You Dont Need an Education to Create Change
[Music]
[Applause]
2020 has been a
wild year we started off strong with
forest fires and talk of world war
iii we got hit with a virus called coven
19 but we didn’t handle that quite well
enough
so now we’re living in a pandemic that
has robbed us of toilet paper
high school and college graduations and
one of the hottest summers that i can
remember
murder hornets were reported to be
invading people’s homes and killing
people
and aliens were proven to be real
2020 has been absolutely mad and has
brought about change that i don’t
believe
anybody was ready for especially myself
a lot of you may know i was born and
primarily raised in scranton
pennsylvania
home of coal and the office but
scranton has never really felt like a
home to me
my family and i moved back to scranton
after living with my grandparents in the
country
we moved back to the area because a
group of mixed girls going to school in
a predominantly white area
that has never seen a black person
before was detrimental to our
self-esteem
so we moved back to scranton and my
mother has lived here ever
since i can’t remember a time where i
felt included in scranton
or felt welcome at all really
but going to school here and growing up
here i love to be involved in anything
and everything that i can be involved in
extracurricular activities clubs sports
teams you name it i was either doing at
school or at home
i was really bright fun-loving child and
i never thought that would change
until i lost my best friend in third
grade now
when i say lost i don’t mean that she
died i mean that she moved across the
country to north carolina
but it felt like she did and the grief
and loneliness that came with losing
someone that important and that close to
me
really changed the way i thought of not
only myself but of the people and the
world around me
bully started to get to me i no longer
thought my curly hair was pretty
and i started to think twice about the
way i acted and the way i was
as a person and just in class as a whole
i was one of the smartest kids in my
class but i was still targeted bullied
by my third grade teacher
i’m not kidding when i tell you this
like my mother actually had to come into
my class and force her to apologize to
me
because i would go home every day crying
but in her defense
i was a needy child and her way of
helping me
was by toughening me up with passive
insults and quieting my curiosity
this affected me for years later i spent
a lot of time questioning who i was and
who i wanted to be
so when we moved schools and moved
houses i decided that i was going to be
somebody else
i told myself that i was going to be a
cool girl i was going to wear short
skirts and flats because that’s what the
boys liked
and if the boys liked you you were cool
and everybody wanted to be your friend
i started participating in games i
didn’t enjoy and let people touch me in
a way that made me uncomfortable
because if you were a cool girl the boys
liked everybody wanted to be you and be
your friend
which made you a good girl in the eyes
of authority and teachers
because you’re well liked and you’re
unproblematic so
being a cool girl plus a good girl
therefore
made you a smart girl because smart
girls got ahead in life
smart girls were well accepted fit in
everywhere they went and loved by
everyone
and the only way you can be successful
in life or get ahead was to be a smart
girl and that’s what i believed and
that’s what i was told
now when you spend a lot of your life
pretending to be something that you’re
not it really wears on your mind and
who you believe to be who you are and
becomes hard to pretend
i always had an idea of who i was and
who i wanted to be
i just didn’t know that i could be that
person and still be happy
loved and accepted so as you can see
that didn’t last long
now a lot of us grow up with
expectations i know i did and i’m sure a
lot of you can relate to that
and i didn’t i didn’t if i wasn’t being
pressured by
students and authority i was being
pressured by my relatives and my own
choices
i didn’t realize my anxieties until i
reached high school
and everything became too overwhelming
and just too much for me to handle
so i decided that i wanted to move
states and i moved to syracuse new york
i was lured to syracuse with promises of
a happier life
and overall just change i spent my
remaining years of high school
homeless abandoned and traumatized by
domestic and verbal abuse
i was reminded on the regular how
worthless i was
and constantly reminded by people who
claim to love me
that i didn’t offer much and that i
should end my life
that was a really hard negative time for
me in my life
and probably one of the worst decisions
i’ve ever made
but without that experience i want to be
the person i am today
and this way of thinking i had to train
myself to obtain
struggle with bipolar ptsd
and adhd
i was diagnosed about two years ago and
ever since i’ve been doing everything in
my power to take control of
my life and my choices because i spent a
lot of my life
believing that i was hopeless crazy
and undeserving because that’s what i
was told
i just want you to know that if you’re
still navigating your mental health
journey or you’re finding things out
about yourself that you don’t that you
think is wrong or okay
your mental health does not define you
your mental illness does not mean that
you’re any less worthy than anybody else
you just have to try a hundred times
harder to be okay
and that’s perfectly fine if anything it
just makes you a stronger person
and even more worthy and at the end of
the day even more successful
a lot of us don’t know this though
because we live in a society that tells
us that
if we don’t play it safe and keep it
cool and
be normal we won’t be successful i spent
a lot of my life believing this to be
true
but at the end of the day the life that
i live now is a life that i chose
the life i have currently and the way i
am is for me and not for anybody else
because at the end of the day what
matters the most is how you feel
accepted
how you feel the most welcome and what
makes you feel the most okay
and after all of that i still made it on
the stage and i’m here today to tell you
that you’ve got this
as i’ve said i’ve been homeless screwed
over
beaten i’ve self-harmed i’ve attempted
suicide on a few occasions and i’ve been
lost
and i’ve still made it to the stage to
come here and tell all of you guys about
how you can still
make long-lasting effective change not
only in your own life
but in lives of others as well in your
community
this summer i made it my job to be
educated and to educate others
about the world around me now when i say
educated i don’t mean in the way of
textbooks and certificates i mean
educated in the way of
shared experiences controversy and human
choice
i attended many protests this summer the
first one i actually
attended was in scranton and no more
than 100 or so people showed up
but from having that experience and
hearing everybody’s stories
it really made me realize that a lot of
the things that i could relate to
weren’t just happening to me it was
happening to everyone else
i started to think outside of my own
problems and thought that
if i’ve been working on myself for the
past two years and doing my best with
the best i can then
i can help others do the same i attended
any protest within a two-hour radius of
scranton pennsylvania
scranton bloomsburg wilkes-barre
homesdale
the list goes on i collaborated on
protest events with
other northeastern pa leaders
and groups in the area and before i had
realized that i had created a name for
myself
i was now recognized as a leader in the
community people started to recognize me
when
i went out positive and negative
reactions there
i was being reached out to for
interviews and to make appearances to
talk places and being told how
being approached by people to tell me
about how i had a positive change on
their life
or made them look at things differently
or inspire them to
push and stand strong in their beliefs
thus came about creating change for the
people
creating change for the people is a
grassroots community organization that i
founded this year
it was founded and it’s primarily led by
myself but i work alongside with a
handful of other people
volunteers that are pretty consistent in
the process of the things that we do
over the past few months we’ve held
mutual aid drives collected food and
clothing donations giving it to the
community for free
we’ve held free educational workshops
ranging from gender and sexuality to the
prison industrial complex
we do the best we can with what we’ve
got and who we’ve got
and so far i’d say we’ve done pretty
damn good
you don’t need money power or education
to create long-lasting effective change
but what you do need
is love and understanding not only for
yourself and the things that you go
through on the regular but
love and understanding for other people
and their experiences whether or not you
can relate
because either way those things are
happening and those things are just as
important
i didn’t think that i would live to be
22 years old
nor did i think that i would be 22 years
old having done everything i’ve done and
still doing the things that i do now
but i am and i did
i contemplated many ways on how i wanted
to do this talk
i experimented with poetry spoken word
facts the list goes on but at the end of
the day
i realize that the best way that i can
make long lasting effective change
is to come up here and expose my flaws
and my struggles to show that
you are not alone and you can do
anything
because at the end of the day the only
support system that you really need
is yourself and your willpower to do so
you don’t need an education to create
long lasting effective change
and you sure as hell don’t need to be
like anybody else thank you