TED Talk Tuesday – Shane Koyczan: “To This Day”… for the bullied and beautiful

For the bullied, the belittled, and the beautiful…an Amazing conversation between poet and audience, but they are all amazing.There are so many great lines in this piece I cannot put them all. Stop the hate, stop the bullying, stop the criticism. We can’t see the damage it does to others but it does do damage, and long lasting, heart breaking damage. I still remember times I have been bullied, many years after the event. It can end, we can stop it, we can make the world and our lives better. May this piece remind us all to be a little kinder, a little gentler, and a little more compassionate.

“ When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much. When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was nine, I saw the movie “Jaws,” and thought to myself, “No, thank you.”

“See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be. And I wasn’t the only one. We were being told that we somehow must become what we are not, sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be. I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me.“

“ I thought to myself, “What now? Where do I turn?” Poetry. Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me. One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself.From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully. When I was 19, I wrote, “I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite.”

“When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases not at all. I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise. And I remember this plan, born out of frustrationfrom a kid who kept calling me “Yogi,” then pointed at my tummy and said, “Too many picnic baskets.” Turns out it’s not that hard to trick someone, and one day before class, I said, “Yeah, you can copy my homework,” and I gave him all the wrong answers that I’d written down the night before. He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score, and couldn’t believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero. I knew I didn’t have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, “Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker.”

“In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, “Beware of dog.” To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn’t think she’s beautiful because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. Kids used to say, “She looks like a wrong answerthat someone tried to erase, but couldn’t quite get the job done.” And they’ll never understand that she’s raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word “Mom,” because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she’s only ever always been amazing.“

“and if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself,get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself. You signed it, “They were wrong.”