Transcriber: Emanuela Catoni Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
About a year and a half before my 40th birthday
I made one of the most bizarre decisions of my entire life.
I decided I wanted to travel back in time to every age that I’ve lived so far.
Think of it like a midlife crisis, but instead of going after a sports car,
I wanted a time machine, kind of like this one here,
created by three of my favorite students at a school where I teach
a social emotional learning program that I created.
So why exactly did I want to hop in a time machine
and travel back to my younger years?
Well, I was at a meditation workshop in Southern California,
where I had a very clear vision of myself at age 12.
It’s like he was right there in front of me.
Now, I was excited to see this younger version of myself,
but the feeling clearly was not mutual
because what I saw in this kid staring back at me was pain and sadness.
First, I thought he was just disappointed to see the hair loss in his future.
But then I remembered how poorly I treated that kid.
I remember my negative inner voice.
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m not smart enough.”
“I’m not tall enough.”
And those words that you never want to hear from a child:
“I hate myself.”
I felt sick to my stomach, remembering all that self-hate.
I think the reason that it hit so hard,
was because I realized that self-hate had never actually gone away.
As a 12 year old middle schooler, I never talked about it.
I never dealt with it.
I just quietly carried it with me right into high school,
and then college, and my 20s and my 30s, and my jobs, my relationships,
my whole sense of well-being.
Twenty five years after middle school, I still didn’t feel like I was enough.
I felt this profound sense of lost, wasted time.
Real regret.
And then something happened.
In the middle of this meditation, I apologized to my 12 year old self.
“I’m sorry for the way I made you feel.”
And then I said something that I didn’t even understand on a conscious level.
I looked my 12 year old self in the eyes,
and I said,
“We’re going to do it all again, but this time around I’ve got your back.”
I walked out of there thinking what you might be thinking right now.
What in the world was that all about?
“We’re going to do it all again”, what does that even mean?
I kept thinking about this idea of doing it all again.
And I started to wonder:
what if I really could travel back in time, to every age of my life?
What would I learn about who I was in my past,
who I am today,
and who I want to become in my future?
How could those insights help not just me,
but others holding on to their self-doubt?
After failing to find an actual time machine,
and yes, I looked for one online,
I thought, what if my time machine could be other people?
What better way to reconnect age five and 12 and 25, and 34
and every other age that I’ve lived,
than to sit down and have a conversation
with someone, living and experiencing each of those ages?
My mission was set.
In the year leading up to my 40th birthday
I was going to interview 40 people,
from the ages one to 40,
about what it’s like to be the age that they are.
Instead of just helplessly asking: “where did the time go?”
I was actually going to answer that question.
One age at a time.
There was only one place to make this happen.
My hometown of Durham, North Carolina,
in the Carolina friend school community
that nurtured that lost 12 year old self of mine
as he was trying to find his way.
I kicked off these interviews inside the home of one year old Emory,
the daughter of a long time friend of mine.
I showed up, my friend said,
“So how do you want to do this?”
I was like, “I don’t know.
How does your one year old normally do her interviews?
Can she even talk?”
I kind of stumbled across the starting line there,
but we eventually found a corner of the kitchen
where we pulled together these two tiny wooden chairs.
I squatted down in my chair.
She climbed up into hers.
And what I saw in this one year old
was wonder, this fascination with sights and sounds,
and tastes, and textures.
Even though she just got up and walked out on me
12 minutes into the interview - rude! -
it was clear there was some magic
to this idea of seeing the world through younger perspectives.
In the fourth interview with a four year old boy named Davy
I was just melting at the joy and silliness and kindness of this kid.
Toward the end of the chat
after he told me he could eat a million zillion waffles,
I asked him, “So what advice do you have for me as I turn 40?”
This little four year old boy looked at me and he says, “I like you.”
At first I thought it was just a sweet, childish misunderstanding of my question.
But he was the wise one.
On this quest for self-compassion,
Davies’ words were exactly what I needed to hear from a younger version of myself.
At the age-six-interview with this adorable little first grader,
she was telling me about the secret hidden nest that no one knew about.
When I asked her if she could show it to me,
she walked me to the middle of the playground,
pointed to this old beat-up tire lying flat on the ground.
This jaded adult voice in my head is thinking,
“Pfft... that’s it? That’s the secret hidden nest?”
And then I saw this little six year old and her friends sit inside of the tire,
and the six year old inside of me woke up and I saw the magic that she saw.
The first 9-10 interviews showed me
that the secret to a happy life exists
within our early childhood qualities:
imagination, creativity, curiosity, playfulness, kindness.
A lot of the world’s conflict would melt away
if we all became our four year old selves again.
I did not want to leave that phase of the project.
But just like real life, these interviews carried on.
And next came the shift.
So a few days later, Monday afternoon,
and I’m slowly walking toward the front doors of the middle school
that I attended 25 years earlier.
My heart is pounding, my stomach is churning.
It’s like my first day of middle school all over again.
All those feelings of anxiety and insecurity,
and self-doubt are just flooding back.
And I don’t like it.
I spent the past 25 years working very hard to bury these feelings
and pretend they don't exist.
I don’t want to walk back in the building
where I was the shortest, scrawniest kid in my class.
I resisted the temptation to run away into the surrounding woods,
pulled myself together and walked through those doors
to start the next interview with an 11 year old sixth grader.
He had brown hair, brown eyes, baby face, sensitive personality.
It was me at age 11.
And this kid is telling me about the stress of homework,
and kids teasing each other and his crush turning him down.
All this is happening inside a classroom
where I was once a student, inside the same middle school
where I experienced my first heartache from my crush turning me down.
I felt like I should have some profound piece of advice for this kid,
but I was just right there alongside him, reliving it all.
One of the questions that I would ask in every interview is:
“what are your biggest fears?”
Little kids who talk about being afraid of spiders and monsters
and exploding volcanoes.
When I asked a 13 year old,
she said her biggest fear is that the people she likes won’t like her back.
I talked to a 14 year old up on the tennis courts
where I coached middle school tennis.
This kid came to me distraught.
He said: “I hate my tennis game, I hate myself,
I literally hate everything about myself.”
Oh, I remember that pain.
I’ve seen it in the kids that I’ve interviewed
and coached and taught.
And I’ve studied the broader epidemic of teen anxiety and depression
that carries on for decades into adulthood, in all areas of life.
These middle schoolers were such terrific, beautiful kids.
I think that’s why on this accelerated journey through 40 years,
it was so jarring to witness and to relive that transition
from the magic of early childhood to the struggles of adolescence.
Looking back now, as an educator, I can see that these insights
gave me the building blocks to a breakthrough educational approach
to help teens and tweens with these struggles.
But at the time, during these interviews,
I was just asking “Why? Why does this happen?”
I received an unexpected clue in an unexpected place
in my next interview.
It was with a 15 year old high school sophomore.
And she was up on stage with some other student musicians
performing a song by the Beatles called “Don’t Let Me Down.”
And she sang those four words over and over again,
♫ “Don’t let me down” ♫
So she could actually sing.
I thought about myself at age 15
and how I used to threaten myself with those words.
Don’t let me down.
Don’t mess this up.
Don’t be a failure.
As the weight of expectations grew heavier during my teenage years,
the volume of that voice got louder.
And I could hear it in the kids
and young adults that I was interviewing.
Now, in the interviews with the later teens into the early 20s,
there was a lot of joy remembering what it was like
to get my driver’s license, go to college,
travel the world, start new friendships
and jobs and relationships.
But a pattern had emerged.
In the interviews from the middle school years,
through the 20s into the 30s,
there was a theme of people talking about feeling behind.
Like they weren’t doing enough, like they needed to hurry up and do more.
The 22 year old college senior that I talked to,
he said that bigger than his fear of the unknown
was his fear of the known:
of just being ordinary.
The 33 year old that I interviewed said that he thought
he had finally checked off all the social expectation boxes,
college degree, job, house, wife, baby,
only to find that life was just as unstable as ever,
and there was a whole new set of expectations waiting for him.
I finally got a hint of a solution.
The age thirty-five interview,
talking to a writing professor,
she was telling me how at age 35,
her definition of strength was shifting.
From holding on for dear life,
never giving up,
to letting go,
letting go of the expectations
and this myth that there is some external checklist
we all have to meet in order to feel like we’re enough.
In the homestretch interviews with age 36, 37,
38 and 39, I reconnected with my brother,
my best friends from childhood,
who all showed me no matter how much we grow up
there maintains within us a core essence and personality
and childish, immature sense of humor, fart jokes included,
that never goes away and always ties us to our past.
On my 40th birthday, I was the 40th and final interview.
When the people I interviewed turned the tables
and interviewed me about what it was like turning 40.
Best birthday party ever.
It was like walking into a room full of my younger selves.
As I looked out at the people who brought this journey to life,
I thought about some of those words of self-criticism.
“You’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you idiot!”
And it hit me so hard that I would never dare say those words
to the people in this room.
And if the people in this room represented the younger versions of me,
then I could never dare say those words to myself again.
At the end of the evening, I told everyone I appreciate you, I love you,
I would do anything for you.
I wasn’t just talking to them, I was talking to myself.
I was finally treating myself like a friend and a loved one,
telling myself the brilliant words of four year old Davey: “I like you.”
I walked out of that 40th birthday party
reflecting on the past year of interviews
and what I saw was an unconventional path to self-compassion.
This different way of looking at myself that gave me
such a deeper understanding of my past, my present and my future, my whole self.
So I started thinking,
what if I could do this for middle schoolers,
who are at the heart of that transition from the magic of early childhood
to the struggles of adolescence that carry decades into adulthood?
When the brainstorming dust settled
I came up with a social-emotional learning program
designed to give middle schoolers a break from the weight of being middle schooler
by guiding them on a journey through their own past, present, future
in a way that could transform their self-doubt into self-love
and turn the light back on inside of them.
I called the program Time Travel Journeys,
let’s face it, for middle schoolers
time travel is way cooler than social emotional self-development.
I pitched it to the middle school that I went to.
And I was ecstatic to find out
they were going to hire me to teach this as an elective class,
and eventually as a workshop and a summer camp and a full curriculum
that I now train other teachers to deliver to their students.
Every time travel journey starts with one of these,
each student designs their own time machine
that inspires them to explore
the best of who they were when they were younger,
who they want to become when older
and how those discoveries can help them today.
One middle schooler who was reflecting and journaling on his past
said: ”If I was more like my pre-school self,
I guess I wouldn’t worry so much about what other people think.”
Another middle schooler, interviewing a college student
about what’s like to be in college, asks:
“So what do you do for food on campus?”
College student said: “I go to the dining hall, eat sandwiches, mashed potatoes.”
This middle schooler’s eyes lit up.
“I love mashed potatoes,” she said.
“Can you get seconds?”
College student said “You can get thirds.”
Poof! In an instant!
The middle schooler’s anxiety for the future,
turned into extreme excitement for mashed potatoes.
Bottomless mashed potatoes.
When the kids come back to the present time,
they are transformed.
As one middle schooler so eloquently said,
“This project has given me a clear understanding of what makes me who I am.
And finally, I have a glimpse of who I want to become.”
The impact extends to parents and educators.
A mom who helped her son find early childhood photos wrote to me and said,
“Thank you for this opportunity to connect with our boy.”
A teacher that I trained said, “Today was pure magic.”
I kind of joke around that this program tricks teenagers into self-compassion.
There’s some truth to that, because when you try to force it,
you run into a wall.
But when middle schoolers appreciate their past
and get excited about their future,
it naturally uplifts their present sense of self.
And I think that’s the case for all of us at any age.
I think it starts with us, the adults,
strengthening that relationship
with our own past, present and future selves,
so we can be better role models for the young people in our lives.
My mission moving forward is to implement this program
to schools and organizations across the planet. Why?
Because I cannot tolerate another 12 year old waiting twenty five years
to start appreciating and loving him or herself.
What this journey, this time travel method has given me,
and what it’s now giving others
is the strength to let go of that voice of self-doubt.
And to look in the mirror and say those simple but powerful words:
“I like you,
and from this moment forward, I’ve got your back.”
Thank you.
(Applause)