{"id":644776,"date":"2013-02-28T23:45:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T04:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/?p=70266"},"modified":"2013-02-28T23:45:26","modified_gmt":"2013-03-01T04:45:26","slug":"live-a-life-to-do-with-beauty-shane-koyczan-at-ted2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/644776","title":{"rendered":"Live a life to do with beauty: Shane Koyczan at TED2013"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: James Duncan Davidson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Spoken-word poet and artist\u00a0Shane Koyczan<\/a>\u00a0is onstage at TED, sharing his own experiences and charming us silly. This is an intimate, heartfelt look into a life that has not always been easy. “I’ve been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself,” he says.<\/p>\n

Being told to stand up for yourself is a common response to trouble. But “that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.” Asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, Koyczan found it a difficult question to answer. “When I was a kid, I\u00a0wanted to be a man,” he says. “When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much.” (Koyczan, it should be noted, has an impressively full beard.) “When I was 8, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was 9, I saw the movie Jaws<\/em> and said ‘no thank you.’”<\/p>\n

He said he wanted to be a writer. And he was told: “Choose something realistic.” He said he wanted to be a professional wrestler. “They said, don’t be stupid. They asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be.\u00a0I wondered what made my dreams so easy to dismiss.”<\/p>\n

In Koyczan’s world, even his dreams were called names. But he kept on. I was going to be a wrestler, and my name would be the Garbage Man. “My finishing move was going to be the Trash Compactor.” He turned to poetry, and he concludes this beautiful, lyrical presentation by reading the poem “To This Day<\/a>,”\u00a0which he wrote to explore the impact of bullying, and which was animated through an open call for contributions (the film plays in the background). It’s a clarion call for action, and it makes the audience decidedly weepy. A\u00a0sample:<\/p>\n

so we grew up believing no one
\nwould ever fall in love with us
\nthat we\u2019d be lonely forever
\nthat we\u2019d never meet someone
\nto make us feel like the sun
\nwas something they built for us
\nin their tool shed<\/p>\n

It’s a bravura performance, and a tearful Koyczan receives a prolonged standing ovation.<\/p>\n

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