If TEDxPSU’s 2023 conference was the first one you were familiar with, you and I have something in common. A little bit about me. My name is Jadzia, and this is my second year at Penn State and as a member of TEDxPSU’s marketing team. This will be important later. Last year’s conference was the first one I worked on, and if you remember, its theme was Blurring the Line. At first, I will admit I only had a basic idea of what this meant. I knew its core ideas: redefining limits, pushing boundaries, innovating new methods. But I had no clue what that looked like in a concrete way, or how someone could possibly capture all of those things in a single talk. That was until I heard Kimberly Stratton’s talk, “The homeless are not who you think they are.” As I listened to Stratton give her talk in Eisenhower Auditorium, my expectations were shattered one-by-one. Through her own powerful voice, Stratton connected listeners to stories of grief, hardship, heartbreak, and human resilience. She dove headfirst into tangled knots of the ideas and biases many of us are taught, and undid them. Through this, she showed that the hard lines that we think divide us are often myths. There is only one hard line, the thread that connects us all: our humanity. You can watch her talk HERE, but nothing can beat seeing it in person. I know it’s cheesy, but you really did just have to be there. And this year, you can. You can have your expectations shattered in the way I did, break boundaries, and tighten the knots tying you to your fellow man. This year, you can be there.
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