Chi Perlman

Hi, everyone.

Thanks for listening to Lauren Kiki Palmer's talk.

I'm Chi Perlman.

I'm one of the curators here at TED.

And what that means is I get to work with the speakers who we bring to our stage.

It was such a joy working with Lauren.

And before you go, I want to jump in and share a few more thoughts about that process.

Sometimes you get to work with a speaker and you just feel the whole process is such a gift.

Lauren Palmer, of course, is well known in the world through her stage personality and her identity as Kiki Palmer.

Kiki Palmer is a joyful, wonderful, beautiful actress.

Lauren Palmer is somebody who I had the privilege of working with.

When we first started talking about this process and this talk of going to the TED stage, I actually didn't expect Lauren to go so deeply into her own story, which is a story I think was so important to share with all of you.

But as we started to peel back what it was she wanted to talk about and who she wanted to be on the stage, the life she led going from a child star to becoming who she was in the public world was not an easy process.

This is a person who had to become an adult long before most of us would have had to do that.

This is a person who rose to the occasion to pull her family out of poverty.

And she paid the price for many of those things.

I think her insight into how she handled that and how she has resolved to become who she is now is a very important story for all of us.

Our external identities are not who we necessarily have to be when we're not in the public eye.

Everyone around Lauren Palmer calls her Kiki, but I was proud and it was quite a joy to call her Lauren because I knew that that's where her real connection point is.

That's her true self.