 Listen guys, this won't come as a shock to you if you know me in real life or if you've listened to my channel for a long time, but I am a TED Talk nerd. I love hearing other people's speeches and their stories and I listened to one this morning that really changed my perspective on how I've been viewing my amputation and my identity as an amputee and how I've been trying to deal with that, so let's talk about it. Hello my beautiful internet friends, welcome back to my channel. Thank you for joining me here today, I truly appreciate it. I was listening to a speech this morning and do you ever have those moments where you're just going about your day and then suddenly something hits you like a bag of rocks to the side of the head and then everything is a little bit different? I just had one of those. I was listening to a speech by Andrew Solomon who is someone I have a lot of respect for. I listened to a couple of his speeches before and as a little bit of background for this or a little bit of setup, ever since my leg has started working right for like the last month I guess I feel like I've been having this identity crisis. I mean for the last year and a half I've been trying to figure out what it actually means to me to be an amputee. I've struggled saying that sentence and attaching it to myself. I'm not sure what I want it to mean, I've talked about that openly. I haven't been sure if I've wanted to be like nonchalant about it or if I've wanted to be super flamboyant about it or something in between and more importantly I haven't always been sure of what I actually feel about it in reality. I think a big part of what's been going on is that for the last year and a half there's always been something new happening. I've been waiting for a surgery or waiting for a scan result or like actively recovering from getting my leg chopped off or whatever and so that's been a huge part of my life and now it's more really trying to find what normal looks like for me. I haven't found it yet, I'm in the process of it but now things are quieter. Now they're not quite as in my face and I've wondered if I should just kind of shut up about it. I've always had this voice in the back of my head telling me I just need to sit down and shut up and be quiet. I think a lot of us can relate to that, that no one really wants to hear me talk about anything, especially not about anything that I'm struggling with and I should just shh, like just hush, right? So especially as things have started to go right with my leg I'm like okay well they're going better, I should probably get quieter about this because it's just a normal part of who I am now, right? I don't know. There's been a lot of shoulds in my head, what I should feel what I should think and then I listened to this speech today and I was like oh goodness, that hits home. So this is what Mr. Solomon said in his TED Talk titled, the worst moments in our lives make us who we are which is a phrase I in a large part do agree with. In this talk he's addressing the struggles of many many different people and he mentions his own struggle growing up being a gay man and wanting that not to be the case and making himself go through basically conversion therapy to try to be straight and that just didn't work because that wasn't who he was and then he has this to say as he's coming to self-acceptance. I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis but the self-loathing of that period left a void and celebration needs to fill and overflow it and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy there's still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address. Someday being gay will be a simple fact free of party hats and blame but not yet. So I don't personally belong to the LGBTQ plus community but I do belong to another marginalized community which is the community of people who deal with disability and when I heard him say that I was like that is what I think I've been pushing myself towards. I've been pushing myself towards quietness about this new part of my life. I don't know what I want it to be yet but I've felt subconsciously like if I was cool about it, if I was good about it that would mean that it was just a normal part of my life. No one would have to know. I would never have to discuss it. People wouldn't even know that I was missing a leg. That's when I would actually be mature and good about it and I didn't even necessarily feel good about that thought. That's just the impression in my head and when he talked about this it was like it unlocked something for me where I was like that's it. I don't know as me living in this country at this time I've always felt this pressure to be smaller than I am and I'm pretty good at that. I'm pretty good at being a small person when I need to be which is a skill and a curse. I also realize that this might sound dumb and slightly hypocritical coming from someone who has a YouTube channel about all of this but understand that who I am in my normal life is not an amputee. I'm just Joe. Also as a person who has lived with chronic illness most of their life and with a form of disability most of my life there is this pressure to be quiet about it to not upset people, to not make a scene, to not make a fuss, to not really talk about it, to not make other people uncomfortable. I mean really that's what's at the root of it to not take up too much space. I don't know that that needs to be the case and I don't know that I agree with that. For the record I'm not saying I want to make people uncomfortable. In fact I want to do the polar opposite. I want to make people very comfortable around me and all of who I am but I don't know that that needs to be accomplished by hiding any part of who I am. By the semi-rambling nature of this video I hope you can tell this is not yet a fully formed thought in my mind but it was really a lightning bolt moment for me to realize that being mature about being an amputee doesn't mean that I have to shut up about it all the time doesn't mean that I have to be quiet, doesn't mean that I have to as he said simply deal with disability without any kind of emphasis or even celebration. I can make this whatever I want it to be and whatever you're dealing with. You can make it what you want it to be. I think that's one of the coolest things about the hard things that life throws us. We get to assign meaning to it even if it started out with pretty crappy meaning. We get to make it into what we want it to be and I'm still very much in the process of figuring out what I want this to be but I kind of felt like someone gave me permission today to be whatever I needed and wanted to be with it and I wanted to pass that permission on to you. I'm gonna link his whole speech down below. It is one of the most profound talks I've ever heard. I've listened to it more than once and today that was a line that stood out to me. If you do choose to watch it let me know what you get out of it. I would really like to hear what do you think? Is this something that you struggle with with whatever your identity or identities are? I would love to hear down below. Leave me a comment. I read all comments. I can't reply to every single one but I do my best. Thank you to my patrons who make these videos possible. You support me in more ways than you know. I'm truly grateful to each and every one of you and thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day to watch this video. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to spend it with me so thank you. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys. Actually by the way before I go I saw a couple comments a couple videos ago that many of you don't know that I have a second channel. I've actually had that second channel much longer than I've had Foolish Joe. It's called Trauma Talk. I would love it if you'd consider checking it out. I talk about life in the aftermath of trauma and a lot of mental health specifically focused videos so I'd love to see you over there if you'd feel like checking me out over there. Alright that's actually it. Thanks guys. Bye.