Keke Palmer

I carried the load, not because I had to, but because I couldn't unknow what was at stake.

Once you've seen life on the other side of poverty, you can't unsee the contrast.

I couldn't live with the fact that we had a shot and I didn't take it, so I didn't fail.

I just didn't know when it was complete.

Somewhere along the way, I started believing I was a thing that saved us.

I was Kiki Palmer.

I built an entire way of moving through the world around staying alert, staying useful, staying on.

I was reflexively disembodied, constantly juggling everything thrown at me.

I got so good at letting my body run on autopilot, I would have these huge gaps in my life where I lacked recall.

I remember one time I was doing Cinderella on Broadway, and I couldn't remember how I got to the stage while on stage.

It's clear that system didn't know how to stop.

It's like a computer.

It works great, so you never turn it off.

You don't even let it restart for updates, so you never know just how much better it could be.

That was me, a billboard for hyperfunctioning, with style, of course.

But the pattern finally broke.

When I held my son and told him to rest,

That was a small moment, but it ended something old, something that had been running for generations.

When adaptive intelligence outlives the conditions it was built for, it turns into compulsion, productivity without presence.

What I want to share with you is that survival can be so effective you don't realize when it's no longer needed in your life.