Life is hard. Art helps | Liana Finck (re-release)

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Sometimes a cartoon is all I need to see in order to understand something really big in my life. For cartoonist Liana Fink, this is what it's all about. In this funny, moving archive talk, Liana shares how she uses creativity to navigate false starts and cluelessness in the search for belonging, and how drawings have a unique power to guide us through life's predicaments, big and small, whether it's what to make for dinner or how to think about our relationship with a higher power.

0:48The ways of the world often baffle me. I sometimes wonder if I miss the memo about the most basic things. What are you supposed to make for dinner? What do you talk about in an elevator? Why do people cut in line? How do you leave a dinner party without being rude? Or do you leave at all?

1:15My tendency to see the world like I'm from outer space was a bit of a liability when I was a kid. True story.

1:26But it's been helpful in my career. I'm a cartoonist. When I first started making cartoons for The New Yorker about a decade ago, I kept my ideas light and quirky. I didn't draw anything too personal. I figured I was too specific, too hard to relate to and read, possibly too female. It took a breakup to get me to start drawing more autobiographically. The pain I was feeling, although objectively pretty run-of-the-mill, was impossible to ignore. I knew that drawing was my strongest problem-solving tool, so I decided to diagram what I was going through.

2:16By making these drawings, I could see how my ex and I had hurt each other and move on. On to other breakups.

2:31Drawing from my own life was a revelation to me, not only because it helped me understand myself better, but because it made me see for the first time that people could relate to me. Now that I had this amazing tool, there were so many problems I wanted to solve with it. The problem of scheduling, the problem of too many things happening all at the same time, the problem, relatedly, of time, and finally, dating again. There's an endless amount to say about dating. There are, of course, problems that can't be summed up in a single drawing. For these problems, you need many drawings. One more complex problem I have is with God.

3:28I'm Jewish, so I'm talking about the God of the Old Testament. My problem with God isn't actually a big problem. It's just, I don't know, it stayed with me. My problem with God is that he's too confident.

3:51For me, creation is an act of solving problems, of figuring things out. God already seems to have everything figured out. He strikes me as more of a king than a creator, and I'm not sure you can be both. As an experiment, I decided to remake the book of Genesis as a graphic novel. My version of God is not confident, and maybe not coincidentally, she's a woman. It surprised me how few changes I needed to make to the original text, which is sparse and ancient and lends itself well to interpretation. For example, the Bible opens in this mysterious, moody way with God floating aimlessly on the face of a dark, mysterious void.

4:50In my version, I have her floating this way because she's feeling despondent about her limitations as an artist. She's made this messy, wet, mixed-up, dark first draft of the world, and she just doesn't know where to go from here. My version of God doesn't know exactly what she's doing, but she draws a horizon line, and things start to fall into place. She banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, not because they disobeyed her, but because by eating the apple and becoming wise, she feels they've outgrown the world she created for them, and she needs to let them go. She scatters the builders of the Tower of Babel, not because she's threatened by their power, but because, like any introvert, she needs her privacy.

5:48When she destroys the world in the story of Noah, it's not because she's incensed with mankind, but because she's incensed with herself. She knows she could have done a better job when she made us. My adaptation of the book of Genesis is a creation story full of false starts and absurdities. But it's a creation story all the same, one in which a self-conscious woman, even though she worries and makes mistakes, is nonetheless a successful, committed artist.

6:28When I finished my book, I did feel a new connection to the God of the Torah and a new sense of belonging to my religion. I also felt a new sense of belonging, period. It's lonely being someone who has no idea how to act normal, but it's profoundly less lonely being that person in a world created for her by an equally awkward, self-conscious God. These days, when I worry that I won't know what to make for dinner, I remind myself that God wouldn't know either. This gives me the confidence to embrace my cluelessness and just wing it. Thank you. Thank you so much.

7:21That was Liana Fink speaking at TED 2023. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.