how many of you believe that we are
products of our environment I not only
believe that our environment shapes us
but that the environment shapes us I
believe that there is a lot that we can
learn from the earth
I believe that Mother Nature has lessons
written into her geology and her
disasters lessons on love death and even
crisis I used to ride the big yellow
classic American school bus from home to
school and back again every day even
well into high school on one
particularly long bus ride when I was 13
my classmates started to get antsy and a
fight broke out in the heat of the
moment as I was yelling at everyone to
be quiet and sit down an older boy who
towered over everyone paused for a
moment and looked me dead in the eye he
said three words gritting his teeth and
enunciated every consonant forcefully
shut up Dyke he said a chorus of ooh
burns rang out behind him eventually I
was dropped off at my stop I trudged the
snow to my house sat down at the
computer and typed that single word into
Google search I didn’t just learn the
meaning of that word that day I felt it
this derogatory word for lesbian made me
realize that at the age of 13 I wasn’t
just different I was the other I knew
that as long as this word could be
applied to me that I was not welcomed by
my peers so I decided that I was going
to deny this realization of my sexual
identity because I had something to
prove I may not have known it then but
at that time I was entering in again
crisis I’m 20 now and I didn’t start on
the path to recovery and pulling myself
out of crisis until I was 19 that’s six
years of desperately trying to push away
an inherent part of myself six years of
trying to control the uncontrollable six
years of reckless rebellion I began to
spiral downwards almost as soon as I had
stepped foot onto the hardstyle floor of
my high school this is where I began to
force myself into this heterosexual
world that left me confused angry and
very very uncomfortable I couldn’t cope
healthily I got into fights I started
drama I drank I did drugs i disrupted
class and I shut myself off emotionally
even into my first year of university I
barely left my room and when I did I
rarely had positive interactions with my
peers in six years I struggled with an
eating disorder struggled with mental
illness threw myself into manipulative
heterosexual relationship and
experienced sexual assault and through
all of this I felt like my world was
crashing and burning around me this
self-destructive behavior put me into
this dark suppressed and dangerous
existence with seemingly no way out
somehow though in the midst of all this
I discovered a passion for the earth for
environmentalism ecology and natural
disasters the more I read and the more I
researched the more I began to
understand vulnerability and
powerlessness in a deeper sense the
earth is this big beautiful thing with
her own processes and our own disasters
and I and we
just tiny tiny specs that exist because
she lets us mother nature does what she
wants when she wants and how she wants
and in this sense Mother Nature embodies
crisis crisis doesn’t care who where or
what you are it will hit you without
warning and take your life if you let it
you cannot prevent natural disasters and
you cannot prevent personal crisis when
crisis started to consume my life when I
felt defeated by a pile-on of
misfortunes
it was the simple understanding that our
personal lives and the earth are
interconnected that began to guide me
towards recovery and comfort me another
key factor in my process of recovery was
a concept called emotional intelligence
or EQ before my second year of high
school I picked up this book called
emotional intelligence called by Daniel
Goleman essentially EQ is the capability
of an individual to assess and manage
their emotions in order to adapt and
adjust their behavior appropriately in a
given context it’s the idea that if we
can understand our own personal
emotional needs and the needs of others
that we will form healthy relationships
acclimate to stressful conditions and
ultimately find greater success it’s
safe to say that during my six-year
crisis I would did not have a high EQ I
let emotion consume my entire world but
then eventually I learned how to step
outside of myself and assess my
emotional needs I realized that I needed
a way to guide myself towards recovery
and health and that’s when my
understanding of the earth began to have
a broader application in my moments of
rationality and clarity I knew that if I
applied if I thought critically and
metaphorically I could apply lessons
about natural disaster preparedness and
it was in this way that I understood
emotional intelligence to be a roadmap
for navigating personal crisis an
individualized evacuation map for times
of emotional disaster but then if you
don’t have or practice EQ then crisis is
harder to navigate and thus the first
major parallel between the earth and our
personal lives
is the issue of preparedness or lack
thereof
many of us have the privilege of
distancing ourselves from natural
disasters watching wildfires burn and
winds destroy buildings from miles and
miles away as if these events occur in
an alternate reality it’s because of
this mentality this emotional and
physical separation and even a lack of
means that causes cities to not utilize
the proper mitigation strategies the
proper evacuation routes that are
necessary to limit the effects of
devastation and casualty caused by a
natural disaster on an individual level
humans are also like this we believe
that if we work hard get good grades and
make a decent living that will avoid any
sort of catastrophe we watch the lives
of others crash and burn and sometimes
we make fun of those people and then
that catastrophe happens to us and when
it happens we realize that we don’t have
the tools to fix what’s broken
we institutionally lack a flow of
information that could prepare us for
and lessen the effects of crisis we
aren’t aware of our evacuation routes
Daniel Goleman stresses that emotional
intelligence needs to be taught in
educational systems for this very reason
he says teachers need to be comfortable
talking about feelings this is part of
teaching emotional literacy a set of
skills we can all develop including the
ability to read understand and respond
appropriately to one’s own emotions and
the emotions of others emotional
education
is just as important as academic
education because EQ is a determinant of
survival at the end of the day you can
withstand any test of your intelligence
and you can be successful but the true
test is how you handle and overcome
emotional turmoil but then then what
about all of us that haven’t learned EQ
how do we cope during and in the wake of
crisis a natural disaster is a process
just like a personal problem first there
is the eerie calm before the disaster or
the sky is blue and the air is warm
where we’re gliding through life with
ease and happiness and then come the
first warning signs where we feel a
slight rumble beneath our feet and we
see Birds take off the trimmed trees and
dart across the sky maybe I had felt
these four shocks when my friends would
ask me about my boy crushes and I
couldn’t give them an answer and then
things start to break plait fall to the
floor and shatter into a million pieces
and building shake off their foundations
this is where the identity that I have
constructed had broken and the absolute
chaos of discovering and accepting my
true self had begun and then sometimes
their aftershocks and maybe even
secondary crisis I know I had both you
see when a city or country has low
welfare poor sanitation and health care
or poor infrastructure the effects of a
crisis can ripple and cause devastation
and destruction in less direct ways when
an earthquake hit Haiti in 2010 low
socioeconomic status and an overcrowded
healthcare system created the perfect
conditions for a devastating cholera
outbreak my poor mental health and my
lack of emotional intelligence created
the perfect conditions for a downward
spiral into second
crisis other factors can also serve as
Institute situational magnifiers for
crisis people from historically
marginalized communities people in
poverty and people with disabilities
will almost always feel the full force
of catastrophe and then in the midst of
all this panic can set in and when panic
happens it triggers our flight-or-fight
response do we run do we hide do we
stand up and face disaster I chose to
run I ran so far in six years that I
ended up in Edinburgh four thousand
miles away from when I once to his home
I thought I would never have to look
back but the dust settled and I realized
that I was alone with only my own
thoughts to keep me company I realized
that I had to confront this disaster as
hard as it was I looked back and saw all
the devastation left in the wake of my
crisis I looked back and saw the
fragments of the superficial shell that
I had spent six years building I looked
back and I saw my trauma and my anger
and I understood that the friends that I
once had were now ghosts in my memory
there are many times where I felt like I
had to leave my life in ruins
where being gay and traumatized then
angry and then alone felt like the end
of the world
this was my earthquake but a crisis can
happen to anyone
yours just may come from a death a
broken relationship a bankruptcy or
otherwise yours may look like a wildfire
or a landslide yours may be small like a
tremor that leaves behind a few broken
plates but regardless of how severe your
crisis is Reformation is always
necessary we eventually have to come out
of hiding and reach out for help
so I quite literally came out of the
closet and reached out for support
because foreign aid is the main way that
cities and countries put themselves back
together again after a natural disaster
and then when I realized that I had
support from my family from my friends
and from counseling Reformation began to
see him not only necessary but also
tangible we tend to be prideful and
dedicated to preserving our self-image
but if a country can ask for help then
so can we when we gather all the tools
that we need support patience and
investment I say this because I found
little moments of happiness through
investing time and money into self-care
then we can begin to recover we can
begin to build better stronger
infrastructure in order to support
ourselves in the future we can plant the
seeds of self love and confidence and
sit back and watch the landscapes of our
lives bloom and grow once again if we
can practice emotional intelligence then
we can develop an internal mechanism for
handling future crisis but the most
important lesson from mother nature’s
self-help book is that much like the
earth we can take years and years and
years to heal recovery from crisis may
be one of the hardest tasks we will ever
face but if we can learn and understand
emotional intelligence create supportive
relationships and accept this
inevitability of crisis then we can
eventually accept our own undoing adapt
and begin to create healthier happier
and more stable lives for ourselves and
then even though we may wait and wait
and wait the barren ruins of our lives
will look like vibrant cities again
thank you
[Music] [Applause]
products of our environment I not only
believe that our environment shapes us
but that the environment shapes us I
believe that there is a lot that we can
learn from the earth
I believe that Mother Nature has lessons
written into her geology and her
disasters lessons on love death and even
crisis I used to ride the big yellow
classic American school bus from home to
school and back again every day even
well into high school on one
particularly long bus ride when I was 13
my classmates started to get antsy and a
fight broke out in the heat of the
moment as I was yelling at everyone to
be quiet and sit down an older boy who
towered over everyone paused for a
moment and looked me dead in the eye he
said three words gritting his teeth and
enunciated every consonant forcefully
shut up Dyke he said a chorus of ooh
burns rang out behind him eventually I
was dropped off at my stop I trudged the
snow to my house sat down at the
computer and typed that single word into
Google search I didn’t just learn the
meaning of that word that day I felt it
this derogatory word for lesbian made me
realize that at the age of 13 I wasn’t
just different I was the other I knew
that as long as this word could be
applied to me that I was not welcomed by
my peers so I decided that I was going
to deny this realization of my sexual
identity because I had something to
prove I may not have known it then but
at that time I was entering in again
crisis I’m 20 now and I didn’t start on
the path to recovery and pulling myself
out of crisis until I was 19 that’s six
years of desperately trying to push away
an inherent part of myself six years of
trying to control the uncontrollable six
years of reckless rebellion I began to
spiral downwards almost as soon as I had
stepped foot onto the hardstyle floor of
my high school this is where I began to
force myself into this heterosexual
world that left me confused angry and
very very uncomfortable I couldn’t cope
healthily I got into fights I started
drama I drank I did drugs i disrupted
class and I shut myself off emotionally
even into my first year of university I
barely left my room and when I did I
rarely had positive interactions with my
peers in six years I struggled with an
eating disorder struggled with mental
illness threw myself into manipulative
heterosexual relationship and
experienced sexual assault and through
all of this I felt like my world was
crashing and burning around me this
self-destructive behavior put me into
this dark suppressed and dangerous
existence with seemingly no way out
somehow though in the midst of all this
I discovered a passion for the earth for
environmentalism ecology and natural
disasters the more I read and the more I
researched the more I began to
understand vulnerability and
powerlessness in a deeper sense the
earth is this big beautiful thing with
her own processes and our own disasters
and I and we
just tiny tiny specs that exist because
she lets us mother nature does what she
wants when she wants and how she wants
and in this sense Mother Nature embodies
crisis crisis doesn’t care who where or
what you are it will hit you without
warning and take your life if you let it
you cannot prevent natural disasters and
you cannot prevent personal crisis when
crisis started to consume my life when I
felt defeated by a pile-on of
misfortunes
it was the simple understanding that our
personal lives and the earth are
interconnected that began to guide me
towards recovery and comfort me another
key factor in my process of recovery was
a concept called emotional intelligence
or EQ before my second year of high
school I picked up this book called
emotional intelligence called by Daniel
Goleman essentially EQ is the capability
of an individual to assess and manage
their emotions in order to adapt and
adjust their behavior appropriately in a
given context it’s the idea that if we
can understand our own personal
emotional needs and the needs of others
that we will form healthy relationships
acclimate to stressful conditions and
ultimately find greater success it’s
safe to say that during my six-year
crisis I would did not have a high EQ I
let emotion consume my entire world but
then eventually I learned how to step
outside of myself and assess my
emotional needs I realized that I needed
a way to guide myself towards recovery
and health and that’s when my
understanding of the earth began to have
a broader application in my moments of
rationality and clarity I knew that if I
applied if I thought critically and
metaphorically I could apply lessons
about natural disaster preparedness and
it was in this way that I understood
emotional intelligence to be a roadmap
for navigating personal crisis an
individualized evacuation map for times
of emotional disaster but then if you
don’t have or practice EQ then crisis is
harder to navigate and thus the first
major parallel between the earth and our
personal lives
is the issue of preparedness or lack
thereof
many of us have the privilege of
distancing ourselves from natural
disasters watching wildfires burn and
winds destroy buildings from miles and
miles away as if these events occur in
an alternate reality it’s because of
this mentality this emotional and
physical separation and even a lack of
means that causes cities to not utilize
the proper mitigation strategies the
proper evacuation routes that are
necessary to limit the effects of
devastation and casualty caused by a
natural disaster on an individual level
humans are also like this we believe
that if we work hard get good grades and
make a decent living that will avoid any
sort of catastrophe we watch the lives
of others crash and burn and sometimes
we make fun of those people and then
that catastrophe happens to us and when
it happens we realize that we don’t have
the tools to fix what’s broken
we institutionally lack a flow of
information that could prepare us for
and lessen the effects of crisis we
aren’t aware of our evacuation routes
Daniel Goleman stresses that emotional
intelligence needs to be taught in
educational systems for this very reason
he says teachers need to be comfortable
talking about feelings this is part of
teaching emotional literacy a set of
skills we can all develop including the
ability to read understand and respond
appropriately to one’s own emotions and
the emotions of others emotional
education
is just as important as academic
education because EQ is a determinant of
survival at the end of the day you can
withstand any test of your intelligence
and you can be successful but the true
test is how you handle and overcome
emotional turmoil but then then what
about all of us that haven’t learned EQ
how do we cope during and in the wake of
crisis a natural disaster is a process
just like a personal problem first there
is the eerie calm before the disaster or
the sky is blue and the air is warm
where we’re gliding through life with
ease and happiness and then come the
first warning signs where we feel a
slight rumble beneath our feet and we
see Birds take off the trimmed trees and
dart across the sky maybe I had felt
these four shocks when my friends would
ask me about my boy crushes and I
couldn’t give them an answer and then
things start to break plait fall to the
floor and shatter into a million pieces
and building shake off their foundations
this is where the identity that I have
constructed had broken and the absolute
chaos of discovering and accepting my
true self had begun and then sometimes
their aftershocks and maybe even
secondary crisis I know I had both you
see when a city or country has low
welfare poor sanitation and health care
or poor infrastructure the effects of a
crisis can ripple and cause devastation
and destruction in less direct ways when
an earthquake hit Haiti in 2010 low
socioeconomic status and an overcrowded
healthcare system created the perfect
conditions for a devastating cholera
outbreak my poor mental health and my
lack of emotional intelligence created
the perfect conditions for a downward
spiral into second
crisis other factors can also serve as
Institute situational magnifiers for
crisis people from historically
marginalized communities people in
poverty and people with disabilities
will almost always feel the full force
of catastrophe and then in the midst of
all this panic can set in and when panic
happens it triggers our flight-or-fight
response do we run do we hide do we
stand up and face disaster I chose to
run I ran so far in six years that I
ended up in Edinburgh four thousand
miles away from when I once to his home
I thought I would never have to look
back but the dust settled and I realized
that I was alone with only my own
thoughts to keep me company I realized
that I had to confront this disaster as
hard as it was I looked back and saw all
the devastation left in the wake of my
crisis I looked back and saw the
fragments of the superficial shell that
I had spent six years building I looked
back and I saw my trauma and my anger
and I understood that the friends that I
once had were now ghosts in my memory
there are many times where I felt like I
had to leave my life in ruins
where being gay and traumatized then
angry and then alone felt like the end
of the world
this was my earthquake but a crisis can
happen to anyone
yours just may come from a death a
broken relationship a bankruptcy or
otherwise yours may look like a wildfire
or a landslide yours may be small like a
tremor that leaves behind a few broken
plates but regardless of how severe your
crisis is Reformation is always
necessary we eventually have to come out
of hiding and reach out for help
so I quite literally came out of the
closet and reached out for support
because foreign aid is the main way that
cities and countries put themselves back
together again after a natural disaster
and then when I realized that I had
support from my family from my friends
and from counseling Reformation began to
see him not only necessary but also
tangible we tend to be prideful and
dedicated to preserving our self-image
but if a country can ask for help then
so can we when we gather all the tools
that we need support patience and
investment I say this because I found
little moments of happiness through
investing time and money into self-care
then we can begin to recover we can
begin to build better stronger
infrastructure in order to support
ourselves in the future we can plant the
seeds of self love and confidence and
sit back and watch the landscapes of our
lives bloom and grow once again if we
can practice emotional intelligence then
we can develop an internal mechanism for
handling future crisis but the most
important lesson from mother nature’s
self-help book is that much like the
earth we can take years and years and
years to heal recovery from crisis may
be one of the hardest tasks we will ever
face but if we can learn and understand
emotional intelligence create supportive
relationships and accept this
inevitability of crisis then we can
eventually accept our own undoing adapt
and begin to create healthier happier
and more stable lives for ourselves and
then even though we may wait and wait
and wait the barren ruins of our lives
will look like vibrant cities again
thank you
[Music] [Applause]
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