Elizabeth Ann “Lizzie” Velásquez is an American woman whose extremely rare medical condition led her to become an author and motivational speaker…
“In a time when beauty is defined by supermodels, success is defined by wealth, and fame is deified by how many followers you have on social media, Lizzie Velasquez asks the question how do you define yourself? Once labeled, “The Worlds Ugliest Woman,” Lizzie decided to turn things around and create her own definitions of what she defines as beauty and happiness.
Event: TEDxAustinWomen
Date: December 5, 2013
Audio-Only:
Lizzie Velasquez – Motivational speaker
I’m really, really, really excited to be here. I kind of want to tell you little bit more of the – I don’t want to say basics, because we don’t really know anything about my syndrome.
I was born with this very, very rare syndrome that only two other people in the world, including myself thought we know of have. Basically, what this syndrome causes is that I cannot gain weight. Yes, it does sound as good as it is. I can eat absolutely whatever I want, whenever I want and I won’t really gain any weight.
I’m going to be 25 in March and I’ve never weighed over about 64 pounds in my entire life. When I was in college I hid — well I didn’t hide – it was – everyone knew I was there, but it was a giant tub of Twinkies, donuts, chips, skittles and my roommate would say, I could hear you at 12:30 reaching under your bed to get food.
But I’m like you know what, it’s all right, I can do these things, because there are benefits to this syndrome, there are benefits to not being able to gain weight, there are benefits to being visually impaired, there are benefits to being kind of really small.
A lot of people think Lizzie, how in world are you saying there is benefits when you can only see out of one eye? Well, let me tell you what the benefits are, because they are great. I wear contacts, contact, half off contacts, when I wear my reading glasses half off prescription. If somebody is annoying me, being rude, stand on my right side, it’s like you are not even there, I don’t even know you were standing there.
Right now, if I stand like this, I have no clue that there is this whole side of the room. Also being small, I am very willing to volunteer myself to go to Weight Watchers, go to some gym and say, hi I’m Lizzie, I will be your poster child. Put my face whenever you need and I will say, hi I used this program, look how well it worked.
Even though there are really amazing things that have come from this syndrome, there are also things that have been very, very difficult as you can imagine. Growing up I was raised 150% normally. When – I was my parents’ first child and when I was born the doctors told my mom, your daughter has no amniotic fluid around her, at all. So when I was born, it was a miracle that I came out screaming. The doctors told my parents, we just want to warn you, expect your daughter to never be able to talk, walk, crawl, think or do anything by herself.
Now as first parents you could – first time parents you could think that my parents would say, oh no, why? Why – why are we getting our first child to have all these unknown problems? That’s not what they did. The first thing they told the doctor was, we want to see her and we are going to take her home and love her and raise her to the best of our abilities and that’s what they did.
I credit pretty much everything that I’ve done in my life to my parents. My dad is here with me today and my mom is at home watching, hi mom. She is recovering from a surgery and she has been the glue that’s held our family together and giving me the strength to see that she is going through so much, because she has this fighting spirit that she has instilled in me, that I have so proudly been able to stand in front of people and say “you know what, I’ve had a really difficult life but that’s okay” that’s okay.
Things have been scary, things have been tough, one of the biggest things that I had to deal with growing up was something that I’m pretty sure every single one of us in this room has dealt with before. Can you guess what that is? Starts with a “B”, can you guys guess it?
Female Audience: Boys.
Boys.
Lizzie: Boys. Bullying. I know what you all are thinking. I should have come – why couldn’t I sit here with them? I had to deal with bullying a lot, but as I said I was raised very normally, so when I started kindergarten, I had absolutely no idea that I looked different, no clue. I couldn’t see that I looked different from other kids. I think of it kind of as a big slap of reality for a five year old, because I went into school first day, decked out and Pocahontas gear, I was ready.
I went in with my backpack that looked like a turtle shell, because it was bigger than me and I walked up to a little girl, I smiled at her, she looked up at me like I was a monster, like I was the scariest thing she had ever seen in her life.
My first reaction was, she is really rude. I am a fun kid and she is the one missing out. So I’ll just go over here and play with blocks or boys. I thought the day was going to get better and unfortunately it didn’t, the day kind of got worse and worse and a lot of people just wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with me and I couldn’t understand why. Why? What did I do? I didn’t do anything to them. In my mind I was still a really cool kid. So I had to go home and ask my parents, what’s wrong with me, what did I do, why don’t they like me?
And they sat me down and they said, Lizzie the only thing that’s different about you, is that you are smaller than the other kids. You have this syndrome, but it’s not going to define who you are. They said, go to school, pick your head up, smile, continue to be yourself and people will see that you’re just like them. And so that’s what I did.
I want you think and ask yourself this in your head right now. What defines you? Who are you? Is it where you come from? Is it your background? Is it your friends? What is it? What defines who you are as a person? It’s taken me a very long time to figure out what defines me.
For so long, I thought what defined me was my outer appearance. I thought that my little tiny legs, and my little arms and my little face, was ugly, I thought I was disgusting. I hated when I would wake up in the morning when I was going to middle school and looking in the mirror getting ready and thinking can I just scrub this syndrome off. It would make my life so much easier if could just scrub it off. I could look like the other kids, I wouldn’t have to buy cloths that had Dora the Explorer on it. I wouldn’t have to buy stuff that was bedazzled when I was trying to be like the cool kids.
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