Angela+K’s+Final+AmEx+2013+Speech



=Title of Speech= Visions of X's

=Text of Speech= This might be a strange way to start a speech, but have any of you seen the first Rambo movie? I must confess, I always cry at the end. Rambo’s in the police station and this tough, battle-scarred Sylvester Stallone starts crying over the deaths of his friends in Vietnam, and the totally unwarranted prejudice and hatred that left him no home to return to. And I feel for this guy, you know? Because he’s got all of these demons in his past and no one will give him the chance to admit their existence.

There is so much pain in this world. Broken bones, stubbed toes, bad breakups, divorces, physiology tests…the list goes on and on. You’ve felt it, as have I. Pain is everywhere; it affects everyone. I’ve seen my share of difficult and heart-wrenching things, especially when I went to Sierra Leone last October. You might be surprised to hear that the hardest thing I experienced there was not seeing hundreds of faces pressed up to the bars at the window at clinic, arms squeezing through, begging for help; it was not diagnosing a young girl with polio, knowing she would never be able to walk right again, or telling a mother she was HIV positive; it was not when swarms of stick-thin children pressed up to me begging, __begging__ for food, when I was forced to refuse. It’s hard to believe anything could be harder than that, but for me, there was.

It was an X. Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing I’ve seen in my entire life was an X, about three feet tall, spray painted red, repeated again and again and again and again on the sides of mud brick houses in Sierra Leone. You see, those X’s were remnants of their civil war, and they marked the houses where the SLRA shot someone. They were markers of death. And I drove for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from that sea of scarlet. I saw hundreds and hundreds of X’s that day, and although they are now thousands of miles away, that image is as clear in my mind as if I had just looked away.

I’m not here to unload the difficulties of 3rd world countries on you. I’m bringing this up not to depress you, but to simply make you consider the vast expanse of pain in this world. More specifically, I want to make you think about the way we acknowledge pain in our society. Because those X’s tortured me for far too long, and there was no one I could really share that pain with. Society dictates silence. Of course, pain is not only found in Africa. Several years ago, I was depressed. To be more accurate, I was suicidal. The first time I shared that with people, I was so scared that they were going to dismiss me as being weak or look at me like I was a freak, only deserving pity. But then people kept telling me that they understood, that they related, that they experienced the same. I was blown away. A friend who goes to Ventura confessed how she had swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills and a couple beers, trying to bring on a sleep she would never wake up from. Another friend told me she had tried to cut her wrists. Still another friend admitted to me that he had thought seriously about committing suicide. Now I know for a __fact__ that I am not the only one in this room who has struggled with depression. So why do we always feel like we’re the only ones who are hurting, the only ones to be debilitated by pain or by sorrow?

Why do we let society tell us we’re all alone? We’re not. There is some truth to those cheesy lyrics “we’re all in this together”. All of us deal with pain. All of us face loneliness, and sorrow, and fear, and stress. So why do we feel weaker or less worthy than our peers for admitting it? We have __all__ got visions of X’s, memories of pain that stubbornly won’t fade away. And you know what? Even the fiercest warrior weeps sometime. If we each hold the same burden, why do we refuse to share the load?

In the America I want to live and grow old in, I know there is going to be pain. There always is. But I hope that there will be a lot more friends and a lot fewer therapists. I want to live in a world where you don’t feel strange saying an encouraging word to someone, where crying and admitting to tears does not reward you with disdain. I want to live in a world without teenage-brand drama, where people stop making everyone else’s lives miserable for the sake of their own gratification. I want to live in a world where we build each other up instead of tearing each other down, where we can rely on support from more than just those few very close friends. I’m not calling for an end to sarcastic or ironic or facetious jokes, but the beginning of compassion. Of honesty. Of acknowledging the demons we’ve all battled, and doing something to stop them in their tracks. After all: to struggle is to live. Let us be a part of each other’s lives.

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