Transcriber: Maira Perez Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
Who are you?
Really.
When I was nine, I realized
that I was a failure.
I was standing at the bottom of the hill
with a voice calling down at me over and over again
to push this giant rock up the hill.
I was filled with fear but I tried my best.
The rock was so big that I couldn't see in front of it.
But I could just feel its weight trying to roll back down onto me.
I felt my muscles ached, and then,
I heard a snap ...
and I saw both of my wrists bending backwards.
And as I was blacking out from the pain,
the voice from the top of the hill kept calling and calling and calling,
and then, I woke up.
And a week later, I had this exact same dream.
The calls from the top of the hill telling me to push on,
the voice encouraging me to just try harder,
to keep on pushing against the burden that crushed against me,
and then, the excruciating snap
when the struggle would finally break me,
I still remember every moment of those nightmares vividly.
What was hidden behind the calling and the pain in those moments
was a secret,
the most important detail, a hidden message
that I was too terrified to hear and too young to understand.
But that secret, that hidden message is at the heart of why I'm here today.
It took me over thirty years to finally understand it.
But once I did,
it completely transformed who I was and who I'm able to become.
That lesson taught to a scared confused little girl
has the potential to be too important, too empowering and too transformative
for me not to share it with all of you today,
and I only hope that it would shed
as much light in your life as it did in mine.
(Sighing) So, when I was ten years old,
I left the concrete jungle of my Hong Kong daily life
and the rocks and hills of my nightmares behind, to take for the stars.
I was imagining that I was on a spaceship,
and I was boarding a plane for the first time.
It was the most exciting experience of my life.
I was leaving everything that I know into the complete unknown,
an alien world full of new life and new civilization,
to boldly go where no Able has ever gone before,
to the land of Toledo-Ohio, in America.
And as I departed in my imaginary spaceship,
I looked at everything with eyes as big as saucers,
and everything was just amazing.
I mean, the land was so flat,
the food portions were so huge,
and the people!
Well, the people were so tall.
A few weeks later, I was told that the fun was over,
and it was time to get started in school.
And that's when I realized that I was the alien.
I looked different from everyone else.
Most of the kids had much paler skin than mine.
Some had beautiful blond hair and blue eyes.
And then, there was me.
I felt even too stupid to understand what anyone was saying.
And when a new friend would teach me to say a word or two,
to share with the teacher, everyone would just laugh at it.
It just remind me of what [a butt of] a joke I was.
(Sigh)
But, time went on,
and that little girl learned a word or two and a few more
and changed school several times.
But even then, kids would still make fun of my small Chinese eyes,
or laugh at my accent and took it for granted
that my lack of English was an obvious sign of my lack of intelligence as well.
Over and over again, I would try harder.
I would try to improve - excuse me...
I tried to improve my English.
I tried to dress like everyone else.
I tried to speak like everyone else,
just so that I could feel that I could fit in,
and to feel connected, feel worthy,
and to silence that voice in my head that said,
"You know Able, if you just raise yourself to their level,
then maybe one day... one day, you'll be happy."
(Sniffing) Sorry!
Those beliefs came from conditioning, from looking outward
and always comparing yourself to everyone and everything around you.
And it doesn't take long for those comparisons
to pile into one big hill.
And eventually, that big hill develops
to become our ego, our sense of self.
And of course, those instant comparisons that are being so innocent,
when we start attaching labels to them,
when we're told that blond hair is just prettier than black hair,
that white skin is better than dark skin,
that you're just not as smart as your friends or as talented as your cousin,
then sooner or later, the weight of everything that we are not
crushes everything that is good, joyful and beautiful that we are.
And of course, the older we get, the bigger the pile gets.
(Sniffing) I'm sorry.
Growing up in an Asian immigrant family
or for most immigrant families for that matter,
childhood usually mean
taking up a lot more responsibility than the kids next door.
And I was driven to excel at every single one of them.
I defined myself by being the hardest working
or trying to get the best grades,
or never being too tired to work at my parents' restaurant
because, as far as I was concerned,
second place was first loser, and I wasn't going to be a loser.
Unfortunately, that mindset didn't change much after I got married.
Pushing myself harder and harder,
being the perfect student, the perfect daughter,
just got swapped up to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother,
or, at least, I tried to be.
And between the diapers and the dishes
and the hundreds of little trivial arguments every couple would have,
it all just became too much,
and I felt the weight of everything crushing back down onto me.
I became so distraught, so volatile, that my husband suggested,
"You know what, Able? You should go see a psychiatrist,
so that he can tell you what the heck is wrong with you."
Now on the plus side, the psychiatrist was incredibly insightful,
but, on the down side, he was incredibly expensive.
And so I thought I was so smart that I had the solution.
I'm going to work harder, make more money,
do more work, and then, maybe I can afford to see him,
and then the psychiatrist is going to tell me
what the heck is wrong with me, right?
(Laughter)
(Whispering) No!
Long story short, the trips to the psychiatrist
is replaced by visits to the yoga studio.
And for a few brief moments,
I wasn't trying to impress my instructor on having the best downward dog;
(Laughter)
I wasn't comparing my lotus position to the person next to me;
I wasn't waiting for a word of approval, a pat on the back, or a word of praise;
I wasn't trying to be something else or someone else;
I was just trying to be.
Excuse me, I wasn't even trying to be ...
but just being.
Just being was enough.
Now from yoga came meditation,
and from meditation came reading books
such as Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now"
and other Buddhist books.
And all of them taught me a key lesson:
stop struggling.
You are not defined
by what you're struggling to become or struggling against.
The more you define yourself
by some external source of praise or some external goal,
the more strain you're going to feel, year after year,
trying to maintain that burden.
And, sooner or later, that weight is going to come crushing down onto you.
And the struggle you've dedicated so much of yourself to
is going to roll back down onto you with strain and pain and suffering.
You are not defined by the size of the hill that you're trying to climb.
If you fail, all that stress will just come rolling down that much harder.
But even if you succeed,
the weight you've spent your entire life trying to push to the top
is just going to roll back down onto another side,
and you're going to find yourself looking at the exact same rock,
trying to shove it up the exact same hill, and you're going to convince yourself
that "You know what? When I become CEO, when I make this much more money,
when I have this title, when I have this and that ..."
It never ends!
You are not defined by what people expect of you
or demand from you
or tell you to be or tell you to do
because I can tell you from personal experience
that when the strain finally becomes too much,
you won't be able to hear anything.
And the voices that you spend your entire life trying to satisfy
are rarely coming from the same people who'd be there
to help your shoulder, your burden,
when your struggle becomes too heavy to bear.
"You are not defined
by what you are struggling to become or struggling against."
"You are not defined by the size of the hill that you're trying to climb."
You are not defined by what people expect of you or tell you to be.
You are not defined ...
You are not defined.
You just "am," you just are,
and that's enough.
You are enough.
It took me over thirty years to finally understand the profound lessons
that my dreams were trying to teach me all those years ago.
And if that lesson can help even one of you in the audience today,
then it would be worth the wait for me.
Remember, you're not something, you are someone.
You are a spirit, a soul,
a unique masterpiece that would never be reproduced.
You are enough.
And in closing, I'd like to share with you a quote
from the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
"Be content with what you have,
rejoice in the way things are;
when you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you."
Thank you.
(Applause)