Do Not Let Your Experience Claim You The speaker of the Ted Talk, “Yes, I survived cancer. But that doesn 't define me” is Debra Jarvis. Debra Jarvis has been a hospice and hospital chaplain for 30 years. In 2005, she found out that her mother had breast cancer, 5 days later she received news that she also had breast cancer. She says that we tend to identify ourselves by our wounds and claim that we are a survivor of something whether it be a rape survivor, holocaust survivor, cancer survivor, or any other kind of survivor. Jarvis uses her personal experiences, stories of patients, and her humor, to make her listeners believe in her credibility. Her appeals to ethos, combined with her friendly tone and light hearted jokes, creates an effective …show more content…
She ends her speech by questioning that if we identify our trauma as an experience and not an identity then we would stop being trapped by our trauma and we can identify ourselves as the person we have become. The speaker 's purpose is to try and get people to claim their experience and find the meaning in it "And that 's when I told myself, claim your experience. “Don 't let it claim you" (Jarvis). The audience of the speech is intended for everyone, or everyone that has been through a significant tragedy and identifies themselves with that tragedy. In the opening of her speech she says that whenever she meets someone she is instantly thinking about if they are a survivor of some kind of trauma and also if they are going to identify with that trauma. She makes the argument that we should not be defined by the tragedy 's that we have experienced but we should be defined by the person we have become or are becoming. Jarvis uses humor throughout her speech. The humor she uses allows Jarvis 's intent of the speech to be credible. She wants everyone to find meaning in their tragedy and she shows how she got through her own tragedy by being lighthearted about the subject. She makes a lot of jokes throughout her speech, which keeps her audience engaged and makes what she is hoping to get across to the audience less serious even though it is a serious matter. The audience seems to enjoy the jokes that she makes throughout the speech. Overall the humor that she uses is effective and makes her argument easily