The Secret To Starting Over: Danyell (Danny-J) Johnson (Transcript)

Here is the transcript and summary of Danyell (Danny-J) Johnson’s talk titled “The Secret To Starting Over” at TEDxWaterStreet conference. In this TEDx talk, Danyell Johnson shares her personal story of overcoming setbacks and starting over multiple times.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

I was the first in my family to graduate from college, and I did what any college graduate would do. I ran off and joined the circus. I was the kid who liked to climb to the top of a tree, put on a grocery bag over my shoulder, and jump out. I wanted to fly.

So becoming an acrobat at SeaWorld was a dream come true. Cirque de la Mer, Circus of the Sea. I was an acrobat that would climb these poles, Chinese poles, and I would get launched off a giant swing set 30 feet in the air before I landed in the water. It was amazing. Adrenaline rush every day. I lived in San Diego. The sun, beach, beautiful, and I was living my dream. I was getting paid to fly.

So everything was going wonderfully until one morning I got out of bed and fell. I felt like my legs were like, like your foot falls asleep, that tingly feeling, and soon it became excruciating, and I wasn’t able to move.

So I was taken to the hospital, and after three days in the ICU, a doctor came in and said, “Danny, you’re not going to perform again. We’re not sure you’re going to walk again, and you’re lucky to be alive.”

I found out that I had three gram negative bacterial infection in my bloodstream, and it lodged into my sacroiliac joint and made me paralyzed, and these were all bacteria you would typically find in sewage that came from the water at my shell.

So I had really wished, honestly, that if I couldn’t perform anymore, that the bacteria had just killed me. I was able to slightly move my right leg before I left the hospital, so I could use a walker, and I can kind of scoot along, and honestly, I spent most of the time lying on my parents’ couch taking tons of pain pills. I was in pain, but mostly just to sleep the day away.

I felt like everything was taken from me. My apartment in San Diego was gone, my job was gone, my degree was in physical education. Like what was the point? I wished this stupid bacteria had just killed me. I felt so useless.

But a year prior, a dear friend of mine, Kelly, was diagnosed with terminal stage four colon cancer. She came to see me at the show, and a month after I got out of the hospital, she came to see me at my house. I bent over, I opened the door with my walker, and she stood there and was like, Danny, I can’t believe this happened to you. It’s so unfair.

My friend, who had a death sentence, was telling me that it was unfair that I couldn’t walk. I felt like such a jerk. I realized that while my situation wasn’t ideal, at least I had a chance to do something, to do something different, to have a do-over at my life. So I decided to get moving.

I asked my mom to drive me to the gym every day with my walker. I’d sit on the recumbent bike, and I would just push my legs around. And within a year, I had the strength to walk again. And two years later, I ran my first and probably last marathon. I officially made the most of my do-over.

So I’d like to know, how many of you have ever had to start over? Moving to a new state, a job, breakup, and how many maybe more than once? According to my scientific poll, which I did on Instagram, 65% of people who responded said they’ve had to start over three or more times.

And I know there’s not a whole lot of guarantees in life, but I know that there are these three: Death, taxes, and starting over. Life is a lot like the game of chutes and ladders. Remember this game? You spin the wheel, leave it all to chance, and you land on a square. And if you’re lucky, you get to take a ladder up to the top. And if you’re not so lucky, you’ve got to take one of those slides all the way back down.

Now, have you ever played a game with a kid? Not just this game, any game. If they land on the bad one, they’re like, let me get a do-over, let me get a do-over. They don’t want to go back to the beginning. They know that starting over feels like a punishment. It sucks. You have to go back to the beginning, you’re at the start, everyone’s getting so far ahead, you’ll never catch up. But if you get a do-over, then you have a chance to maybe get something better.

ALSO READ: The Power of Language: Madura Katta at TEDxYouth@Edmonton (Transcript)

Now, we all have things that don’t go according to plan in life. A teenage pregnancy, a bacterial infection that leaves you paralyzed, a bankruptcy, moving to a new state, a breakup with your business partner, your husband having an affair, moving to a state again, going through another bankruptcy, going through a divorce, having your dogs die, two of them eight months apart, pets with their heads falling off, and everything in 2020 being canceled, and then your mom having a brain tumor and you becoming her caretaker.

Just one of those things could be a setback for any one of us. You put that all together, you have my life. I’ve had to start over so many times, my friends started to call me do-over Danny.

Everyone loves a good comeback story, except when you’re the one in it. But I’ve had many people tell me that I’m one of the most resilient people they know. And I appreciate that, but I know it’s not resilience. I just see setbacks as a secret gift to get a do-over.

And I know it might be the kind of gift that feels like it’s in a brown paper bag that someone left on your doorstep that’s about to burn your house down, but it’s a different kind of gift. So I’ve come up with a framework to help me overcome life’s chutes and ladders, because I know that none of us are immune to what life has to throw at us, and we need to be prepared.

GRIEVE

So the first step in the gift of a do-over is to grieve. Now I know we all know about grief when we lose someone, and there’s the five stages of grief. But sometimes the loss of a dream can actually cut deeper than the loss of a person. And these things, my friend Christina Rasmussen calls invisible losses. These are things like dreams, miscarriages, losing a business, the 10-year anniversary that you never had, and it is important to move on, to grieve in order to move on.

INSIGHT

The next is insight. With insight, this is where you look for clarity. You’re looking for the lessons in the pain and the lessons in what happened. So this is where you can ask yourself questions like, who do I want to be now? Where do I want to go? Maybe if you lost a job or you’re looking at what skills I have so I can move forward and do something different.

FORGIVENESS

And then it’s forgiveness. Often people think forgiveness means you’re letting someone off the hook or what they did was okay. Forgiveness doesn’t mean what someone did was okay. It simply means that you’re no longer letting it control you anymore. And forgiveness also includes yourself, to have compassion for yourself.

TRUTH

And last is truth. Tony Robbins says to see reality as it is, but not worse than it is. We tend to catastrophize as humans. You like lose your job and suddenly you’re going, I’m going to be homeless, so I’m going to have to live out of my car, my kids aren’t going to eat… no, just you lost your job. You might have to cut back on your Starbucks. You can figure it out. You have friends. They can help you.

Well, it sounds really easy now, but it wasn’t always that way. When I was 15 years old, I was suicidal and I ended up in a mental institution. And they do regular labs and my psychiatrist called me back into his office and he said, “Your pregnancy test came back positive.” And I immediately blurted out, well, I’m going to have an abortion. I mean, I was going to kill myself anyway, so what did it matter?

And the day before my scheduled abortion, I had a change of heart. I met a woman who shared with me her desire to have children and her inability due to an eating disorder. And without even thinking, I said, I want you to have my baby. And she said, what? And my brain went, what?

And I said, I want you to have my baby. And for whatever reason, I stuck to that and I went forward with the pregnancy. And four months in, I found out I was having a little girl. And the woman called me crying, saying she couldn’t come up with the $50,000 to do a private adoption.

So I was left with trying to figure out what to do, but I still had this plan to end my life after she was born. So I found another way to do an adoption. I read through hundreds and hundreds of profiles until I found the perfect one for her.

And then, just a Wednesday in the summer, she was born. I was told not to hold her, not to look at her. They wanted to whisk her away, but I needed to. And I remember holding her and thinking she was so perfect. And I thought, what if she grows up and asks what happened to her birth mother? And she finds out I killed myself and thinks it was her fault. I could not put that on someone.

ALSO READ: We Are Dead Stars: Michelle Thaller at TEDxBaltimore (Full Transcript)

So I made the decision right then that I was going to live. And not only was I going to live, but I was going to live in a way that would make her proud if she ever looked for me. And that was my first real second chance, my first real do-over.

So for 18 years, every year on her birthday, I wondered if I made the right decision. I wondered if she’d hate me, I wondered if she’d look for me. And because of the rules of the adoption, after she was 18, she would be able to if she wanted to. Right before her 19th birthday, I was going to be in her city, and I decided to reach out. Or I said, hey, maybe we should meet. And she said, sure.

So we decided to meet at IHOP in the middle of the day, nothing at all like the fantasies I had my whole life of the airport and the balloons. And I was so nervous. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I asked my husband, do I hug her? And he’s like, yeah, just don’t make it a creepy hug. What is a creepy hug? Oh my gosh.

So I went to the IHOP, I sat in the corner, and I waited. I was looking down at my phone, and I heard, hey there. And I looked up. I had seen pictures of her, but I had never heard her voice. I stood up, and I hugged her, really careful not to make it creepy. And she hugged me back. It was the best feeling in the world, and I felt so good.

And she told me that she had an amazing life, that she was so grateful, and that she was with the exact parents that she needed to be with. And I realized, too, in that moment, that as much as I wanted her to be proud of me, I was proud of me. So how I used the GIFT framework in this situation.

The first was GRIEVE. Interestingly enough, this was one where I was not allowed to grieve. I was told when I had her, it was my decision, my consequence, I needed to suck it up. So anything that made it look like, made me look like I was sad, I was told to knock it off.

And I realized that our bodies need that time to grieve. A couple of years ago, I went to the jungle to experience ayahuasca. And if you don’t know what that is, it’s a plant medicine used in traditional ceremonies, and they use it a lot for PTSD and trauma. And I experienced this moment of seeing my 16-year-old self in the hospital delivery room and being able to hold my younger self and let her cry and grieve for having to give up that baby.

And grief is so important, and I think sometimes we think that we can skip that part, but it’s so important to get through it.

With INSIGHT, my social worker at the time made me read the book, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He’s a Holocaust survivor, and he said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And this was such a lesson for me because I realized at that time I had a choice in my attitude of what was happening. And I had a choice to see instead of my daughter’s life being the end of the world, it was a new life for me as well.

And then FORGIVENESS. This one was tough. I was angry at my parents, angry at the church, angry at people at school, and I had to let that go. But the person that was hardest to forgive was myself. I had to have compassion for myself for just being young and not knowing better and doing my best.

And then TRUTH. Truth was, teen pregnancy is not the end of the world. Sometimes we have hard choices. I had become a teen mom, have an abortion, give your baby away. It kind of felt like, do you want us to stab you in the foot, punch you in the stomach, or kick you in the face? But you have to make the best of the decisions you have.

And you make your choice, and hopefully you’re able to get a do-over out of it. So sometimes we’re forced to start over, and sometimes we choose to. And some people don’t get a do-over, like my friend Kelly.

ALSO READ: Esther Perel on Rethinking Infidelity - a talk for anyone who has ever loved (Transcript)

So I hope you remember that should you ever get the chance to start over, that you remember that there’s a GIFT a do-over should you choose to take it. Thank you.

SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:

In Danyell (Danny-J) Johnson’s inspiring talk titled “The Secret To Starting Over,” she shares her personal journey of resilience and the framework she has developed for embracing the opportunity for a fresh start, or what she calls a “do-over.” Here are the key takeaway points from her talk:

Embracing Change: Danny-J begins by sharing her unique journey, from becoming the first in her family to graduate from college to realizing her dream of being an acrobat at SeaWorld. She highlights the importance of embracing change and pursuing one’s dreams.
Facing Adversity: Her life takes a dramatic turn when she contracts a severe bacterial infection that leaves her paralyzed. She emphasizes the physical and emotional pain she endured during this period and the feeling of everything being taken away from her.
Perspective Shift: Danny-J’s perspective shifts when her terminally ill friend, Kelly, expresses sympathy for her situation. This moment makes her realize that she has a chance to start over and make the most of her life despite the setbacks.
Taking Action: She decides to take action by going to the gym every day with her walker, gradually regaining strength and ultimately learning to walk again. She even runs her first marathon two years later, illustrating the power of determination and taking small steps toward recovery.
Starting Over is Common: Danny-J discusses how many people have experienced the need to start over in various aspects of life, whether it’s moving to a new place, changing jobs, or going through difficult personal transitions.
Chutes and Ladders Analogy: Life is compared to the game of chutes and ladders, where individuals face both ups and downs. Danny-J explains that nobody is immune to setbacks, and they are an inherent part of life.
Seeing Setbacks as Opportunities: She introduces her framework for dealing with setbacks, known as the GIFT framework, which stands for Grieve, Insight, Forgiveness, and Truth. These steps are tools to help individuals navigate life’s challenges and embrace do-overs.
Grieve: Danny-J highlights the importance of allowing oneself to grieve, not just for the loss of a loved one but also for the loss of dreams and expectations. She acknowledges that grieving is a necessary step in moving forward.
Insight: Seeking clarity and lessons in painful experiences is crucial. Danny-J encourages individuals to ask themselves questions like, “Who do I want to be now?” and “Where do I want to go?”
Forgiveness: Forgiveness, both for others and oneself, is a crucial step in the framework. She explains that forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning someone’s actions; rather, it means letting go of the control these actions have over one’s life.
Truth: The final step is to see reality as it is without catastrophizing situations. Danny-J emphasizes the importance of facing the truth and making the best choices possible in challenging circumstances.
Personal Story of Redemption: She shares a deeply personal story of teen pregnancy, struggling with the decision to give her child up for adoption, and ultimately choosing to live. This experience taught her the value of second chances and the importance of making the best of the choices we have.
Reunion: Danny-J reunites with her daughter after 18 years, and the encounter is filled with emotion and gratitude. It reinforces the idea that starting over and making the best of a difficult situation can lead to a fulfilling and meaningful life.
Conclusion: Danny-J concludes by encouraging the audience to remember that starting over is a gift, and it’s important to embrace it when the opportunity arises. She inspires listeners to use her GIFT framework to navigate life’s challenges and setbacks.

In her talk, Danyell Johnson’s resilience and the GIFT framework she presents serve as a powerful reminder that even in the face of adversity, individuals can find strength, purpose, and a chance to start over. Her story is a testament to the human spirit’s capacity to overcome obstacles and thrive in the face of uncertainty.