Amazing Poems/Monologues

To This Day (TEDx Talk) - Shane Koyczan

This is the TEDx Talk. I'll put the project version in the next chapter.

When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, "If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it." Take it from me: Under the bed is not a good hiding spot. I know because I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself. But that's what we were told. "Stand up for yourself." And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are. We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn't do it, others did it for us. Geek. Fatty. Slut. Fag.

And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always thought that was an unfair question. It presupposes that we can't be what we already are. We were kids.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man. I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet.

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."

And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me. When I was 11, I wanted to be left alone. When I was 12, I wanted to die. When I was 13, I wanted to kill a kid. When I was 14, I was asked to seriously consider a career path.

I said, "I'd like to be a writer."

And they said, "Choose something realistic."

So I said, "Professional wrestler."

And they said, "Don't be stupid."

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.

And I wondered, what made my dreams so easy to dismiss? Granted, my dreams are shy, because they're Canadian.

My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic. They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too. Silly. Foolish. Impossible. But I kept dreaming. I was going to be a wrestler. I had it all figured out. I was going to be The Garbage Man.

My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor. My saying was going to be, "I'm taking out the trash!"

And then this guy, Duke "The Dumpster" Droese, stole my entire shtick.

I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor.

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."

Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence.

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 frustration from 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,
mother fucker."

This is who I am. This is how I stand up for myself.