-
For a long time in my life,
-
I felt like I'd been living two different lives.
-
There's the life that everyone sees,
-
and then there's the life that only I see.
-
And in the life that everyone sees,
-
who I am is a friend,
-
a son, a brother,
-
a stand-up comedian, and a teenager.
-
That's the life everyone sees.
-
If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me,
-
that's what they would tell you.
-
And that's a huge part of me. That is who I am.
-
And if you ask me to describe myself,
-
I'd probably say some of those same things.
-
And I wouldn't be lying.
-
I wouldn't totally be telling you the truth, either,
-
because the truth is,
-
that's just the life everyone else sees.
-
In the life that only I see, who I am,
-
who I really am,
-
is someone who struggles intensely with depression.
-
I have for the last six years of my life,
-
and I continue to every day.
-
Now, for someone who has never experienced depression
-
or doesn't really know what that means,
-
that might surprise them to hear,
-
because there's a pretty popular misconception
-
that depression is just being sad
-
when something in your life goes wrong,
-
when you break up with your girlfriend,
-
when you lose a loved one,
-
when you don't get the job you wanted.
-
But that's sadness. That's a natural thing.
-
That's a natural human emotion.
-
Real depression isn't being sad
-
when something in your life goes wrong.
-
Real depression is being sad
-
when everything in your life is going right.
-
That's real depression, and that's what I suffer from.
-
And to be totally honest,
-
that's hard for me to stand up here and say.
-
It's hard for me to talk about,
-
and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about,
-
so much so that no one's talking about.
-
And no one's talking about depression, but we need to be,
-
because right now it's a massive problem.
-
It's a massive problem.
-
But we don't see it on social media, right?
-
We don't see it on Facebook. We don't see it on Twitter.
-
We don't see it on the news, because it's not happy,
-
it's not fun, it's not light.
-
And so because we don't see it, we don't see the severity of it.
-
But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this:
-
every 30 seconds,
-
every 30 seconds, somewhere,
-
someone in the world takes their own life
-
because of depression,
-
and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away,
-
it might be two continents away, but it's happening,
-
and it's happening every single day.
-
And we have a tendency, as a society,
-
to look at that and go, "So what?"
-
So what? We look at that, and we go, "That's your problem.
-
That's their problem."
-
We say we're sad and we say we're sorry,
-
but we also say, "So what?"
-
Well, two years ago, two years ago it was my problem,
-
because I sat on the edge of my bed
-
where I'd sat a million times before
-
and I was suicidal.
-
I was suicidal, and if you were to look at my life on the surface,
-
you wouldn't see a kid who was suicidal.
-
You'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team,
-
the drama and theater student of the year,
-
the English student of the year,
-
someone who was consistently on the honor roll
-
and consistently at every party.
-
So you would say I wasn't depressed, you would say
-
I wasn't suicidal, but you would be wrong.
-
You would be wrong. So I sat there that night
-
beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand
-
and I thought about taking my own life
-
and I came this close to doing it.
-
I came this close to doing it.
-
And I didn't, so that makes me one of the lucky ones,
-
one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge
-
and look down but not jump,
-
one of the lucky ones who survives.
-
Well, I survived, and that just leaves me with my story,
-
and my story is this:
-
in four simple words, I suffer from depression.
-
I suffer from depression,
-
and for a long time, I think,
-
I was living two totally different lives,
-
where one person was always afraid of the other.
-
I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was,
-
that I wasn't the perfect, popular kid in high school everyone thought I was,
-
that beneath my smile, there was struggle,
-
and beneath my light, there was dark,
-
and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain.
-
See, some people might fear girls not liking them back.
-
Some people might fear sharks. Some people might fear death.
-
But for me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself.
-
I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability,
-
and that fear made me feel
-
like I was forced into a corner,
-
like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out,
-
and so I thought about that way every single day.
-
I thought about it every single day,
-
and if I'm being totally honest standing here,
-
I've thought about it again since, because that's the sickness,
-
that's the struggle, that's depression,
-
and depression isn't chicken pox.
-
You don't beat it once and it's gone forever.
-
It's something you live with. It's something you live in.
-
It's the roommate you can't kick out. It's the voice you can't ignore.
-
It's the feelings you can't seem to escape,
-
and the scariest part is,
-
the scariest part is that after a while,
-
you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you,
-
and what you really fear the most
-
isn't the suffering inside of you.
-
It's the stigma inside of others,
-
it's the shame, it's the embarrassment,
-
it's the disapproving look on a friend's face,
-
it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak,
-
it's the comments that you're crazy.
-
That's what keeps you from getting help.
-
That's what makes you hold it in and hide it.
-
It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it,
-
and you hold it in and you hide it,
-
and even though it's keeping you in bed every day
-
and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it,
-
you hide it, because the stigma in our society
-
around depression is very real.
-
It's very real, and if you think that it isn't, ask yourself this:
-
would you rather make your next Facebook status
-
say you're having a tough time getting out of bed
-
because you hurt your back
-
or you're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning
-
because you're depressed?
-
That's the stigma, because unfortunately,
-
we live in a world where if you break your arm,
-
everyone runs over to sign your cast,
-
but if you tell people you're depressed, everyone runs the other way.
-
That's the stigma.
-
We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking down
-
other than our brains. And that's ignorance.
-
That's pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created
-
a world that doesn't understand depression,
-
that doesn't understand mental health.
-
And that's ironic to me, because depression
-
is one of the best-documented problems we have in the world,
-
yet it's one of the least discussed.
-
We just push it aside and put it in a corner,
-
pretend it's not there, and hope it'll fix itself.
-
Well it won't. It hasn't, and it's not going to,
-
because that's wishful thinking,
-
and wishful thinking isn't a game plan, it's procrastination,
-
and we can't procrastinate on something this important.
-
The first step in solving any problem
-
is recognizing there is one.
-
Well, we haven't done that, so we can't really expect
-
to find an answer when we're still afraid of the question.
-
And I don't know what the solution is.
-
I wish I did, but I don't, but I think,
-
I think it has to start here.
-
It has to start with me, it has to start with you,
-
it has to start with the people who are suffering,
-
the ones who are hidden in the shadows.
-
We need to speak up and shatter the silence.
-
We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in,
-
because if there's one thing that I've come to realize,
-
if there's one thing that I see is the biggest problem,
-
it's not in building a world
-
where we eliminate the ignorance of others.
-
It's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves,
-
when we're okay with who we are,
-
because when we get honest,
-
we see that we all struggle and we all suffer.
-
Whether it's with this, whether it's with something else,
-
we all know what it is to hurt.
-
We all know what it is to have pain in our heart,
-
and we all know how important it is to heal.
-
But right now, depression is society's deep cut
-
that we're content to put a band-aid over and pretend it's not there.
-
Well, it is there. It is there, and you know what? It's okay.
-
Depression is okay. If you're going through it, know that you're okay.
-
And know that you're sick, you're not weak,
-
and it's an issue, not an identity,
-
because when you get past the fear and the ridicule
-
and the judgment and the stigma of others,
-
you can see depression for what it really is,
-
and that's just a part of life,
-
just a part of life, and as much as I hate,
-
as much as I hate some of the places,
-
some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to,
-
in a lot of ways I'm grateful for it.
-
Because yeah, it's put me in the valleys,
-
but only to show me there's peaks,
-
and yeah it's dragged me through the dark
-
but only to remind me there is light.
-
My pain, more than anything in 19 years on this planet,
-
has given me perspective, and my hurt,
-
my hurt has forced me to have hope,
-
have hope and to have faith, faith in myself,
-
faith in others, faith that it can get better,
-
that we can change this, that we can speak up
-
and speak out and fight back against ignorance,
-
fight back against intolerance,
-
and more than anything,
-
learn to love ourselves,
-
learn to accept ourselves for who we are,
-
the people we are, not the people the world wants us to be.
-
Because the world I believe in is one
-
where embracing your light doesn't mean ignoring your dark.
-
The world I believe in is one where we're measured
-
by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them.
-
The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye
-
and say, "I'm going through hell,"
-
and they can look back at me and go, "Me too," and that's okay,
-
and it's okay because depression is okay. We're people.
-
We're people, and we struggle and we suffer
-
and we bleed and we cry, and if you think that true strength
-
means never showing any weakness, then I'm here
-
to tell you you're wrong.
-
You're wrong, because it's the opposite.
-
We're people, and we have problems.
-
We're not perfect, and that's okay.
-
So we need to stop the ignorance,
-
stop the intolerance, stop the stigma,
-
and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos,
-
take a look at the truth, and start talking,
-
because the only way we're going to beat a problem
-
that people are battling alone
-
is by standing strong together,
-
by standing strong together.
-
And I believe that we can.
-
I believe that we can. Thank you guys so much.
-
This is a dream come true. Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you. (Applause)