Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I would like everyone here to take a moment, right now,
and close your eyes.
Go ahead. Close your eyes, please.
Now, I want you to imagine that you are 11 years old.
It’s the holidays ...
You are asleep in your bed, dreaming away.
Okay?
Now open your eyes.
Those two sounds, those thuds,
are what woke me up on the morning of December 31, 1989,
and those sounds were my mother’s skull being smashed in
while she was being suffocated,
15 feet away from my bedroom.
I then counted 12 footsteps
as they slowly walked down the hallway,
and then they stopped at my door.
I knew at that moment that if I had looked up,
I wouldn’t be standing here today.
Twenty-five days later,
police exhumed my mother’s body from underneath my father’s new home
in our neighboring state of Pennsylvania.
Little did I know at that moment
that I was about ready to embark on a journey
to discover what resilience is,
to turn my “why” into “what now?”
and to realize that sometimes the answer that you seek
is not necessarily the answer that you need.
My father murdered my mother,
and my life was changed forever.
Just as my mother’s skull was smashed in, so was the innocence of my youth.
Now, instead of deciding which video game I was going to play with my friends,
or which action figure I was going to get at the toy store,
I was faced with a different set of questions.
Being torn from my home, my dog and my whole way of life,
I was wondering, “Where am I going to live?
Will I get a new mommy and daddy?
What the hell is foster care?”
And most importantly,
“How did I get here?”
My father’s selfish act
turned not only my own life upside down,
but affected an entire community,
the community of Mansfield, Ohio,
the audience that sits here before me right now.
And little did we know that our tiny town of 25,000 people at that time
was going to be thrust into the national spotlight
for a trial that was so horrific in its nature.
I testified at trial for two and half days
against my father,
as the key witness for the prosecution,
because I heard the murder happen.
And I worked with them because I was angry, I was hurt,
but I was determined.
I was determined to put my father in the one place that he belonged:
in prison for life.
Little did I realize that when I testified at trial,
I was actually working through my own trauma,
because I was going through an action -
because at that point in my life,
I felt like I had no control over anything.
I had no say in where I was going to live,
I was stuck in a foster care home I didn’t want to be in,
I was separated from my family and I was abandoned by my family.
But the one thing that I could do, that I could make a difference in,
is testifying.
But one thing always evaded me,
and it continued to evade me the rest of my life:
Why?
Why did my father,
my own flesh and blood,
commit such a horrific and heinous act?
And how could he so selfishly turn not only his own life upside down,
destroy my mother’s life,
but destroy and affect an entire community
that was so connected to this trial?
I struggled for the next 25 years with this question,
so much so that I took myself to Los Angeles, California,
after getting out of music school,
because I wanted to do something with this story.
I had to do something positive with this,
because I was not going to let this define me.
I went as far as to creating a film
with a two-time Academy Award winner,
and the result
was “A Murder in Mansfield.”
Now, I want to take a moment
to say that over that 25 years,
my father manipulated, deceived,
did everything he could in his power to have me rescind my testimony,
to have me represent him at the parole board
to help him get out,
anything that this man could do to manipulate me,
and I always just wanted my father’s love, right?
Because I had already lost one parent,
and despite as gruesome as everything was,
I wasn’t prepared to lose another.
Now, in the film’s final scene,
I confront my incarcerated father in prison.
And finally, finally,
I’m going to get that moment,
I’m going to have that moment where I can ask this man,
“Why?
Why, Dad?
Why did you do this?”
You know what?
In what is definitely a very heartbreaking scene,
my father is unable to answer.
Hidden below the depths of narcissism and self-protection,
he denies any wrongdoing.
It was at that moment that I realized
that I had taken back the power in that room
by confronting my father finally, and saying,
“You did this. I want to know why.”
But I never got the answer to my question.
So you know what?
I was a failure.
I failed as filmmaker,
I failed as a human being -
I never got the answer to the one question that I wanted!
Then I realized something, because like most things in life,
failure often disguises as success.
I realized that: what if the answer that I was seeking
wasn’t really the answer that I needed?
Hmm, it’s an interesting concept, right?
You see, life will never ever really give us the answer
to the whys that we want, right?
It just doesn’t. Life doesn’t work that way.
So I thought, “Well, there’s got to be something to this, right?”
And I thought, well -
When we go through a traumatic event,
human beings are natural empaths.
We want to know why, “Why? Why?”
Why did the gunman walk into a school and shoot up a bunch of children?
Why did terrorists fly planes into two towers in New York City
and kill 3,000 people?
Why did a husband selfishly murder his wife?
So I did a little bit of a deep dive,
and I discovered what researchers call
the mirror-neuron system.
Now, researchers classify the mirror-neuron system
as this group of cells in our brain that lies in our limbic system
that is responsible for compassion.
It’s how we relate to one another.
So I thought, “Okay, so there’s a little bit of science behind this.
So I’m not too far off base here.”
And then I come back to my why -
my why, my why ...
I just want to know why.
And then I really realized something.
“Why?” looks into the past,
but “what now?” ...
“What now?” looks to the future.
So, what if our approach to trauma is all wrong?
What if instead of saying “Why? Why? Why?”
and trying to understand and justify in our heads
why these horrible things happen,
we instead say, “What now? What are we going to do about it?
What can push us forward and lead us through the trauma?”
And I argue that that is being of service.
That is doing something that helps the greater good.
For me, creating my film, when I set out,
I wanted to heal myself and help one person,
because I could show in the film,
as plain as day, and be as honest and open as I can for the camera
to show everything that’s going on
and to show that you can really work through trauma.
That was my way of giving back because I know that people would see this.
I had hoped to change one life,
and in fact I ended up changing thousands of lives,
which is a really cool thing.
So anyways, back to this: what if in our approach to trauma,
we lead ourselves through service
and that ends up pushing us through the trauma?
See, I realized that my “what now” began on the morning of December 31, 1989,
because I knew that my mother was dead,
but I knew I had to do something about it.
I worked with investigators,
I got into the courtroom, I testified,
and I had a whole wonderful community -
some of these individuals are sitting in this audience -
that pillared me up,
that brought to me the resilience.
And my quest for resilience continued then.
I was in high school, I dove head-on into the arts,
because as a child, growing up in this community,
we have always had wonderful art programs.
And art is what lead me through my trauma.
It lead me to create,
which helped me get to my “what now”
It’s a really wonderful place to be.
And that community continues to be with me as I work in Los Angeles as a filmmaker,
because I have a different group of friends now,
and a different community, a more expanded community,
that also supports resilience
and that also understands the “what now” of the world.
But don’t just take my word for it
because when you go through these types of things,
you end up making other friends.
This is my friend James Gribble - or Gribbs, as he likes to be called.
In 2008,
James set off on a life-changing journey to travel the world for two years.
His first stop was the African nation of Zambia,
where he was going to fish
for one the world’s rarest and most prized fish to catch:
a tiger fish.
James arrived at this remote island on the Zambezi River,
sat down on a stool and was dehydrated,
fainted onto sand
and broke his C4 and C5 vertebrae
and became a quadriplegic immediately.
But Gribbs didn’t …
didn’t say, “Why? Why?”
In fact, his father was a rugby coach,
took to his immediate rehabilitation,
his whole family rallied around him,
and James often said,
“You can’t feel sorry for me because I don’t feel sorry for me.
I’m on my journey.”
And through doing that,
James had a passion, which was golf,
and James was determined to get back on the links,
determined to rehabilitate himself.
So [after] tens of thousands of hours of rehabilitation,
James partnered with a company in Germany,
and helped to bring to market a device called
the ParaGolfer,
which put James back on the links.
Now, the ParaGolfer is designed
to help spinal cord victims, stroke victims, get back and play sport.
James is also someone who took his why, put it in the past
and faced the “what now.”
And the work that he has done has been adopted by doctors and clinicians
in his native country of Australia
to treat spinal cord injury.
So when it comes to resilience,
it really is a team sport.
I wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t for members of this audience
and the community that pillared me up.
I wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t for the resilience of the arts
and me diving into that.
When I was a freshman at music school,
I heard a great quote,
and it was by Aristotle.
It says, “We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
Well, so is resilience.
I’m here to say ...
biography is not destiny.
You can be both the author and the audience of your life.
Thank you.
(Applause)