VANESSA VALERIO: I didn't know what to do with my life.

So I quit my job, I sell my car, and I buy a one-way ticket to Paris.

ANNA WILLIS-COLLIER: It was glorious, because finally, I had found the courage to speak up.

ADAM SELBST: Now, I knew tigers were fast.

I mean, David Attenborough taught me that when I was, like, ten years old.

But let me tell you, I had no idea.

THERESA OKOKON: Tonight's theme is courage.

It's said that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to triumph over it.

It happens in moments in our lives that feel big or small.

Tonight, we're going to hear stories of overcoming risks, hard lessons, and finding the inner strength when it matters the most.

♪ VALERIO: My name is Vanessa Valerio.

I am from Dominican Republic, but now I live in Denver, Colorado.

I am an architect during the day, and at night, I like to tell stories, to whomever would listen to me.

So, I've heard it said that architecture is a lot like storytelling.

Do you think that that's true, and in what elements of your job do you find storytelling to be present?

When you enter any big space, or, really, space that have made an impact in your life, you can feel emotions, and you can probably tell what the designer or the architect wanted to tell with that space.

And when you're telling a story, it's basically that, you're telling something that you want people to understand, to make an impact in their life.

And in a way, that's basically the same thing.

OKOKON: And tonight's theme is courage.

So how would you say that that theme relates to you?

I don't think I want to say anything.

I think that people should, should see that it was a very courageous moment for me, and it really defined my life.

I was born and raised in Dominican Republic to a conservative, middle-class family, and for someone with my profile, the path to follow in life is, you go to school, you find yourself a nice man from a "respected family," you get married, have kids, and are dominated for the rest of your life.

At 24, I had graduated school.

I've been dating a nice man from a good family, we're talking marriage and kids.

Everything is on track.

However, sometimes in life, things happen the way you do not plan them.

So I was very devastated when we broke up.

I didn't know what to do with my life for months, until one time, I was thinking about all these movies where people go to Paris, they find love and happiness, and I want that.

So, I quit my job, I sell my car, and I buy a one-way ticket to Paris.

And when I tell my family and my friends about this, some of them are very excited.

But some of them are, like, "But why?

"You don't know anyone there.

"You don't even speak French.

What are you going to do there?"

One of these people was my dad.

He was not happy at all.

In fact, he thought that I should stay home forever.

And every time that I would talk to my dad or to my friends and they would say these things over and over, I would start a battle with myself.

Should I stay?

Should I go?

This is probably a crazy idea, I should stay.

But, I get on that plane and I make it to Paris.

And on my first night in Paris, I am unpacking all of my clothes and I'm thinking about all my friends and everything I left behind.

And I want to be happy, but I feel so sad, and I start crying, a lot.

I can't control my emotions, I can't control my body, I start shaking like crazy, and I start feeling this intense pain on my chest, and I can't breathe.

I think I'm having a heart attack.

So I pick up the phone and I dial 911.

But this is not working.

Do French people don't have 911?

So I run for my life, literally.

I go to the neighbor and I ask for help.

She calls the paramedics, and when they finally make it here, they say that I'm okay, that I am "just" having a panic attack.

The next day, I'm trying to relax, walking in the neighborhood, and looking for a place to eat.

And I see this little cafe.

People are outside drinking coffee and eating fancy pastries.

And I want that.

But immediately, I think, "How am I gonna read the menu?"

I won't be able to communicate with the waiter.

This was a bad idea.

This whole thing was a crazy idea.

And I continue walking until I find a place where I know the menu.

I go inside and I eat an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald's.

And yes, I hate McDonald's with all my heart.

But it has the same food, the same smell, even the same furniture layout, like the one in Dominican Republic.

And it's comforting.

So I make McDonald's my preferred and only meal for the next three weeks.

And every day in the morning before I leave my little apartment, I make a list of things to do that day.

Like today, I want to go to the Louvre Museum and I want to try Nutella crepes finally.

But instead, I end up at an internet cafe, chatting on Messenger with my friends, hearing about their weekend plans, and I really want to go there.

I really want to be with them.

And then I go home and end the day on the phone with my mom, telling her how sad I am, how much I wanna be back.

I never call my dad because I do not need to listen, "I told you so."

And one day at the internet cafe, I overhear some tourists talk about going to Versailles.

And I kind of got a little excited, because I've always wanted to go to Versailles.

But then I think, that is so far.

What if I get lost?

How am I going to come back?

I, I better not.

Maybe another time.

The next day I wake up, and Versailles is still in my mind.

And I don't know what's different about today.

Maybe it's all of that McDonald's for three weeks and I really need something different.

But I get ready and I get on that train and I make it to Versailles, and wow, this is such an amazing experience.

I had never seen such luxurious architecture, and these gardens, oh, wow.

Like, the trees probably could touch the sky.

And fountains everywhere.

And I sit on, by one of these fountains, and I, and I stare at the water.

It's so peaceful, so calm.

And that's how I feel now.

It's been so long since I've experienced this.

And I'm also feeling so happy, but also really mad at myself.

I should have make it here sooner.

So I go back to the city and I go directly to that little cafe.

I sit down outside overlooking the beautiful Eiffel Tower.

I drink a cafe au lait as I go through the list of things that I want to do in Paris and the list of things that I want to do in life.

And it's been 15 years from that day.

I have traveled all over the world, I have moved six different times from different cities and countries.

And every time that I move, I get so nervous, scared.

In fact, every time, I've had a panic attack.

The difference now is that I know I can do it.

I just have to remind myself and drink that cafe au lait.

♪ WILLIS-COLLIER: My name is Anna Willis-Collier.

I live in the Greater Boston area, and I'm actually a storytelling coach and storyteller and producer of storytelling shows.

Anna, can you tell me a bit about what you've learned from being a storytelling coach?

So much.

It's, it's quite incredible.

For every single person I coach, I learn this universe of information of how to maximize a person's story and make it as rich as possible.

And if you could have one tip to give to a storyteller, what is your one tip?

I would say...

Lean, lean into your senses and your feelings, because when you do that, your voice and your face and your body will, will sort of follow, and you will communicate that to your audience.

Because at the end of the day, you want your audience to come on that journey and think and feel as you do as you're telling the story.

And so it was for the longest time that the only reason why I would ever turn the pages of a book was to look at the pictures, because I was illiterate-- couldn't read a word.

Now, the teachers at my elementary school could see that I was quite bright, really.

And, and so, I was persecuted instead for being lazy or attention-seeking.

About the age of eight, I had exploratory ear surgery just to make sure there was nothing wrong with my ears.

There wasn't.

And about the age of nine or ten, my parents had fought like crazy to have me assessed by an educational psychologist.

And there we had it.

I was dyslexic.

But the help that I did get was way too little and way too late, because my peers, they'd already learnt to read and write.

And I was sort of socially isolated from them.

And my esteem was completely screwed.

And I felt stupid.

Kind of limped through the rest of my school days.

And high school... (sucks in breath): Ooh.

They were some of the worst years of my life.

To be at my high school and be dyslexic meant that you were stupid, no doubt about it.

And you were eligible to be bullied relentlessly.

I was kicked, punched, tripped up, spat on.

And once, this kid set light to my hair, and I'm not quite sure whether I ever quite got over that.

But somehow, through tenacity, chance, luck, and a story for another day, I made it to university.

I did.

And...

They let me in.

They did.

And yes, it was a real struggle, and I had to work harder than anybody else that I was with.

But I did go on to graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree, and have actually thrived professionally and socially ever since.

I did struggle, though.

And, you know, it wasn't with reading and writing.

But it was at the hands of others and their intolerance towards my disability and the mistakes that I make.

Now, to give you some kind of example, about six years ago, before I turned 40, a fellow colleague at my work took it upon herself, completely unsolicited, to edit the first draft of a creative brief that I was working on.

And she assaulted my work with so much red ink that it looked like it be given 100 lashes.

It was quite literally hemorrhaging red ink.

And I was crushed, and I was humiliated, and I cried, and I went to bed for two days.

In fact, the only reason why I got up is because I got small kids to look after.

But you know, I was angry, really angry, because after all these years and everything I had accomplished, someone could still just come along and slash me down and make me feel just as stupid as I had done for my whole entire schooling.

And I wanted to do something about it, but I didn't know what or how, and so I didn't, and that made me feel even worse.

Oh, but I did vow that if this was to ever happen to me again, then I would do something about it.

And then, just a few years later, it did.

And it was glorious!

Because finally I had found the courage to speak up.

So, basically, what happened was that I had authored a petition with regards to a matter of our children's schooling.

And, in just under two weeks, it had won overwhelming support from the community.

And that felt kind of good, yeah?

And then a fellow parent at the school, she emailed me, she copies in 30 other parents at the school, and she said that she agreed with my message, and she thanked me for my work.

But she would not sign my petition because my writing was substandard.

Hm.

(smacks lips) Yeah.

But this time, I did not feel humiliated or crushed.

And I did not go to bed for two days, because, finally, I had found my words and my courage, and my reply was sprung-loaded.

Would you like to hear my reply?

Oh, all right, then.

"Dear pedant"-- I'm not supposed to use her real name.

"Dear pedant, "I will take this opportunity to explain to you "that I am utterly dyslexic "and spell-checkers are some of my best friends.

"Despite the fact that I have often felt deep shame "at my disability and the mistakes that I've made, "I have found the courage "to forge on regardless, even when those who are better-suited "on a literary level have not found the courage "to do so themselves.

"I have deliberately not run the spell-check on this email "as a kind of exercise in self-empowerment.

"I am not sorry.

"Every day is a school day, I find, and I hope that this will be a lesson for you in empathy and understanding."

And that was the end of my story just after it happened.

But, you know, I realized that I never really got an apology.

Well, she did apologize, but it was one of those apologies that says, "Sorry, but..." And it wasn't a public apology.

She didn't copy in those 30 other parents she was so keen to tell about my mistakes.

So I just felt a need to do more, to address this kind of culture of intolerance towards mistakes in our written text and dyslexia.

And so I started to send my, the recording of my story and the... the letter, the reply to interest groups around the world, from New Zealand to Australia, all the way, spanning through Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. And kind of fireworks started going off.

And many people wrote to me and said, "Yes!

I've been suffering from this," and it was quite amazing.

And I thought, "I think I have something here."

So I thought, "Perhaps I should send this to the media," and, well, I'm British, so I thought BBC?

So I thought, click, paste, send.

Easy as that.

And the very next morning, the BBC News in London had replied to me, and they asked me if I would go to London and work with them to produce a small piece on, on the subject.

And so I did, and it was pretty cool.

And to date, just two years later now, it has received over half a million views.

♪ ADAM SELBST: My name's Adam Selbst.

I'm here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I'm a graphic designer and a storyteller, and I write short stories and personal essays.

So a lot of us tell stories that originate from our families.

How does your family feel about you telling stories about them?

I will be honest with you.

It is a mixed bag.

A lot of the stories I tell are personal and they're about my family.

And some people don't always love the way that they're portrayed.

But it's been pretty good.

Like, people really respect the craft that I try and bring to it, and they respect my honesty.

And, you know, even if, like, they're not always happy about it, it's something that we can have a conversation about.

So can you tell me a little bit about your creative process?

So I think the first and most important step is to experience some sort of horrible trauma, something that you would never want to tell anybody, and you find ways to find the humor in it.

And by doing that, you sort of disengage with the painful parts of it, and you turn it into something that brings you, like, some amount of positivity.

And, you know, you can sort of, like, deactivate the ghosts that way.

♪ A couple of years ago, my parents retired and decided to move to North Carolina.

They had been there for about a week when I got the call from my mother.

"Adam," she said, "You're not gonna believe this, but in North Carolina, it's legal for us to own a tiger."

Growing up, my mother was well- known for taking in stray cats.

The first one to attack me was when I was learning how to grill and it left a scar that I still have to this day.

A lot of parents in that situation would have probably sided with their child.

Not my parents.

To quote my mother, "Well, Adam probably deserved it.

"And besides, these cats were here first, so what are we going to do?"

Anyway, in the end, they decided not to adopt a tiger.

Not because, um, they had just moved into a small one-bedroom apartment, or any of the other reasons that you might think, but only because they already had two cats, and they thought that the tiger and the cats might not get along.

And ultimately, that would be unfair to the cats, since, you know, those cats had been there first.

But it was okay, because my mother had already started volunteering her time at the local tiger rescue organization.

What's that?

Okay, great, I'll explain.

You see, in North Carolina, since it's legal to own a tiger, a lot of people think, "Hey, cool, I'm going to do that," and then they go and they do it.

There's a few problems with this, though.

The first is that owning a tiger is actually really expensive.

Tigers eat meat-- a lot of it, too.

The second thing is that tigers-- and you may have heard this-- are actually extremely dangerous.

But the third thing is the most important thing, which is that once you have a tiger, they're really hard to get rid of.

But don't worry, in North Carolina, they have a system for that.

If you have a tiger that you're sick of owning in North Carolina, you just sort of drive it out into the middle of nowhere and you... let it go.

Yeah, yeah, I didn't say it was a perfect system, I know.

In fact, a lot of the residents of North Carolina agree with me.

They don't love the system, either.

Which is why this organization exists.

They drive around, pick up all of the abandoned or unwanted tigers, bring them back to their place, so that they can live their lives out, like, in peace.

Um, they're a wonderful organization, and for the year that my mother was volunteering there, every time I would go down, I would take some time with my mother to go and visit all of the tigers, and I got to know quite a few of them.

However, I am not embarrassed to tell you that I had a favorite tiger there.

His name was Jelly Bean.

Jelly Bean is a white tiger.

White tigers have a tendency to be really inbred, so they can have a lot of health problems, but not Jelly Bean.

Jelly Bean was perfect.

And he absolutely loved me.

There was only one problem with going to visit Jelly Bean, which was his roommate.

Jelly Bean shared an enclosure with Tex.

Tex had a well-earned reputation as the most obnoxious tiger there.

He had a tendency to attack the visitors sometimes.

There's one instance where he charged the fence when there were 20 kindergartners visiting, all of whom wet their pants at the exact same time.

So, whenever I was visiting Jelly Bean, I would always do a quick scan before I went down and approached the fence.

You know, just to see where Tex was, if he was around.

Anyway, on this particular day, I scanned, I didn't see Tex anywhere, so I walked down to the rope line and I just sort of whistled to get Jelly Bean's attention.

And he saw me, and he got really excited, and he ran right up to, right up to the chain-link fence.

Um, again, I looked around.

I didn't see Tex, so I just sort of stepped over the rope to approach the fence so I could get a little bit closer.

I know, I know, you're not supposed to, but... You know...

It's fine, my mother works there.

So, it's cool, right?

So, I get up to, to the fence line and Jelly Bean rolls over, and he's being really cute.

And we start having some fun, but I see out of the corner of my eye, I see a little movement off in the distance, right?

So I sort of look up and I scan around through the underbrush again.

But, you know, I don't see anything.

So I turned my attention back to Jelly Bean, and now, he's totally rolled over.

He's showing me his belly.

It's, it's striped, it's adorable.

And now he's chuffling, which is like the tiger version of purring, and it's really cute.

Um, but again, I see just some movement.

So this time, I stand up and I really look, and after a little bit, I finally see it, just sort of off way in the underbrush, just this little splash of orange.

And it's something that you could so easily miss if not for the fact that every once in a while, you would see an orange tail flick up, like a house cat stalking a bird.

And it's Tex.

He's hunting me.

(sighs): What a jerk.

So I turned to my father to say, "Hey, Dad, look at this."

And this is when I learned two really important things about tigers.

The first is that a tiger will almost never attack you if you're staring straight at it.

They're smart.

They'll wait till you turn your head away and say something like, "Hey, Dad, look."

The other thing is that I learned tigers are really fast.

Now, I knew tigers were fast.

I mean, David Attenborough taught me that when I was, like, ten years old.

But, let me tell you, I had no idea.

By the time I turned my face around again, Tex had closed the distance and was in the air.

And the fence was still between us, but when he hit me, it felt like being hit by the world's softest locomotive.

And I flew back several feet and landed in the dust, the wind knocked out of me.

My whole family ran over to help me up and see if I was okay.

Everybody except my mother, who came stalking over angrily.

As she pulled me to my feet, she looked at me and she said, "You know, Adam, this is entirely your fault.

"This never would have happened if you hadn't been acting so much like prey."

Which my whole family thought was hilarious.

They all started laughing hysterically.

They called me "prey" for the rest of the weekend.

Later that day, we went out to eat, and I forgot my glasses in the restaurant, and I turned to run back.

My father said, "Wait, don't run!

That's prey behavior."

And again, everyone started laughing at me, so I became angry.

I turned to my mother and I said, "You know, Mom, "this is really unfair.

"I am your son.

"I was here first.

"Who's Tex?

"He's just some jerk you've never met before.

"You barely know him.

I, I cannot believe that you're taking his side in this."

And she turns to me and she exhaled really slowly, and she said, "Listen, Adam, "I am your mother and I love you so, so much, "and I will always try and protect you.

"But I am not going to be here forever, "and at some point, you're going to have to grow up and stop acting so much like prey."

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