‘Make friends with reality’: Emily Levine

She says we are given this gift of life, and when the time comes, we have to give it up, too

Emily Levine is an American humourist, writer, actress, and public speaker (Source: Screen grab of Emily Levine's Tedtalk video)

We all love to live in a world that is ‘perfect’. The old habit of romanticising life is hard to give up. But, reality is not always pleasant. It comes with its negatives and positives. The farther we go from it, the harder we are hit by it. But it is possible to be friends with reality and accept it unfiltered.

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Dodging reality for years altogether, Emily Levine, an American humourist, writer, actress, and public speaker realised that “reality isn’t reality” after spending two years in a wheelchair and developing stage-four lung cancer. She believed she was never a ‘real’ person but a fantasy one.

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“I spent my whole life denying, pushing past, and ignoring the real and that I had to deal with them,” she said.

She believed that reality is an interaction of two things: “Space-time, mass-energy, and life-death.”

Talking of death she said life is a beautiful gift that comes with an expiration date and to think that one can control it is being “ungrateful”. She said “we won’t be able to know everything, control everything, and predict everything.”

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Calling nature “a self-driving car,” she said that life is a cycle of “generation, degeneration, and regeneration” and she loved to be a part of the cycle. She believes we are given this gift of life, we can enrich it as much as we want and when the time comes, we need to give it up and that is reality.

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