How I set myself free | Keke Palmer

0:03TED: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Multi-hyphenate entertainer Keke Palmer has spent more than 20 years mastering the art of performing on stage and off. But somewhere along the way, she realized that the very skills that carried her family out of poverty were also keeping her trapped. Today, I'm going to share my story with you. Not as a survivor soliloquy, but to expose a pattern. Because survival can be so effective, you don't realize when it's no longer serving you. In this talk, Kiki introduces us to the side of herself that the public never got to see.

0:45TED: She tells the story of her childhood in Robbins, Illinois, where performing was their ticket to a better life. To a career built on never stopping, never resting, and never letting herself be still. Once we was out, I forgot to let myself free. Yet I'm here today, grateful to say, my parents showed me how to survive. I showed them how to dream. And my son is showing me how to live. Her talk is coming up right after a short break. And stick around after. We caught up with TED curator Chi Perlman to share a few thoughts on what it was like working with Kiki behind the scenes.

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3:28TED: And now, our TED Talk of the day. What's up, everybody? I'm Kiki Palmer. You might know me from the Spelling Bee movie, Akilah and the Bee. My Nickelodeon TV show, True Jackson VP. Jordan Peele's Nope, maybe my viral meme where I was sorry to that man, or more recently, my new TV show, The Burbs, streaming now on Peacock. I've been working in front of the camera for over 20 years now, but today I'm going to share my story with you. Not as a survivor soliloquy, but to expose a pattern. Because survival can be so effective, you don't realize when it's no longer serving you. I grew up in Robbins, Illinois.

4:24And Robbins, by definition, is a food desert. The liquor store is often where I picked up my lunches before school. Flaming hot Cheetos and a pop. A meal the teachers over at my Catholic school often criticized. Even still, my family had love. We was cash poor, but rich in culture and pride. My mother was a substitute teacher for disabled children. She sang for churches and did backup singing for extra cash. My father worked in the factory at a polyurethane company. He had Carhartt before it was fashionable, okay? But they fell in love doing speech interp and theater, things circumstance slowly made no space for.

5:08The love was there, the joy was there, but even with both of my parents working multiple jobs, it wasn't enough. When I was eight, we moved somewhere a little nicer and qualified for Section 8, which is a subsidized housing program. I remember being told not to mention my father when the assessor came by because it would reduce the support we needed. I didn't understand the system, but I understood the stakes. Stability was fragile, survival was urgent, and in that urgency, I learned that protecting the whole sometimes meant shrinking parts of ourselves. Growing up in a place where access is limited, hamming it up became my pastime, a dream passed down.

5:54Then suddenly, performing was a gift that granted my family more access. See, only a child could fit through the gatekeeper's gates, especially a child like me that was so eager to please. So when I started auditioning and booking, it became clear I was the one who could do it. I could do something I enjoyed and lift some weight off my parents. so we did it we moved to LA for my career we drove four days and three nights from Illinois to California my dad withdrew his pension the church and extended family gave us what they could and we was off and right away it seemed to be the right decision in the first year I starred in a movie alongside William H.

6:41Macy and got a SAG nomination then go ahead Clem

6:50then i got a self-titled disney channel pilot and i starred in my own movie suddenly we had access to a life that didn't require constant vigilance each opportunity gave way to a world we never knew was possible we no longer shared rooms we had a card that worked my parents weren't stressed about bills or their ability to get the best education from me and my three siblings, it got to the point where my career became the center of our orbit. And not because we chased success, but because it bought us freedom. That's when performing stopped being something I did for fun and something we relied on.

7:34Messing that up wouldn't have just cost me. It would have put our freedom at risk. And we already knew what it was like to live without it. So I adapted. Not all at once, but over the years. By the time I landed my own TV show, I was undoubtedly the breadwinner, and my job was just that. There was no time for outside activities, no time for vacation, no time for pause. And as the pressure got greater, stage became my home. Performing was the safest way for me to be free. In my roles, I could embody joy. Even briefly, I could be true Jackson VP. Working at a grown-up job Never really knew I could work this hard At the time, it was just a theme song I wrote.

8:23I didn't know how I was transmuting. In my roles, I could be sad. I was allowed to be frustrated, although often disguised as humor. Performing was safe because it didn't make people feel guilty about watching me carry the weight of adulthood far too early. As the years flew by, I didn't just perform on stage. I started performing off it, too. I began designing a character to survive my life. That character is Kiki Palmer. Approachable, capable, funny. A small container my full range could exist inside of without overwhelming anyone. and it worked that character has carried me through 23 years in this industry through childhood fame the transition into adulthood through success i could have never imagined i even wrote a new york times best-selling book about how i did it how i became a master of me by every external measure i made the system work for me and then i had a son his name is leotis and every year my son and i do these elaborate halloween costumes and listen he's really good like he commits he knows how to perform they become full-on productions and it's a cool way to share what I do with him.

9:56We have a lot of fun. But this past year, after it was over, I noticed something. He was exhausted. And not the kind where you just fall asleep, the kind where you keep running and running and yelling and screaming. I thought once we got into the car, he'd fall asleep, but he didn't. He couldn't. And that scared me. So I pulled over, took him out of his seat and held him real tight. He was fighting me. I kept saying, it's okay to rest. You can rest. I've got you. After one last slap to my face, he fell asleep. When we got home, I still had work to do, but I had one hour free. So I lay down, closed my eyes, and before I knew it, the hour was gone.

10:44I hadn't slept one bit. My mind kept running. Then my mom walks in saying it's time to go and I get angry with her. She has no clue what's going on. Now I'm crying, feeling this delayed sense of grief, realizing I'm acting like my son and expecting my mother to do what she never could. Not because she didn't love me, but because survival taught her to value propulsion. Moving forward mattered more than being held. My mother was terrified I wouldn't survive, so she gave me what she knew, survival skills. And sure, when I was younger, she'd say, we can go back to Chicago, but going back didn't feel like rest.

11:28It felt like erasure. Stopping was always on the table alongside going back to how we were living before. So stopping never felt like a choice, just an ultimatum. I wasn't trying to be exceptional. I was trying to be reliable. I carried the load, not because I had to, but because I couldn't unknow what was at stake. Once you've seen life on the other side of poverty, you can't unsee the contrast. I couldn't live with the fact that we had a shot and I didn't take it, so I didn't fail.

12:12I just didn't know when it was complete.

12:19Somewhere along the way, I started believing I was a thing that saved us. I was Kiki Palmer. I built an entire way of moving through the world around staying alert, staying useful, staying on. I was reflexively disembodied, constantly juggling everything thrown at me. I got so good at letting my body run on autopilot, I would have these huge gaps in my life where I lacked recall. I remember one time I was doing Cinderella on Broadway and I couldn't remember how I got to the stage while on stage. it's clear that system didn't know how to stop. It's like a computer. It works great, so you never turn it off.

13:03You don't even let it restart for updates, so you never know just how much better it could be. That was me, a billboard for hyper-functioning, with style, of course.

13:18But the pattern finally broke. When I held my son and told him to rest, That was a small moment, but it ended something old, something that had been running for generations. When adaptive intelligence outlives the conditions it was built for, it turns into compulsion, productivity without presence. what I want to share with you is that survival can be so effective you don't realize when it's no longer needed in your life you might think you need to earn more prove more secure one more opportunity collect one more accolade or just keep moving long enough until you finally feel safe when in reality, you don't need another achievement.

14:17You need a break. Okay?

14:27You need a break long enough to look around, take stock, and feel gratitude for what you've already built. it's important we check the systems we're still running on some of the functions that saved you may be keeping you from the very you you were always trying to save my parents survived inside of systems that never fully saw them learning how to live instead of just surviving became my way of returning some of that visibility I went to Bali this past year and finally spent some one-on-one time with that little girl who left Robbins, Illinois all those years ago. So please, allow me to reintroduce myself.

15:19My name is Lauren Kiana Palmer, and I'm the CEO of the Kiki Palmer Company, A company I created out of nothing, with my mother, my father, and my three siblings.

15:43I'm just a girl that wanted herself and her family out of poverty. And once we was out, I forgot to let myself free. Yet I'm here today, grateful to say, my parents showed me how to survive. I showed them how to dream. And my son is showing me how to live.

16:12Thank you.

16:16TED: That was Lauren Kiki Palmer at TED 2026.

16:23TED: Hi, everyone. Thanks for listening to Lauren Kiki Palmer's talk. I'm Chi Perlman. I'm one of the curators here at TED. And what that means is I get to work with the speakers who we bring to our stage. It was such a joy working with Lauren. And before you go, I want to jump in and share a few more thoughts about that process. Sometimes you get to work with a speaker and you just feel the whole process is such a gift. Lauren Palmer, of course, is well known in the world through her stage personality and her identity as Kiki Palmer. Kiki Palmer is a joyful, wonderful, beautiful actress. Lauren Palmer is somebody who I had the privilege of working with.

17:06TED: When we first started talking about this process and this talk of going to the TED stage, I actually didn't expect Lauren to go so deeply into her own story, which is a story I think was so important to share with all of you. But as we started to peel back what it was she wanted to talk about and who she wanted to be on the stage, the life she led going from a child star to becoming who she was in the public world was not an easy process. This is a person who had to become an adult long before most of us would have had to do that. This is a person who rose to the occasion to pull her family out of poverty.

17:50TED: And she paid the price for many of those things. I think her insight into how she handled that and how she has resolved to become who she is now is a very important story for all of us. Our external identities are not who we necessarily have to be when we're not in the public eye. Everyone around Lauren Palmer calls her Kiki, but I was proud and it was quite a joy to call her Lauren because I knew that that's where her real connection point is. That's her true self. What surprised me about this process of working with Lauren was to see a celebrity allow themselves to become so real. It was relevatory both for her and for me.

18:34TED: So what that leaves me thinking about is what are some of the patterns that I could change or that we could change? Those patterns just become such a habit, but we don't have to have them. That's what I'm thinking about when I think about Lauren and I think about the process that we went through to build this story and to build this talk.

18:56TED: If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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21:02TED: If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.