Hello! Good Morning TEDx San Diego! Hey! So good to be here.
Today, I want to talk to you about one of the great loves of my life which is the love of possibility. And what I mean by that is the passion that you have inside of you to create the results that you know that you are meant to create in this world.
And in order to do that, I want to share with you a little bit about my journey of going from being a homeless person on the streets of New York City and transforming my life and going on to Harvard.
And another piece I want to share with you — Actually, to start that conversation is to talk to you a bit today about one of my heroes, who is someone who has passed away who was with us as a young man and his name was Ben Underwood.
Ben Underwood is someone who became famous to us in this world because he was someone who we labeled as blind, but he actually had the ability to see in a different way. He had something called echolocation which you’ve heard about before with dolphins and bats. He, like some people who don’t have sight, found a way to create sound waves. He would — you know, some people pound their foot — he would actually use a clicking noise in his mouth to send sound waves bouncing off the walls around him so that he could actually navigate his way around the world.
I know it sounds crazy, but if you go on YouTube you can see tons of videos of Ben navigating his way around even though he had actually no eyes. And he’s an incredible person to me for a few reasons.
And one is I would watch these videos of Ben and be so moved by him because any day of the week that you went to his house, you could watch Ben and you would not be able to tell that he was blind. You would watch him run up and down the stairs in his home. His mother, Aquanetta, would call down to him, and he would get her things from her dresser upstairs, he would ride his bike around the neighborhood. He would hold the door open for people because he was able to make a noise that sounded a little like this [make sounds] send sound waves off and essentially see in a different way.
Now, scientists became fascinated by Ben. And they came from everywhere to study him. You would see scientists, and academics, and reporters would gather around Ben and they would put him through a series of tests, and you would watch them put a telephone on the table, or a plate, or something, and he would click and he would be able to tell you what was in front of him.
So people became fascinated by Ben’s story, but that’s not what moved me so much about Ben’s story. There was something else that was different about Ben that really touched my heart.
Now as much as I understand that people are fascinated at the result that he accomplished in his life, which was, let’s be straight, was incredible, what I was curious about in watching him was what is the thinking that gets somebody to create that kind of result in their lives? What is it inside of a person that refuses to say: “I will label myself as blind?” And find another way?
The answer to that question is something that moved me to tears when I learned about Ben’s story. And what that is, was a conversation that took place between Ben and his mother the day of his surgery.
Now, he was two weeks shy of his third birthday, and his mother had put him through intense chemotherapy because he had had cancer in both eyes. And, she had a choice to make: “Do I give Ben a ton of chemotherapy and keep risking his life and maybe save his eyes? Or do I remove his eyes entirely? And if I do, he’ll live, but he’ll have no sight.”
She made the tough call. They removed his eyes. And I’m just going to ask you for one moment to imagine, if you could, what you would say to your three-year old if they woke up from surgery without their eyes? What could you possibly say?
So I listened carefully at the words his mother Aquanetta chose to share. And what she did was, as soon as Ben woke up and said, “Mom, I can’t see,” she immediately said to him, “Ben, yes, you can.”
And in her own words, she said, “I took his little hands and I placed them on my cheeks and I said, “Ben you can see with your hands.” And then I said, “Ben, here,” and I gave him my arm, and I let him smell my skin. And she said: “Ben, you can smell my skin, and you can see with your smell.” And then I whispered in his ear: “Ben, you can absolutely see. You can see with your ears.”
And one, two, three, Aquanetta, his mother, went through the various ways in which Ben could see. And so, in teaching Ben to refuse to label himself as blind, she set his mind in motion in the search of a greater possibility. He began to ask himself not “Why can’t I see?”, but “In what ways can I see?”
And for the love and the passion of that possibility, he searched for his own and therefore it would only make sense that he would create a new way. That’s what inspires me about him, is when someone is so moved by what possibility can create in their lives — and don’t get me wrong, I marvel at his results, the fact that he could have echolocation, and that people would sit there and study him is incredible — but what moved me to tears again is the search for another possibility.
I relate to that in my own life because well, you guys know, that at some point, I ended up homeless in my life.
And that happened because, I grew up in the Bronx in a very tough neighborhood. My parents, they had always used drugs, I mean, my whole life they had been getting high. And it was commonplace in my household to walk and see my parents shooting up drugs in my kitchen. And growing up, even though they were very loving to us, my sister and I, I watched them use drugs so frequently that that was just the way that our lives went.
That went on for so long. You can’t live like that forever. It catches up to you. Eventually, both my parents contracted HIV and by the time I was that age that most people are when they’re planning their prom or applying to college, what happened in my life, instead, was that my mother was without access to the medications they have now. She went from having HIV to full blown AIDS.
My father was living in a homeless shelter. I found myself, at 15 years old, sleeping in New York City streets, in parks, and subway stations. Many nights I would fall asleep with my backpack in my lap, and I would have my journal, my clothing, I had a picture of my mother when she was my age, and she was homeless in New York City when her family had fallen apart.
Now living this way, I know I sound pretty different from other people because it’s such an intense situation, but I actually think I was really just like everyone else. No matter what was in front of me, I had dreams that I wanted to accomplish. I mean, don’t we all?
I had things like I wanted to go to school, I wanted to have a family, I wanted to live a better life. But, you know, people listen when they hear my story and I guess much like Ben, when they study his echolocation, they want him to be able to distinguish the telephone from the computer, or whatever they did with him, people would often ask me very strange questions about being homeless. People would ask me, “Did you eat from the trash?” Or “Where did you sleep?”
The things that people are interested in, fascinate me. When instead, what really was in my heart, was probably the most amazing experience I had, was again, this internal experience. I had these dreams, but living in that kind of despair, I let them began to fade away.
Have you ever felt hopeless in your life? Where you had something that you wanted to do but it felt so much out of your reach? I had this voice in the back of my head that I believe we all have. I call it the ‘what if?’ voice. And the what if voice said, “What if you go to school? What if you change your life? What if you go back?” And I let that voice fade in all of this sadness that I was in.
And there is a quote that I love by Dr. Martin Luther King and what he says is: “Your life begins to end the day you become silent about things that matter.” And feeling that inside of me, that was the most dangerous thing about being in my situation, but what occurred was incredible. I had a transformational experience. Unfortunately, it came through tragedy. It was when my mother died.
But when she passed away, what my mother did for me, and maybe it was the intense love that we had for each other because we loved each other so much, her dying, it unlocked my mind to begin to think of possibility in my own life. And the best way I know how to explain this is there was something about knowing that at one moment I had a family, I had my mother, and then I lost everything.
And I realized that life changed pretty rapidly for the worst. But life changed. Life can change. And I was inspired by this belief that my life could, in fact, change. With that thinking in mind, I remember knocking on doors in high schools. I’d dust myself off after sleeping on the train, I’d knock on doors at high schools after years of being truant, and I would ask them to accept me. I should have been applying to college; I was applying to high school, that’s how old I was. I was knocking on doors asking for them to accept me.
And I went from school, to school, to school, and I experienced a lot of rejections. But there was this feeling in my heart, a feeling that I want so badly to transfer to everyone that I meet now, which is that passion that I felt for that “What would happen if I just kept going? Even if there was every evidence in the world that it wouldn’t work out, what if?”
And for the idea that even though it was unlikely after being told no so many times, it was possible that the next school would accept me. And so I continued to knock on doors. Until I was accepted.
And then I fell in love with what would be possible if I got straight A’s for the first time in my life? So I did that.
And then I fell in love with what would be possible if I applied to Harvard?
And I fell in love with what would be impossible, well, with applying for a scholarship from the New York Times.
And I had no idea how big this would get. I didn’t know that I would actually be able to lift myself out of homeless, go on to Harvard, graduate and entirely change my life.
Now, like Ben, who I mentioned in the beginning, people get pretty fixated and fascinated on the result.
Talk to me about Harvard.” Or, “Talk to me about the mechanics of how you did what you did.” People think about that.
And what I am moved by instead is falling in love with possibility in your life. Because haven’t you ever felt in a place of despair? You had a goal, you had something you wanted to accomplish, and you started feeling that fading feeling. In fact, I love when people talk to youth because you know what they will often say? I always hear people say: “It’s great you have all the passion you have. Get it done while you’re young.” Raise your hand if anyone’s ever told you ‘youth’ or ‘uniquely qualified.’
Say, “I.”
[Audience: I]
And so I hear this with youth, and I always thought that sounded kind of screwy because what’s the implication? That one day in your life, you will no longer be passionate. You will no longer be capable. And here’s what I believe: absolutely no one knows what’s possible until they’re already doing it. And each and every moment is always another chance. No matter what your history is, no matter where you’ve come from, every moment is a new possibility.
And if I could leave you with something, I’ll tell you that as I moved through these obstacles in my life, I was tempted so much to think that because of my past I could not change my future, but that feeling of, “Okay, I’ll let it go. What will happen if I apply to school? What will happen if I apply to the scholarship? What will happen if I put one foot in front of the other until my world changes around me?”
So any time that you are hunkered down in that feeling of despair, any time that you may ever doubt yourself or believe for a second that there was a before, an after, to your potential in this world, I’m standing here today to tell you that your potential is timeless. And will you do this with me now? As I leave here? Will you go, ‘new moment, new opportunity’? Do it with me now.
New moment, new opportunity. New moment, new opportunity.
And one more time, new moment, new opportunity.
Your potential in this world is timeless. My wish for you is that you fall in love with possibility, and you marvel in what it will create in your life and in this world.
