I am an emotional creature

Today I watched Eve Ensler's TED talk from November 2009 in India, Embrace Your Inner Girl.



Because it's Ensler, it's not what you might expect from the title. "Embrace your inner girl" means to do away with the socially-induced compulsion to please that mutes your identity, and embrace your intrinsically vulnerable, sensitive, compassionate, intuitive, emotional core. It's about being an emotional creature, and being perfectly at east with that as well. She connects this idea of the "girl self" to both males and females, but the examples she speaks about and wrote about in her book that will be released on Wednesday are all teenage girls because that is where and when the backward shift in the mentality happens.

As her talk progressed, I felt a sensation inside like something was overflowing within me. It wasn't just listening to her stories - which are themselves powerful, horrifying, uplifting stories - that caused this. Her message is phenomenal, but her delivery struck a much deeper chord in me. It was the real, raw passion and emotion she displayed during her talk. She was 100% committed to everything coming out of her mouth: these stories were her story, our story, everyone's story. She got emotional about it. And when she put away her notes, her devotion to, passion for, and belief in this project shone out like a spotlight.

Next week on Tuesday I've been invited to give what Ivory Towerites call a "job talk" as part of the interview for the one Stateside job I might be interested in. It's a 40-minute academic lecture on "[my] research in the context of East Asian art history." First of all, that seemingly generous topic is just enough rope to hang yourself with. Second, there are two things you want your audience to take away from a job talk: whatever your message is, and that you are the best candidate for the job. It's hard to know which should have top priority when you know that both you and your ideas stand to swing by the hangman's noose.

To prepare, I've been reading books like slide:ology and Presentation Zen. What these books all come down to in the end is message, visual story, and delivery: a clear, convincing message expressed in a simple, illuminating visual story, presented with passion and without notes to connect personally with the audience.

Whatever I feel about academia as a whole, I am emotionally attached to my research, and rightly so after seven years. As topics go, it's an underdog, and I love me some underdog. Plus, whether this performance turns out to be my opening number or my swan song, I want it to rock the crowd. Ensler showed me that my talk would really benefit from a good dose of the passion and emotion that make TED talks so compelling, because passionate is what I am about the topic even if I have to subdue that energy into smartypants adjectives in my dissertation and at most conferences.

If next Tuesday is my one shot to teach the audience about this topic, then I'm definitely not content to be cold and detached and academic about it. I want to present with all the strength of feeling inside that spills over my edges because I am an emotional creature, and I own my passion for this topic.

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