TED Talk I love: Thandie Newton on "Otherness"

I think it's time for a non-food related post. I adore TED talks. They are informative, inspiring and usually prompt me to think of things in an entirely new way. Helen Fisher and Brene Brown gave two of my favorites, and I watched/listened to the one below by Thandie Newton earlier today. I'm posting it here because Ms. Newton puts to words what I so often felt as the only racially mixed person growing up in a very white place, one of the few progressives in a sea of conservative Catholics in college and someone from modest roots in a place of great privilege during law school. Like Newton, I lost my "self" in dancing in performing while growing up and found that my "otherness" gave me a great deal of empathy for other misfits. Like Newton, I suffered from disordered eating and struggled with wanting to disappear as the "other" that stuck out like a sore thumb. I now prize the fact that I don't belong in any one group because it leaves me free to surround myself with people who feel right rather than people with the same skin tone (which is biologically meaningless). I could go on about how much this talk spoke to me, but instead, I'll let Newton say it all much more eloquently.