[Applause]
so two months ago I was in a classroom
when we were discussing leadership and
our teacher said to us the person excuse
me our teacher said to us the family a
person comes from says a lot about their
leadership ability and then he asked us
this do you really want a person from a
dysfunctional family leading our school
I proudly come from a dysfunctional
family my father was a heroin addict so
by the age of six I knew that my family
was a little different from everyone
else’s
now I instinctively knew not to tell
people that my dad forgot my birthday
but there were also things I was
directly told not to tell people like
our van trip to deliver a bag of dog
food an hour into the city to someone
with no dog or his new job that paid
cash out of a broken window well then I
turned eight and my father went missing
I was in the second grade and I had a
best friend named Caitlin and we did
everything together I went over to her
house almost every day after school and
her mom would watch me while my mom was
at work I inner with them I went to
church camps with them and it got to the
point that Caitlin’s house started to
feel like mine too well one day my
mother mentioned to Caitlyn’s mother
that my father was a drug addict who had
disappeared and as I was standing
outside waiting to be picked up from
school Caitlin’s little sister ran up to
give me a hug and her father grabbed her
and dragged her away from me like I was
a monster and that was the last time I
ever stepped foot in their house I lost
my best friend so at eight I learned to
be very ashamed of my family’s
dysfunction well five years later I’m a
junior high and I’d gotten so good at
lying that I could convince all my
friends my dad was around and it was at
this point that my counselor because
people with dysfunction tend to have
those told me that this lying was
extremely unhealthy and that the reason
I felt alone every day of my life was
because I believe that if my friends
knew who my father was they would never
speak to me again
so she insisted that I tell someone
about my
dad so now at 13 I’ve learned that
hiding dysfunction is unhealthy so I
took her advice and I called up my best
friend my first boyfriend at 13 he was
really cute and and I called him up and
I was crying and I told him all the
difficult things that I’d been through
and he hung up awkwardly because he was
12 but for the next week everything went
really well and I didn’t feel alone well
then he started to tell me that I was
just so lucky to have him because I was
never gonna have anyone else and that he
didn’t even want to be with me but I was
so pathetic that he was going to stay
with me out of pity so now I’m 14 and my
new psychologist tells me that he is
verbally and emotionally abusive and I
thought no way no way he couldn’t be
abusive he was my best friend in fact at
that time I thought of him as my only
friend
well when she realized that I was
ignoring her she told me that if I did
not break up with him she would break
confidentiality and tell my mother I
broke up with him so then I learned that
if you tell a few people about your
dysfunction it puts it puts you at risk
to be hurt and manipulated so now I’m 14
years old and I apply to Culver
academies for high school and one of the
essay questions is how have you
approached the biggest challenge in your
life well I was ready to lie but Culver
has an honor code so I sucked it up and
I wrote the essay honestly and an
incredible thing happened I got accepted
so at 15 for the first time I had been
taught that you didn’t have to hide your
dysfunction and I thought that I was old
enough to be judged on Who I am
and never again on how I grew up and
optimistically I believed that for a
whole year which is really long at 16
and then two months ago I walked into my
favorite class which was taught by a
teacher who knew how I grew up because
he had put out an assignment that
required we share our backstories with
the class and when he said
the family a person comes from says a
lot about their leadership ability and
then do you really want a person from a
dysfunctional family leading our school
I felt my heart breaking and he said no
I’m not saying they can’t I’m just
saying it’s definitely something we
should be considering I got out of that
class and I just sobbed I could never
succeed as a leader at a Leadership
School because I was already a failure
dysfunction is nothing other than the
failure to be normal within a given
community standards but everyone in this
room has faced failure before and we
have the same problems because if you
hide your failures that’s dishonest but
if you only tell a few then they can be
used against you and if you don’t hide
them at all you can be ridiculed and
even denigrated so what are we supposed
to do well there’s a program called
Alateen and it’s a branch off of AAA
which is a 12-step spiritual program
designed to help people with their
alcohol addictions but Alateen isn’t
focused on focused on teenage alcoholics
it’s focused on teenagers who come from
families of dysfunction and Alateen is a
great program but the problem with it is
that since its spiritual and anonymous
it can’t help every teenager right now
in America there is only one environment
that consistently acknowledges
dysfunction within teenagers and
encourages pride for those affected by
it that environment is a gang now I live
by Chicago which is where my father went
missing eight years ago and according to
ABC News since my father went missing in
oh nine all the way up until 2012 we’ve
seen a 25% increase in gang activity and
the scary thing is that the average age
for the people in these gangs is 16 to
19 years old at the end of the day our
stigmas about dysfunction and failure
aren’t just pushing people to take their
own lives they’re causing homicide our
lack of support for one another is
literally killing people every day so
how do we start to solve this problem
well the first step to embracing other
people starts with embracing who you are
to accept the pros and cons of our own
situations now if you come from a
perfect family which doesn’t exist by
the way but if you convince yourself
that if that you came from the perfect
family it would be easy to think that
you’re unbelievably lucky but there’s
disadvantages there too
because right off the bat you can’t
relate to how most of the world grew up
and unless you do something to address
that you’re gonna have a level of
ignorance and similarly if you grew up
with a lot of dysfunction it’s very easy
to feel unlucky but you can relate to an
abundance of people you have perspective
and the ability to reach out and help
people like you in a way that nobody
else can and we need to start
recognizing that instead of hiding it so
the first step essentially is to look in
the mirror the second step is to love
what we see now it’s not easy to be
proud of failure and dysfunction in fact
it’s not even easy to be comfortable
with them but we need to try here’s why
when I came into Culver as a freshman I
was in a big group of people and I got
invited to a football game because
that’s what you do in high school and so
I couldn’t go because I had a
psychologist appointment that night so I
took a deep breath and I stuck my chin
in the air a little bit and I said I
can’t go I have a psychologist
appointment and everybody froze and I
felt my heart stopped because that was a
terrifying moment and I was so scared of
how everyone else was going to react but
it was just a moment and we moved on and
nobody said anything offensive and it
was fine but then almost a month later a
boy from that group reached out to me
and he asked me about the psychologists
at Culver because even though it was a
scary moment for me for him it was the
start of something really important and
sidenote here we really need to be
talking about mental health and
accepting ourselves more openly but back
to the point
that’s why embracing ourselves is so
important
because if you look talking act like
you’re okay with who you are and where
you come from that will impact other
people even if you don’t feel that way
yet and that’s incredible now the next
two steps are for the greater community
for one we need to attack these stigmas
about dysfunction and failure in our
education systems and that has to start
with the faculty because right now
there’s this idea going around in
schools that if you mess up as a teacher
and your students see it that makes you
a bad teacher and that’s kind of garbage
we’ve got to get rid of that we’ve got
to get rid of that because we remain
teachers and students in essence our
whole lives and there’s so much more to
failure than just looking at it as an
opportunity for growth right now we’re
teaching kids that if you just work hard
enough you can overcome dysfunction and
you can overcome failure but that’s not
the point the point is to embrace it to
understand that it’s okay to be a part
of who you are and then you grow from it
and then of course you should never tell
your students that coming from a
background of dysfunction means they
can’t be leaders or anything else for
one that’s kind of ignorant and for
another a generation that loves the
story of Hamilton and pictures of Obama
smoking weed we aren’t likely to believe
you anyway
[Laughter]
so the last step is for for a program
I’m advocating for a program across the
nation possibly even bigger that isn’t
in place of Alateen but is alongside it
that it’s focused not on being anonymous
but in being open and having teenagers
be able to reach out to each other
communicate with each other and then
talk to each other outside of meetings
to utilize our language of social media
to find role models to inspire each
other and not to hide or bully each
other anymore we need a program so to
embrace the people around us to love and
accept where we’re coming from and where
we’re going and to move forward as a
nation as a world to being comfortable
in our own skin that all starts with
each of us
it starts with looking back at those
pros and cons recognizing them accepting
them moving towards embracing them and
educating our children so do you really
want a person from a dysfunctional
family leading our school kids from
dysfunctional backgrounds and kids who
have experienced abundances of failures
have the tools to lead a lot more than
just a school and I believe that we can
do it thank you [Applause]
so two months ago I was in a classroom
when we were discussing leadership and
our teacher said to us the person excuse
me our teacher said to us the family a
person comes from says a lot about their
leadership ability and then he asked us
this do you really want a person from a
dysfunctional family leading our school
I proudly come from a dysfunctional
family my father was a heroin addict so
by the age of six I knew that my family
was a little different from everyone
else’s
now I instinctively knew not to tell
people that my dad forgot my birthday
but there were also things I was
directly told not to tell people like
our van trip to deliver a bag of dog
food an hour into the city to someone
with no dog or his new job that paid
cash out of a broken window well then I
turned eight and my father went missing
I was in the second grade and I had a
best friend named Caitlin and we did
everything together I went over to her
house almost every day after school and
her mom would watch me while my mom was
at work I inner with them I went to
church camps with them and it got to the
point that Caitlin’s house started to
feel like mine too well one day my
mother mentioned to Caitlyn’s mother
that my father was a drug addict who had
disappeared and as I was standing
outside waiting to be picked up from
school Caitlin’s little sister ran up to
give me a hug and her father grabbed her
and dragged her away from me like I was
a monster and that was the last time I
ever stepped foot in their house I lost
my best friend so at eight I learned to
be very ashamed of my family’s
dysfunction well five years later I’m a
junior high and I’d gotten so good at
lying that I could convince all my
friends my dad was around and it was at
this point that my counselor because
people with dysfunction tend to have
those told me that this lying was
extremely unhealthy and that the reason
I felt alone every day of my life was
because I believe that if my friends
knew who my father was they would never
speak to me again
so she insisted that I tell someone
about my
dad so now at 13 I’ve learned that
hiding dysfunction is unhealthy so I
took her advice and I called up my best
friend my first boyfriend at 13 he was
really cute and and I called him up and
I was crying and I told him all the
difficult things that I’d been through
and he hung up awkwardly because he was
12 but for the next week everything went
really well and I didn’t feel alone well
then he started to tell me that I was
just so lucky to have him because I was
never gonna have anyone else and that he
didn’t even want to be with me but I was
so pathetic that he was going to stay
with me out of pity so now I’m 14 and my
new psychologist tells me that he is
verbally and emotionally abusive and I
thought no way no way he couldn’t be
abusive he was my best friend in fact at
that time I thought of him as my only
friend
well when she realized that I was
ignoring her she told me that if I did
not break up with him she would break
confidentiality and tell my mother I
broke up with him so then I learned that
if you tell a few people about your
dysfunction it puts it puts you at risk
to be hurt and manipulated so now I’m 14
years old and I apply to Culver
academies for high school and one of the
essay questions is how have you
approached the biggest challenge in your
life well I was ready to lie but Culver
has an honor code so I sucked it up and
I wrote the essay honestly and an
incredible thing happened I got accepted
so at 15 for the first time I had been
taught that you didn’t have to hide your
dysfunction and I thought that I was old
enough to be judged on Who I am
and never again on how I grew up and
optimistically I believed that for a
whole year which is really long at 16
and then two months ago I walked into my
favorite class which was taught by a
teacher who knew how I grew up because
he had put out an assignment that
required we share our backstories with
the class and when he said
the family a person comes from says a
lot about their leadership ability and
then do you really want a person from a
dysfunctional family leading our school
I felt my heart breaking and he said no
I’m not saying they can’t I’m just
saying it’s definitely something we
should be considering I got out of that
class and I just sobbed I could never
succeed as a leader at a Leadership
School because I was already a failure
dysfunction is nothing other than the
failure to be normal within a given
community standards but everyone in this
room has faced failure before and we
have the same problems because if you
hide your failures that’s dishonest but
if you only tell a few then they can be
used against you and if you don’t hide
them at all you can be ridiculed and
even denigrated so what are we supposed
to do well there’s a program called
Alateen and it’s a branch off of AAA
which is a 12-step spiritual program
designed to help people with their
alcohol addictions but Alateen isn’t
focused on focused on teenage alcoholics
it’s focused on teenagers who come from
families of dysfunction and Alateen is a
great program but the problem with it is
that since its spiritual and anonymous
it can’t help every teenager right now
in America there is only one environment
that consistently acknowledges
dysfunction within teenagers and
encourages pride for those affected by
it that environment is a gang now I live
by Chicago which is where my father went
missing eight years ago and according to
ABC News since my father went missing in
oh nine all the way up until 2012 we’ve
seen a 25% increase in gang activity and
the scary thing is that the average age
for the people in these gangs is 16 to
19 years old at the end of the day our
stigmas about dysfunction and failure
aren’t just pushing people to take their
own lives they’re causing homicide our
lack of support for one another is
literally killing people every day so
how do we start to solve this problem
well the first step to embracing other
people starts with embracing who you are
to accept the pros and cons of our own
situations now if you come from a
perfect family which doesn’t exist by
the way but if you convince yourself
that if that you came from the perfect
family it would be easy to think that
you’re unbelievably lucky but there’s
disadvantages there too
because right off the bat you can’t
relate to how most of the world grew up
and unless you do something to address
that you’re gonna have a level of
ignorance and similarly if you grew up
with a lot of dysfunction it’s very easy
to feel unlucky but you can relate to an
abundance of people you have perspective
and the ability to reach out and help
people like you in a way that nobody
else can and we need to start
recognizing that instead of hiding it so
the first step essentially is to look in
the mirror the second step is to love
what we see now it’s not easy to be
proud of failure and dysfunction in fact
it’s not even easy to be comfortable
with them but we need to try here’s why
when I came into Culver as a freshman I
was in a big group of people and I got
invited to a football game because
that’s what you do in high school and so
I couldn’t go because I had a
psychologist appointment that night so I
took a deep breath and I stuck my chin
in the air a little bit and I said I
can’t go I have a psychologist
appointment and everybody froze and I
felt my heart stopped because that was a
terrifying moment and I was so scared of
how everyone else was going to react but
it was just a moment and we moved on and
nobody said anything offensive and it
was fine but then almost a month later a
boy from that group reached out to me
and he asked me about the psychologists
at Culver because even though it was a
scary moment for me for him it was the
start of something really important and
sidenote here we really need to be
talking about mental health and
accepting ourselves more openly but back
to the point
that’s why embracing ourselves is so
important
because if you look talking act like
you’re okay with who you are and where
you come from that will impact other
people even if you don’t feel that way
yet and that’s incredible now the next
two steps are for the greater community
for one we need to attack these stigmas
about dysfunction and failure in our
education systems and that has to start
with the faculty because right now
there’s this idea going around in
schools that if you mess up as a teacher
and your students see it that makes you
a bad teacher and that’s kind of garbage
we’ve got to get rid of that we’ve got
to get rid of that because we remain
teachers and students in essence our
whole lives and there’s so much more to
failure than just looking at it as an
opportunity for growth right now we’re
teaching kids that if you just work hard
enough you can overcome dysfunction and
you can overcome failure but that’s not
the point the point is to embrace it to
understand that it’s okay to be a part
of who you are and then you grow from it
and then of course you should never tell
your students that coming from a
background of dysfunction means they
can’t be leaders or anything else for
one that’s kind of ignorant and for
another a generation that loves the
story of Hamilton and pictures of Obama
smoking weed we aren’t likely to believe
you anyway
[Laughter]
so the last step is for for a program
I’m advocating for a program across the
nation possibly even bigger that isn’t
in place of Alateen but is alongside it
that it’s focused not on being anonymous
but in being open and having teenagers
be able to reach out to each other
communicate with each other and then
talk to each other outside of meetings
to utilize our language of social media
to find role models to inspire each
other and not to hide or bully each
other anymore we need a program so to
embrace the people around us to love and
accept where we’re coming from and where
we’re going and to move forward as a
nation as a world to being comfortable
in our own skin that all starts with
each of us
it starts with looking back at those
pros and cons recognizing them accepting
them moving towards embracing them and
educating our children so do you really
want a person from a dysfunctional
family leading our school kids from
dysfunctional backgrounds and kids who
have experienced abundances of failures
have the tools to lead a lot more than
just a school and I believe that we can
do it thank you [Applause]
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