Full text of Roy Petitfils’ TEDx Talk titled ‘What Teenagers Want You to Know’ at TEDxVermilionStreet conference. In this talk, Roy Petitfils discusses the invisibility epidemicfaced by teenagers and what we can do to help.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Roy Petitfils – Author
The guy you see before you is wearing a large shirt with a 34-inch waist, but I wasn’t always this way. When I was 16 years old, my mom brought me to a local grocery store under the auspices of shopping. And she leads me to the back of the store where we see a six-foot-four burly butcher who’s got a big red beard and he’s wearing a blood-stained white coat. He was clearly expecting us, and he’s waving us back with a bloody meat cleaver.
And I look at my mom, not for the last time, and say, Mom, what are we doing here?
And she said, You’ll see, baby.
And so we follow the butcher back into this deep cooler, and as we walk through this deep damp cooler, the smell of beef blood fills the air. And I look up to my left and I see these cows that have been slaughtered and are cut in half hanging from these chains, alongside these small pigs hanging from chains which are being prepared for a Cajun boucherie and a cochon de lait.
And the butcher walks forward, and he stands next to this big black metal platform with a pole sticking up from it and a big circle on top. And he begins to explain, Roy, my dish here is a Toledo meat scale. He said, We use this to weigh all these farm animals you see hanging from those chains.
And I look at my mom, Mom, what the hell are we doing here?
And she said, Baby, your doctor called me todayand he said that we have to get an accurate weight on you.
And I said, So why don’t we go to the doctor’s office, which is what we’ve done since I was born.
She said, Baby, you haven’t been able to weigh on the doctor’s scale in years. It only goes up to 350 pounds.
And so at 16 years old, I’m standing in this damp, cool air, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I weigh 350 pounds, that I weigh more than 350 pounds. And I’m thinking, 351.7 tops. And the butcher in patience is like, Come on, Roy, get on up here so we can get an accurate weight on you.
And like anybody who’s gone for a weigh in, I’m like, because that’s going to make a hell of a difference at this point. And I step up onto this black, cold steel platform and feel the cold on the bottom of my feet as I watch this long red needle spin to 454. And I hear the gasp in my mom’s voice. And I look down and I see the shame, the sadness, and the embarrassment trickle down her cheeks.
And I look over at this poor butcher, who is having arguably the most awkward moment of his whole life, who’s like… And my mom looks up at me and she says through a choked up voice, We got to do something about this baby.
I said, I know, Mom, we do, but we didn’t.
See, like 34% of young people in America today, I was born to a single parent home. Like 20% of youth in America today, I was born in poverty. My mom didn’t want that for me for the rest of my life, and she certainly didn’t want it for her grandchildren. And for her, for me to be able to get out of poverty, it meant that I needed a private education, which required her to work up to four jobs at a time sometimes, leaving me alone after 12 years old in a rundown roach rat infested apartment in Jeanerette, Louisiana, where many nights I would cry myself to sleep, just waiting for my mom to come home, but knowing that she’s working so that I can be better, and that I can have a better life.
I noticed as a young teenager that I began to have all of these bad feelings inside of me, and at the time I didn’t know what they were, but I knew one thing, that boudin and cracklin made it go away. And in south Louisiana, especially in Cajun country, we have no shortage of good, inexpensive food, and so I began numbing the pain with the food.
And like any addict will tell you, it just took more and more of what didn’t work to make the pain go away. And I got bigger, and I got bigger.
And attending a private school with a bunch of fairly wealthy people, and from my point of view, slim and good looking people, you can imagine that I was picked on. In fact, I was unmercifully bullied through middle school up until my sophomore year of high school. You see, like a lot of people who gained weight, I didn’t gain my weight here in my stomach. I gained it in my upper back.
And so one day I go to school, and in an especially vicious moment, my classmates had all stuffed their gym and PE uniforms up the shirt, the back of the shirt of one of my classmates, and they had taped a sign on the back that said, Roy.
And one of them comes up to me while I’m taking this scene in, and he sticks his hand underneath the slab, the roll of fat in my upper back, and he goes, can you even feel that big boy? I can’t even feel the ribs in your back.
And the truth was, I couldn’t feel it physically, but I felt it. And I went home that day, and not for the last time, I prayed that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning and have to undergo that torture ever again, but I did.
Of consistent negative attention up through 10th grade, where in my junior year I was the object of no attention.
OUR GREATEST FEAR IS TO BE INVISIBLE
I would walk through the halls of my school, and no one would tick on me, and for a while I loved it. It was great. Even people weren’t unmercifully bullying me, and I was like, yes, this is great. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that not only were they not picking on me, they weren’t even noticing me. They were ignoring me.
And I remember at 17 thinking, I preferred it when they picked on me, and I learned a powerful lesson at 17 years old that has guided my life and the work I do today, that unlike many in pop psychology say, rejection is not our greatest fear. Our greatest fear is to be invisible.
But I did graduate, and I went on to college, and all of these people started coming up to me, and they were smiling at me, and they were asking me questions about myself. I remember it vividly. It was a white Catholic priest, a black deacon, a Puerto Rican office manager, a bunch of people who were my age, some older, and a Polish-American Chicago transplant, who saw me. I remember today I would describe it as psychic shock.
I had no idea what it felt like to be looked at. These people didn’t seem to notice that I weighed 500 pounds, either that or they just didn’t seem to care. But they included me. They saw me. They accepted me. They invited me to go out to places with them. And from the day that I walked into that Catholic Student Center until about three years later, thanks to these people, most of whom include my very best friends to this day and my very best friend, my wife, I would lose nearly 300 pounds without surgery.
But it would be a mistake and it would be unfortunate if you left here today thinking that I came to talk to you about overcoming the challenges of poverty and obesity, as serious and as important as those challenges are. The challenge that I overcame wasn’t being poor and wasn’t being obese. The challenge I overcame, I overcame with the help of people who saw me, who helped me to realize that I wasn’t invisible.
OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF INVISIBILITY
Today I’m here to talk to you about overcoming the challenges of invisibility. The teenagers in our country today are desperately crying to be seen.
Over the last 20 years, it’s been my mission to work with young people, teenagers especially, and to give them the gift that those people gave me when I was in college. And it was the gift of being seen.
And in my work with young people, what I’ve realized that what they want more than anything else is to be seen within the context of a meaningful relationship with adults. But this shocks many adults who I talk with. They’re like, Roy, if teenagers want to be seen by us so much, then why do they act the way they do? Why don’t they just come out and ask for it?
And that’s a good question. In the words of Dr. Bob McCarty, teenagers are experience-rich but language-poor. Dr. Bob McCarty is right. Teenagers are experience rich and language poor, but they do want to be seen by us in the context of a meaningful relationship.
Once I was leading a small group of teens and this 17-year-old girl who was a junior in high school spoke up, she said, Mr. Pedophile, which is what the teens often called me because they couldn’t pronounce my last name, which is a bit unfortunate when you do what I do for a living.
She said, I know you don’t have kids, but if you did, would you and your wife fly away to Paris for two weeks and leave your 17-year-old daughter home alone with her black American Express card, no limit, the keys to her Land Rover in the mansion all alone?
Now luckily, I had the wherewithal then to understand that this girl’s parents were wealthy enough to be able to afford to have several attorneys on retainer and I did not answer that question.
And the budding counselor said, well, what do you think?
And she said, you know, I know I love my stuff, don’t get me wrong, and she pulled the black card out and she kissed it and she’s like, I love you. And she said, and I’ll kill you if you tell my parents this, but I love them more and more than any of this stuff, I just want a relationship with them and I know I avoid them, but they also avoid me and I don’t know how to not avoid them, but I don’t want them to avoid me.
And I look around the circle and I see eight heads nodding in unison, agreeing with this girl. In the last 20 years, I’ve heard this young 17-year-old girl’s sentiments expressed in thousands of different ways countless times from teenagers, that they want to be in our presence despite their verbal and nonverbal actions to the contrary.
In addition to wanting to be in our presence, they also want the greatest gift that we can give them, which is the gift of our attention, to pay attention to them. I had an 18-year-old boy, young man, brought into my office one time who was on the verge of being suspended from a local high school because he refused to stand up after the weekly all school assemblies and sing the school’s alma mater. He was a senior in high school and he sat on the front row and the administration and others didn’t like it because when everyone else stood up, he didn’t stand up.
His parents were also concerned because he was beginning to show signs of depression and they were just worried about him. They had brought him to see two other counselors and they finally decided, well, I guess we’ll just try the big bald pedophile.
And to say that this kid didn’t want to be in my office would be the understatement of the decade. He came in with a scowl on his face, his hat on, not looking at me, and he plops down in my couch and he says, could we just get this over with? And he had this accent, it was like a blend of the Bronx, Sicily, and New Orleans.
And I said, where are you from? And he said, Chalmette, which is a town near New Orleans, which was ravaged in the floodwaters following Hurricane Katrina. And I said, what brought you here to Lafayette, to Cajun country? And he said, Katrina.
And I said, tell me about it. And he goes, seriously, are my parents paying you good money for me to come in here and talk to you about current events, bald guy?
Come on. I was like, no, tell me what Katrina was like for you. And he said, My mom called me up in the morning and she was screaming in the phone, Eric, make sure whatever you want to keep for the rest of your life, go and put it in a duffel bag and we’re going to be there to pick up you and your brothers and sisters in the van. But only a duffel bag because we don’t have enough room for you to bring all your crap.
And he said, Then, you know, we went to Baton Rouge and now we settled here and all my friends are back in New Orleans and they’re graduating from school this year and I’m not because my parents love this godforsaken town of Lafayette, Louisiana. And I looked at him and he goes, Are we done?
And I said, Yeah, almost. I just have one question. What was in your bag?
He said, What?
I said, What was in your bag, Eric?
He said, What bag?
The duffel bag that you packed and put in the van.
He said, I don’t feel like talking about this crap. Can we go, look, I know it’s only half possession, I’ll tell my parents we went the full time, you can collect your money.
I said, What was in your bag, Eric?
And his eyes glassed over. And he said, My dad’s football jersey.
What school did your dad go to?
He said, Holy Cross High School in New Orleans.
What else was in your bag?
My grandfather’s high school diploma.
What school did your grandfather go to, Eric?
Holy Cross High School in New Orleans.
What else was in your bag? And the tears are streaming down his cheeks. My uncle’s on my dad and on my mom’s side, their senior ring and a state championship football.
What school did they go to?
Holy Cross High School in New Orleans.
I said, Let me see if I’m understanding you correctly. You’re about to be the first man in four generations of men in your family to break this unbroken legacy of men who graduate from Holy Cross High School. And he is bawling at this point.
And he said, through a choked up voice, he said, Yeah, and these bastards expect me to stand up and sing my love of their tradition? I love tradition.This school’s barely 25 years old, they don’t know the first thing about tradition. I’m sure as hell I ain’t standing up and singing it.
And I said, I don’t blame you. And we continued the visit and he calmed down and we visited for a few more weeks. And I remember his parents calling me one day and they said, You know what? He doesn’t complain about going back and he’s getting better. He said, Roy, thank you for seeing our son.
You know, you don’t have to be a psychotherapist to be able to see teenagers. You don’t need to go to grad school and you don’t need a duffel bag of tricks. But you do need the willingness to be able to see teenagers. And they’re desperate to be seen.
As you go out of here today, I’ve already primed you, you’re going to be seeing teens everywhere, maybe even at Jefferson Street Pub, illegally. And you’ll have the opportunity to see them or to look away. You’ll have the opportunity to smile at them, what I wouldn’t have given when I was a teenager for an adult to lovingly smile at me.
You could go up to them and you could ask them their name. For the teens who are more close to you in your life, you could text them, send them a Snapchat. You could invite them out for coffee. You can just talk with them, it doesn’t take much. But they are desperate to be seen.
There’s no one of us in here who can go out and see every teenager and give them that powerful gift of attention. But each and every one of us can go out of here and see a teenager. And in doing so, remove from their life this cloak of invisibility and give them the gift of our attention and the gift of being seen. I know that it will make a difference, and I know that it made a difference in my life.
On behalf of all of the invisible teenagers in America today, and of myself, thank you.
