when to retire talks (& other precious things)
thoughts from a life-in-progress ✨
Last week, I spoke at beyond tellerand, a conference for creative people (and possibly my favorite conference in the world). I’ve given the talk, “take up space” at just two other conferences previously, React Rally (August 2023) and Outlier (May 2023), and at both React Rally and beyond tellerand I started the talk by saying that I was going to retire the talk after these three conferences.
Afterwards, I had a lot of people tell me that I shouldn’t retire the talk yet, that more people needed to hear it. It was extremely flattering (one fellow ReactRally speaker even told me that it needed to be a TED talk) and very tempting. Especially because making new talks take a lot of time and energy, and this one took me almost a month of full-time work on and off, not to mention all of the emotional ups and downs of working through all that I wanted to say with it.
But that’s also just it: it’s so emotional, I’m drained as soon as I start practicing and re-memorizing, and the tension doesn’t leave until well after the talk is over. And it is fully memorized because—unlike previous talks where I’d outline a rough structure of bullet points, memorize those bullet points and ad-lib in between, each word in this talk is intentional. It is choreographed down to the pauses and intonations and inflections. It’s that way because otherwise I’d lose myself to my emotions on stage, I needed everything scripted so that I could enter a flow state as soon as I got started.
I got the gut instinct that I wanted to retire the talk by the end of the year, ever since I first gave the talk at Outlier. I say at the beginning of the talk that because it’s such a personal talk, I only feel comfortable giving it in front of audiences I've known before and trust will receive it with kindness—hence those very specific three conferences. I can’t imagine going through that level of emotional distress for more conferences 😂
And I’m really glad that I made that decision for myself, because my feeling of relief after my beyond tellerand talk was almost immediate. I was so glad to not having to give it again, I didn’t even realize how important it was that I had a clear finish line for myself.
And good thing I did, because I noticed that in this last round of practicing, I was starting to get desensitized to my own words. Parts that used to be so emotional to me that I’d start tearing up, I was breezing past with barely a blink. And that scared me, because those emotions—both the good and bad—are precious to me, and I don’t ever want to be desensitized to them.
I also arrived at the decision because I was inspired by a comment that a friend had made, that she only ever makes three editions of her art and afterwards she never revisits them again. When I asked why, she replied that because each of her pieces are so time intensive, if she made more every time someone asked to buy one, she’d never have time to dedicate to new work.
That was eye-opening for me, that even if a piece is loved and celebrated, it’s fine to move on from it. (It reminds me of that saying actually, better to quit while you’re ahead.)
And indeed, I think of this talk as an archive of my 2023, and the end of one big chapter in my career (and life!) and the start of the next. I don’t want to get stuck in it by giving it over and over.
I’m glad to have given this talk, I’m so grateful that it has found people it has resonated with. It is now theirs just as much as it is mine, and it will live on as they tell their coworkers and friends and family about it. And even if they forget about the talk itself, I think they’ll remember the stories within it that resonated with them. And I hope they’ll keep passing that on.
So I guess even though I’m retiring the talk, it’s never really retired.
(Ok sorry I’m getting corny again.)
💖,
Shirley
p.s. my beyond tellerand talk is already up if you want to watch this final version of “take up space”!
p.p.s. now that I’m retiring this talk forever I want to share with you my favorite line from it:
And that was when I learned that in America, women are allowed to be “loud” and “opinionated” only if she’s fictional, or if her opinions fit nicely within the patriarchal social norms that we have here.
When I first wrote it I thought it might be a little spicy for the stage but two of my friends I ran it by were like, “YES DEFINITELY PLEASE KEEP IT” and now it’s my fav line to deliver 😂