You are not alone in your loneliness | Jonny Sun

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2019

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Being open and vulnerable with your loneliness, sadness and fear can help you find comfort and feel less alone, says writer and artist Jonny Sun. In an honest talk filled with his signature illustrations, Sun shares how telling stories about feeling like an outsider helped him tap into an unexpected community and find a tiny sliver of light in the darkness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features screenwriter, author, and artist Johnny Sun, recorded live at TED 2019.
0:10.0	Hello. I'd like to introduce you to someone. This is Jomni. That's Johnny, but spelled accidentally with an M in case you were wondering, because we're not all
0:21.1	perfect. Jomni is an alien who has been sent to Earth with a mission to study humans.
0:27.1	Jomni is feeling lost and alone and far from home, and I think we've all felt this way.
0:34.2	Or at least I have. I wrote this story about this alien at a moment in my life
0:39.0	when I was feeling particularly alien.
0:41.0	I just moved to Cambridge and started my doctoral program at MIT,
0:44.2	and I was feeling intimidated and isolated
0:47.2	and very much like I didn't belong.
0:50.1	But I had a lifeline of sorts.
0:52.2	See, I was writing jokes for years and years
0:56.5	and sharing them on social media,
0:58.9	and I found that I was turning to doing this more and more.
1:02.8	Now, for many people, the internet can feel like a lonely place.
1:06.7	It can feel like a big, endless, expansive void,
1:10.6	where you can constantly call out to it, but no one's ever listening.
1:14.7	But I actually found a comfort in speaking out to the void.
1:18.4	I found in sharing my feelings with the void,
1:20.9	eventually the void started to speak back.
1:23.5	And it turns out that the void isn't this endless, lonely expanse at all,
1:27.0	but instead it's
1:27.6	full of all sorts of other people, also staring out into it and also wanting to be heard.
	...

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