Know Thyself: Two Questions That Will Change Your Life | Julie Cantrell | TEDxLPLDenhamSpringsWalker

[Music] [Applause] did you know that there are more than seven billion people on the planet with us today seven billion people and I like to ask how many of us are living the life that we were born to live let's pretend for a moment that you've been invited to a party a birthday party for someone you love very much and you want to bring something special to acknowledge the relationship that you share so you pour all your time and effort and energy into creating or making or finding the perfect gift and you wrap it in beautiful paper and you type beautiful bows around it or on the day of the party you arrive and you carry it very carefully through the room you see your friend across the way and you don't want anything to damage the present but you're so excited you cannot wait to give her this gift you know you've brought the perfect thing something that's going to bring her so much joy and love and you're gonna feel happy giving it to her and she's gonna be happy receiving it and everybody who gets to share in that exchange is going to feel happy and the rooms gonna light up and all good things are gonna come but before you make it to your friend you pass other guests who have arrived before you and one of them says hey would you bring what's in the box and you tell them because you nailed it and you're ready to give this gift but she does not react the way you expect in fact she says no whatever you do don't give her that that is not gonna go well and as she continues to tell you why this gift is the worst idea ever all those truths that you carried so surely through the door just moments before start to shake and you look down at your gift and you start to think oh my gosh what have I done something really bad is going to happen if I dare to give this to my friend even though I want to and so you sneak that out of the party and you tuck your gift away in the car and you hide it away in the dark where no one will ever see it and nothing bad will ever happen and then you carry on safe we've all heard of people like Einstein Edinson Elvis Presley and Walt Disney but did you know that Albert Einstein was told he would never amount to much and Thomas Edison was told he was too stupid to learn Elvis Presley's first manager told him you'll never make it you need to go back to driving a truck and Walt Disney was fired from his first job at a newspaper because he told he lacked imagination now we all know what these people went on to accomplish in their lives and we've all benefited greatly from the gifts that they dared to share because they didn't allow the people in the party to make them go hide their gifts away in the dark we know these people and we admire these people whether historically our globally or locally these are the people that we see carry a light in them and I don't mean in the superficial way where we know those people to that kind of lure you in with a trap I mean they carry a genuine and authentic glow they are so true to themselves that we look to them and we wonder what do they have that I don't have but I'm here to tell you today they don't have anything the rest of us don't have because in fact we were all sent to the party carrying gifts we don't even have to go out and find the gifts we arrived carrying a gift or more and all we have to do is look down and find it and turn it into the best version that we can offer something only we can give and we have to make it through the party and we have to give that gift now when I grew up right here in Walker Louisiana I grew up with a single mom public school teacher she's here today she's still a single mom still a public school teacher and I'm very proud of that and if any of you know much about public schoolteachers in Livingston Parish we didn't have a lot of extra money for things like books but my mother taught us to read and write from a very young age and she made sure that we had access to books even though none of the homes I went into as a child had books she encouraged us to check out books from the library system through the public schools and also drove us to Baton Rouge to check out books from that library system so I'm so grateful that a library system exists today in and perish and if you don't think libraries are relevant ask people after the flood where they went for information and where they came to find safe space and a sense of community and you'll understand the power of a library but I'm here to tell you what a library meant to me and what books meant to me because from a very young age my mother taught me to try to process the world around me from reading about it and writing about it I'm trying to figure it out and by the time I entered Walker High School I had the luck of entering the classroom with a literature teacher by the name of Linda Purcell some of you may know her mrs. Purcell assigned to kill a mockingbird that's something many literature teachers have done over the years it's a classic award-winning novel by Harper Lee and in this tale there's a father named Atticus and a daughter named Scout and Atticus looks to scout and he says if you really want to understand a person you have to see things from his point of view you have to climb inside of his skin and walk around in it and in a way this is what miss Purcell asked us to do because she told us to journal from the point of view of one of the characters in the novel so for a few minutes a day I was no longer confined to the body in the mind in the space of a fourteen-year-old girl in a classroom at Walker High School I could transport myself anywhere at any time and become anyone real or imagined past or present and that was a tool that was a super power to me as a fourteen-year-old girl because asked most 14 year old girls and they'd rather be anything but what they are I was always a sensitive child and had a lot of compassion anyway and I wanted to understand people and fiction gave me a tool to do that I no longer had to look at each person and write and try to understand them I could become them and I could enter the world and see it through their lens and it gave me a well of empathy like no tool had ever given me before in fact I could even look at myself from their point of view and try to understand my own journey in a better way and I became addicted to fiction reading it and writing it and I started to entertain the idea that maybe someday somehow I would become a writer I had no clue what that meant I'd certainly never met any authors in Livingston Parish none had ever visited our school that I can remember but on the book covers there were names so I knew somewhere somehow somebody was writing stories and maybe one day I could too but by the time I entered my senior year in high school that gift that miss Purcell had found in me and told me was worth sharing writing started to not have so much worth I entered the classroom of another kind of teacher and this teacher did not see the light in me and steer me toward the light in fact she told me every day no this is not how you write this is not how you do it and she never had one positive thing to say about my work or about me and so by the end of the year I no longer believed that my gift was worth sharing I didn't think it had any worth at all in fact I was so beaten down and broken by the end of her year that I no longer believed I had any worth either and in fact very seriously considered leaving the party I didn't think I belonged there at all and had nothing of value of worth to share with anyone we all have people like this in our lives every one of us have crossed at least one person who tells us no you can't you'll never you'll fail and if this teacher had not done enough damage to me already the last day I spent at Walker High School the last time I exited her classroom she pulled me to the side and she said Julie whatever you do don't waste your scholarship to study writing you will never make it as a writer now I'm 17 and I have a teacher who is wiser and older and knows better and I trust that she has my best interests at heart and maybe she did she has a story too and maybe her advice was very sound and well intended the mistake was mine because I dared to believe that someone else knew more about me than I knew about myself when in fact each one of us knows what we're here for we already know it and nobody else can tell us what that is we get to define who we are and why we're here and what we're gonna do with this short span we call life the truth is we all arrive at the party happy and eager and ready to share our gifts were certain of our truths we know who we are and we know why we're there and we know what we have to offer and it's all good but along the way as we make our way through the room life throws things at us traumas and tragedies and losses and abuses and griefs and storms and floods and sometimes we get to the point where we know we are not going to survive one more blow there's not one more thing not one more wound we can take and still move through this party alive so we do one of two things we either take flight and we cower and we learn to lay low and we extinguish our light and we become the smallest most silent form of ourselves that we can possibly become and we hide in the dark because then nobody can see us and if nobody can see us that nobody can hurt us and then we will survive and others of us fight we don't take flight we armor up the lies and the wounds build walls that are high and hard and thick and they shield us and protect us from another blow but you know what else that armor does it separates us from one another and it separates us from our gifts and from our truths and our purpose and if it gets bad enough we don't only armor up we start moving through the room like it's not a party at all but a battlefield and we think the only way forward is to plow another man down but I'm here to tell you that it's never too late to peel away the armor or to come out of the dark it took me 21 years from the time I walked out of that classroom so the time my first novel hit shelves two decades of trying to find my truth again I went through and got my bachelor's and my master's degree at LSU but I never took a writing class not one I put down my pen and didn't write a thing except for my schoolwork for almost a decade even though I walked past that literature building in the journalism building every day and was drawn to it like a magnet because something deep within me still knew that's where I belonged but I never dared to listen to my own voice because the only voice I could hear anymore was no longer misper cells I had silenced hers I could only hear the voice that was nudging me the wrong direction I was listening to the wrong voice when I did dare to write that novel years later I didn't plan on sharing it I just wanted to look down and find that gift again and see what it was and once I discovered it I knew I had a choice again I could come out of hiding and peel off the armor and lay myself out in the room raw and exposed and vulnerable and shining that little light and saying this is what I have to give you and I had to take all the strength and courage and faith I could find to believe that someone would be on the other side waiting with a grateful and open heart to receive that gift Taylor Swift tells us that people throw things that rocks at things that shine and I will tell you some people do this five years have been the hardest I've ever lived and yet I've never been more sure that I'm on the right path in my entire life that novel became a international bestseller it spent time on the New York Times bestseller list the USA Today list starred reviews six languages it goes on it launched my entire career as a novelist I'm about to release my fourth novel and I'm writing my fifth and those are wonderful things that would have never happened if I hadn't dared to give my gift but what I learned from this journey is that it was never about me in the first place and it was never even about the writing writing was just the tool I was given as we all have a tool that we've been given but the tool is supposed to be used to share love and light with other people and if we don't do that we're not living out our purpose all of us have a light to shine all of us have a gift to share so as you leave today I want you to ask yourselves two things first of all what have I hidden not only your gifts and your talents and your passions but what pieces of yourself did you hide away in the dark because you didn't think they had worth anymore somebody made you feel so unloved so unwanted so unseen so unvalued that you no longer thought that part of you mattered you may have to reach all the way back to your childhood decades back into that dark space and pull it out and retrieve it and reclaim it but rediscover your true identity and your true purpose and dare to live your own truth regardless of all of the other voices that have told you not to and to with each step on each breath we take along this journey we are making choices and every choice as we have heard today has significant consequences in our lives and the people around us from this moment forward I literally challenge us all to ask with every choice we make what leads to the light not only for our own lives but for the people whose paths we cross I'm so grateful that 21 years later when I dared to write I went back and found the voices of my mother and mrs. Purcell the light workers in my life who saw the worth of me and said share it you have something to offer share it because today I still receive letters from readers all around the world who have read my stories and writes me to tell me that those stories have shaped their souls and changed their lives and help them rediscover their own truths and purposes and light it ripples out one way or the other at the beginning of the talk I told you that we have more than seven billion people on the planet with us today and I really like to imagine a place where all 7 billion of us are moving toward the light and encouraging all the people around us to come with us whatever you do don't hide don't harden dare to shine your light and never choose to leave this party thank you [Music] you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 36,177

Rating: 4.9141912 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Creativity, Dreams, Happiness, Hope, Motivation, Personal growth, Purpose, Writing

Id: Oi4sqDJ8Wno

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2017