The following is a speech I wrote as my introductory icebreaker speech for a Toastmasters Meetup I attend. If you want to learn a little more about me, this is a good place to start. The paragraphs are broken up a little more than they would usually be because it made it easier to read in the form of speech notes.
A bit literal, but thanks, Pixabay.
The Right Words
The ability to find the right words for an occasion has always been, and will always be, of critical importance to me. It has defined my life, my relationships, and my career.
When writing words down, it has become my primary skill set. But when it comes to speaking words out loud, I have a shakier background, which is enormously frustrating to me because in conversation, I often find the right words... after the moment has passed. Have you ever come up with a great response but about thirty minutes too late? That's me, all the time. And I look forward to changing that.
Hi everyone. If you don't know me yet, my name is Dan. I joined Toastmasters because words are my craft and my passion, and I want to get just as good at speaking them as I am at writing them down. In this speech, I'm going to describe four personal anecdotes from times when words, right or wrong, changed my life completely. By the end, I hope you'll understand my passion for finding the right words, what that means to me, why it matters, and maybe learn some things about me, too.
My first story is a happy one. I was ten years old. My fifth grade teacher, Andy Kinard, asked everyone in the class to write a creative story for our Writing period. We could write any story we wanted, and we would read it in front of the class. We would then vote on the best story (without voting for our own), and whoever won got a Cinemark movie theater gift card.
The story had to be one page long… so I wrote eight. I had never been so excited about a homework assignment. I read the whole darn thing to the class when it was my turn, with Mr. Kinard getting me glasses of water as I plodded through. The class voted, and I won the gift card. But better still, Mr. Kinard took me aside after class and told me I was very talented and should consider becoming a writer when I grew up. I had never won anything in my life and no one had ever suggested a career path to me before that day. This was the first time I had written words down and met with success when I put them in front of others.
The second story is less cheerful, unfortunately. One year later, I was in a car with three other students my age and a parent who was chaperoning us to the CSU library. I was in Advanced Reading class with the other students, so we were driving out to find research books for our "Young Scholars" project, which was supposed to be about what career we wanted to pursue. The other three were talking loudly and completely ignoring me. I asked them to stop talking, and got angry when they blew me off.
I couldn't articulate why I wanted them to so badly at the time, but the reason was that their talking was an incessant reminder that they had friends in the car and I didn't. I couldn't express the feelings I had: jealousy, frustration, loneliness.
For the first time, I said out loud that I wanted to kill myself.
That year was the worst year of my life, which sounds melodramatic to say about sixth grade, but it was bad. For one, it was the heaviest homework load I ever had until junior year of college. I had exactly one friend, who wasn't in most of my classes, so I often felt isolated and lonely. And at home, my parents had started screaming about getting a divorce in the living room when my sisters and I were upstairs trying to sleep. I had thought about suicide before the drive to the CSU library, but had never said it out loud.
The parent chaperone told my parents, who got me into counseling. I was diagnosed, mistakenly, with depression. I was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Looking back on it, I feel like my problem wasn't that I hated myself, it was that when I didn't know how to say what I was feeling, I felt powerless and worthless. I needed help to find the right words.
The third story would be depicted as a montage in a movie, or I like to think it would be.
I met my best friends, Nathan Liston and Ian Barry, in ninth and tenth grade respectively. Nathan was patient enough to let me come up with the words I needed to come up with in conversation, and Ian could match my ability to speak about abstract concepts and big-picture problem-solving.
When I was twenty-two, I got my first actual job as a writer. CSU's Rocky Mountain Collegian has a joke of a pay scale, but my job as an Opinion Columnist was the first time I was paid to write in my life. My editor told me that one of my articles, which was about what it's like to have bipolar disorder, was by far the most-read article on the paper's website all semester, an uncommon occurrence for opinion articles.
When I was twenty-four, I met the woman who is now my wife, Aarica. She is the best listener the world has ever seen (she has to be, she's a teacher), and she's helped me learn to express feelings I didn't even know could be put into words. With her support, I got off my medication at twenty-five. It was the first time in fourteen years I wasn't taking pills for a mental disorder.
So my fourth story is the culmination of it all: I constantly see examples of people wanting me to write for them or help them find the words they need. My manager at my day job, Radial, sponsors my blog. One of our clients pays me to copyedit his marketing materials. And my coworkers come to me for help when they're having a hard time explaining something in an email.
Being able to tell your own story, to say how you feel or describe an event, is so, so important. People who can explain their stress, their fears, their anxieties, these people can vent their emotions and face the day with a level head and firm foundation. For me, words are my craft and my passion, so they matter all the more. I hope you'll continue to help me find the right words as a public speaker here at Toastmasters going forward. Thank you very much.
Post number 62.