Last weekend I had the extremely good fortune of being given a free ticket to TedX Vancouver. The theme of the event was TILT. It was overwhelming and awesome and I got to help out at the photo booth, which was great fun, helping people come up with their “TILT moment,” which is basically your most memorable moment during TedX. Here was mine:

For most of my adult life, I have had a familiar face. I have been been told by many, many people that they think they have met me before, or they ask if I have a sister, or even one time a person I didn’t know approached me at a party and started talking to me, thinking I was someone else.

So while I was volunteering at the photo booth, these two really nice ladies walked up and one of them asked me if her hair was alright, before getting her photo taken. I told her she looked great. After the picture we ended up all standing around and chatting for a while afterwards, and the hair woman just kept looking at me and smiling. She finally said she was sure we had met before, but she didn’t know where or when. I told her that I had lived in Vancouver for twelve years until 2010 and had just moved back recently, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we had crossed paths at some point. We never were able to figure out how we know each other, but I just loved one thing she said to me. She said, “I am certain that I know you from somewhere, and I know this because you don’t look like anyone else.”

What a cool thing to say to someone! That really stuck with me, because I have always been told I look like someone else, it was super awesome to hear someone tell me I don’t look like anyone else. I thanked her for the compliment! Even as I write this I am smiling! I wonder if anyone reading this knows her.

At TILT, artists were scattered throughout the building, doing collaborative paintings (“artist mash-ups”) and of course all of the speakers were pretty amazing. Especially, for me, Victor Chan, who was irreverent and hilarious, almost to the point of making the audience slightly uncomfortable (or I was, at first). He spoke about mindfulness and having the ability to control his body, even the amount that he sweats, through meditation (because he said he hates doing laundry. haha). Victor also told an amazing story of being kidnapped in Afghanistan in the 1970s, being told that he was going to be raped and killed, and then the truck he was being transported in crashed on an icy mountain road, leaving only himself and two other kidnap victims alive. This was not the focus of his talk, though, he was more interested in speaking about mindfulness and meditation. His delivery was dry and absolutely hilarious.

I unfortunately didn’t catch any shots of the inside of the theater, but I will leave you with a few shots of the amazing art collaborations that were going on. It was a very inspiring day. And maybe, just maybe, I will get some help remembering whether I actually know that lady from somewhere in my travels.

(Photo credit: Erik Ferguson)