Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So this is a picture of me
as a young Daniel, growing up in the woods of Minnesota.
And as a young Daniel,
there was a lot of things I wanted out of life.
I wanted every video game released
for the Super Nintendo entertainment system.
(Laughter)
I wanted peppermint, chocolate-chip ice cream with every meal,
or instead of every meal;
that would be okay too.
But most of all,
what I wanted more than anything was a friend.
Mario had Luigi;
I wanted someone too.
So I hatched a plan.
There was a boy who rode the bus with me from elementary school,
and he got off on my same stop.
So I decided when we got off the bus together,
I'd invite him to my house to play video games.
Because who could say no to video games? Foolproof plan, right?
So, we get off off the bus, I put my plan into action.
He starts walking towards his house, and I start walking after him.
And then, something strange happens.
He starts walking faster.
But I decide, "That's OK. He's probably just in a hurry to get home."
So I start walking faster too so I can catch up.
Then something really weird happens: he starts running.
I don't know what's going on,
but I do know I don't want to let my new friend get away.
So, I start running too so I can catch up to him.
And then, finally I do, and I catch up to him,
and I'm so ready to invite him to my house
and start our new friendship,
when he punches me in the stomach,
and he says, "Get away from me!"
And he turns and he leaves,
and I'm left to walk home alone.
I wish I could tell you that this was an unusual experience for me.
I wish I could tell you that this kid was just a jerk,
or maybe he was having a bad day
and the next time I reached out in a friendship, I was met with open arms.
But the fact is, this was a pretty typical experience for me growing up.
I don't mean to say
every time I tried to make a friend, I'd get punched in the stomach,
but sometimes they'd kick me in the back,
sometimes they'd pretend to like me
so they could convince me to eat potato chips they'd secretly spit on.
Sometimes, they would just stand up and walk away, without a word.
And the hardest part of all of this rejection
is that I thought I deserved it.
See, I have a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome,
which means that I'm on the autistic spectrum.
So I can look back at my childhood
and understand why it was so hard for me to fit in.
I can understand why I couldn't read other people's social cues,
or adapt my behavior to fit social norms.
But I wouldn't be diagnosed until high school.
So as a kid, I didn't no any of that.
I didn't know that my brain wasn't wired to learn social skills naturally,
or that there's this whole universe of body language, and tone,
and social nuance that I couldn't see.
All I knew is that I couldn't get other people to like me,
no matter how hard I tried.
And when you're a kid,
you try to make sense of the world the best way you can,
and the only way that my kid brain could understand my experiences of rejection
was to decide that they were my fault.
I remember coming home from school, running into my dad's arms and crying out,
"I'm bad! I'm bad! I'm bad!"
And I believed it.
I was seven years old and I believed that I was bad
because it was the only way I could understand what was happening to me.
And what I wish I had known back then
is that I struggled to find a place to belong, not because I was bad,
but because that struggle is just a part of the human experience,
and that actually my feelings of loneliness,
that made feel so different,
were things that I had in common with a lot of other people.
I want to demonstrate that with a little exercise
that we're all going to do together,
if that's okay.
What I'd like to do is say a couple of things that are true of me,
some feelings that I experienced that, as a kid, made me feel really alone,
made me feel like I was the only one that felt that way.
And if you've ever felt that same way,
if you've resonated with the experiences that I share,
what I'd like you to do at the end of the list is to raise your hand.
So here we go.
Here are some of the things that I've experienced:
I have felt like I don't belong.
I have felt like, deep down, I am not like other people.
I have felt like I've needed to hide part of who I am to fit in.
I have felt afraid that if other people really knew me,
they would leave.
I have felt lonely even in a group.
If anybody here has resonated with those feelings,
if anybody here has had that same experience
of any one of those things,
could you raise your hand now?
Thank you for raising your hands.
That's a lot of people!
Wow! Thank you, guys.
I think what that tells us
is that these are pretty universal experiences,
that they're just part of being human.
That means that we all want a place to belong
and people we're connected with,
and that it's just part of the human experience.
That means that we've had pain when we don't get that,
very significant pain.
And that's true, regardless of diagnosis.
And the moment that I realized that,
the moment that I realized my struggle for belonging was not autistic, but human,
everything began to change
because I started to see the way forward.
It happened the first day of my freshman year of high school.
To put things into context,
just before starting freshman year,
my family had moved from Minnesota to California.
So I'd left behind everything that was familiar to me,
and I had just been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.
So I knew that all of the other kids at school
would be neurologically different from me,
not just "normal different."
This terrified me.
My mom tells me
that on the first day of school, she came to wake me up
and she found that I was covered in a cold sweat
because I'd been shivering the entire night
just afraid of the morning to come.
But once again, I had a plan,
except this time, my plan wasn't to make a friend;
it was about survival.
I was going to become the Invisible Man.
I would be like one of the secret agents, special forces guys
from one of my video games,
sneaking around behind enemy lines, totally undetected.
I was actually kind of excited about this idea,
and at first, it worked out really well.
I sat in the back of every class,
never raised my hand, never talked to anybody.
I made it all the way to lunch without any human contact.
But lunch presented a problem
because at lunch, you sit at lunch tables, and at lunch tables are other people,
and I needed to avoid the other people.
So, that was okay.
I was like a Navy SEAL, parachuted behind enemy lines:
"Adapt! Improvise! Overcome! Don't talk to anybody! Yeah!"
So, I got my food and I went to my next class,
thinking that I would just eat it at my desk.
But then, disaster struck again:
the door to the class was locked; the teacher, out to lunch.
So, "Adapt, improvise, overcome."
I sat on the floor.
My first day of freshman year,
and I was eating my lunch alone on the floor,
with my back to the hallway wall,
trying very hard not to be noticed.
And then, I saw something strange.
I saw there was another boy also sitting on the floor, with his back to the wall,
eating his lunch alone and trying hard not to be noticed.
And at that moment, I had a choice to make.
See, the invisible-man strategy was working.
Nobody has punched on the stomach yet. That was a win!
(Chuckles)
And if I reached out to that other boy, I might lose all of that.
He might make fun of me, he might call his friends over to make fun of me,
he might decide that I was bad.
But the thing that had stuck with me all throughout my days of Invisible Man,
the thing that I couldn't get out of my head
as I just looked at this other boy,
is that no matter how hard I tried to be invisible,
what I wanted more than anything was to be seen.
What I wanted so desperately was for somebody to notice my struggles,
sit down next to me and say, "Hey, it's tough to be new,
but I'll be your friend and we'll get through this together."
And I realized that this other boy might not be autistic,
but he probably was still lonely, still nervous,
still wishing that somebody would see him and reach out,
and I had the opportunity to be that somebody.
So I stood up,
I walked over to him and I said,
"My name's Daniel."
And he said, "My name's Bobby."
And there was a long pause as we kind of sized each other up,
and he said, "Do you like video games?"
And I knew, at that moment,
that I had just made my first friend of high school,
and not just my first friend, but my best friend.
This is a picture of the two of us.
Bobby and I became inseparable,
and what his friendship taught me
is that other people could be sources of joy,
not just sources of pain.
And so, I switched my behavior to try to maximize that joy.
And believe me, joy is a far better motivator than pain.
And trying to have more joyful connection,
I started to reach out more, I started to work on my social skills,
I started to make more friends,
people who cared about me and loved me for who I was,
even though who I was was still kind of awkward.
But the problem is that love is kind of like food.
You can work off of reserves for a while,
but if you don't have a steady supply, you're going to get into trouble,
and that's what happened to me.
A few years ago, I moved here to Oregon
to start a graduate program in clinical psychology,
and I left behind my community of family and friends,
all of the people who were filling my life with a constant supply of love.
And after a few failed attempts to make friends,
what I found is that those old fears from childhood started to gain new power,
they started to creep back again, and I started to think,
"Maybe I don't belong. Maybe I don't deserve to belong.
Maybe I really am bad," all along.
And this became self-fulfilling.
I stopped going to social events.
My first birthday in Oregon, I spent alone in my room,
eating a pizza by myself,
because I thought that if I invited people,
nobody would come.
I had once again become the Invisible Man.
But this time, somebody saw me.
One of my classmates, a man named Kyler, noticed that I was drifting through class,
never connecting to anybody else.
And so, he decided to take a risk.
One day, he sat down next to me and he said,
"Hey, let's get lunch."
And lunch turned into Friday nights playing video games together -
because everything with me is video games -
and then our video game time turned into being workout buddies,
and little by little, Kyler became my best friend.
It's safe to say that Kyler's friendship rescued me.
You can see a picture of our friendship.
(Laughter)
On my own, I couldn't shake my fears that had kept me trapped,
I couldn't believe that I deserved a place to belong.
But then I had another voice saying,
"You do belong. You're not bad. You're my friend."
I needed someone else to speak that into my life.
I'm reminded of an old Jewish parable called The Parable of the Long Spoons,
and it says that heaven and hell are the exact same place.
Everybody is seated around a big pot of delicious soup,
and everybody has a really long spoon.
And in hell, everyone is starving
because they try to feed themselves, but they just can't.
The spoon is too big, and the soup spills every time.
But in heaven, people have realized something important.
They've realized that their spoons are not for feeding themselves;
they're for feeding someone else.
And so, they feed each other and are fed in return.
I used to think that being autistic
meant that there was something wrong with my spoon,
that everybody else could go out
and get their fill of love and connection and belonging whenever they wanted.
But the truth is I was wrong.
None of us have a self-sufficient spoon.
All of us need each other to create that place of belonging,
and all of us deserve each other to create that place of belonging for us.
Nobody is bad, nobody is disqualified,
and it's never too late for anybody to find that place.
The cool thing is we all have the ability to create that place for someone else.
Just as Kyler reached out to me and I reached out to Bobby,
you all have the ability to reach out to somebody in your life.
And that might sound like a small thing,
but I want you to understand just how monumental it actually is.
A meta-analysis of 148 research studies covering over 300,000 participants
found that greater social connection
was connected to a 50% reduced risk of premature death.
Fifty percent.
That's equivalent to effect of quitting smoking,
and it's greater than the effect of exercise or obesity on mortality.
If you discovered that you had a 50% change to heal any disease
just by touching somebody,
that all you had to do was to reach out your hand,
I guarantee you that every single one of you would be jumping out of your seats.
You'd be running to the next hospital,
running into every single room, saying, "Everybody gets a high five!
I want to spread this healing as far as I can."
If you had that incredible power of healing,
you wouldn't waste it.
And what I want you to understand is that you do have that kind of power;
not the power to heal with a touch,
but the power to heal with your friendship.
Through the simple decision to be a friend,
you can help somebody else believe that they are good.
You can give somebody the courage to go through life
knowing that they don't have to do it alone,
and in someone's darkest moment,
your love might be the reason they choose life over suicide.
That is the power of friendship,
and that is a power that each and every one of you have.
Autistic, neurotypical, social butterfly or total wallflower,
it doesn't matter;
all of you have the ability to sit down next to somebody
and invite them to lunch or to play video games.
All of you have the ability to call up somebody
that you haven't talked to for a while,
just to check in.
All of you have the ability
to meet the deep human need for connection and belonging
that somebody else has been carrying
and maybe has been carrying for a long time.
I am the man that I am today because of the power of friendship,
because of people who looked past my awkwardness and saw my value,
because of the people who gave me the courage to say
that I am not bad, I am loved.
Every single one of you has that exact same power.
All of you have the incredible, mind-boggling ability
to change the course of somebody's life, and your own,
through the simple decision to be a friend.
So put your spoon to work,
spread some healing,
and go be a friend.
Thank you.
(Applause)