The Most Important 10 Words a Stranger Ever Said to Me

good morning john i've been doing some thinking about how i became me which is not clear but there have been important moments on that road i was once at a dance at a summer camp for example the thing about summer camp that's a little weird is that there's a lot of people who are young young people but they are not all the same age but they are all occupying somewhat the same like social environment which like looking beyond modern times had to be entirely the norm but these days seems a little bit like you put the high scores with the high schoolers and the middle schoolers with the middle schoolers in the elementary school with the elementary school not sure what that accent was the important thing here though is that like i'm 11 or 12 and i'm at a dance and there are kids dancing in this place and you should imagine me standing over by the benches experiencing some second-hand embarrassment there's this other kid he's maybe two years older than me i don't know him very well but he is a nerd he is a big huge nerd and he is dancing way too much like it's definitely not like good dancing it's not like fantastic dancing and it's but it's a lot it looks like he's working pretty hard at it not that i knew anything about dancing i knew like that you're supposed to look cool while you're doing it which what does that mean who knows and regardless it's been a long time i don't actually remember what this could look like i remember that i looked at him and i thought that's embarrassing here's what i do remember there was a young woman who was older than me like higher status than me maybe 16 years old and she said to me in a very sympathetic tone i know i wish i could dance like him too and my entire life changed like what not only did she think that he was a good dancer she couldn't believe that i was looking at him for any other reason she had misinterpreted cringe for envy so here's what happened from that day forward i was never anyone but my true authentic self and i did absolutely everything i felt i should do and everyone loved me for it no none of none of that what i did do is i took what she had offered though i don't think that she meant it as an offering i took it and like i believed her i accepted her version of that reality that at that moment i had no question in my mind that everybody in the world felt the exact same way that i did about that guy's dancing but she showed me that that wasn't true and in fact that she was impressed by him and she was older than him so i did like start to take up more space and live through moments where i wasn't sure what everyone would think of what i was doing or how i was acting because like who knows like who knows i let her be one of the voices in my head certainly not the only one but one of them if you go bigger if you try harder some people are probably gonna think wow that is so cringe but some people might think man i wish i could dance like him too neither of those people um the dancer or the commenter remember that moment i can guarantee you that because like i remember a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the moments of those years here's the real wild thing they might very well know who i am now because they've seen crash course or something but have no idea that they met me in 1991 and yet those two people who had no idea what they were doing i think had a pretty big impact on me because like putting myself out there is not natural for me like this is my extreme sport like i like this the way that some people like jumping out of planes i had plenty of agency into how to work with that moment like it's not a story that is about me not being in control of my life but like that's a really little moment it was a very few words that i do feel like has had a pretty tremendous impact which makes me feel uh happy john i'll see you on tuesday

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 277,539

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Id: XzUqCwdpnR4

Length: 3min 47sec (227 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021