different way to view their own stories.

To date, the talk has generated more than 1.2 million views.

Even more surprising, it opened doors I never anticipated.

One of those doors led to writing for the Oscars. Since delivering the talk, I've been hired to write for the Academy Awards four years in a row. It's a career opportunity that never would have crossed my mind when I was sitting on that couch years earlier wondering what came next.

Life has a funny way of refusing to follow our plans.

The irony isn't lost on me. The talk was about starting over, and it ended up creating another new beginning.

If there's a lesson in all of this, it's that the things we most want to hide are often the things that connect us to other people. The story I was afraid to tell turned out to be the story people most wanted to hear.

For anyone who feels they're at Square One right now, I offer the same thought I shared in the TEDx talk:

You may not be at Square One at all.

You may simply be in the middle of the story.

If you'd like to watch the TEDx talk, "Square One at 60," it can be viewed here:

[Note: Should this link fail to work on your browser, simply hit the share button below and the link will appear. I'm told posting links on Patch can get glitchy at times. Thank you.]