John Carver Show - Lessons from a Mental Hospital (Glennon Doyle Melton)

I was introduced to TED TALKS (http://www.ted.com/) by a life long friend many years ago and I have been hooked since that day.  Glennon Doyle Melton shares her painful journey with addiction and pretending to be what she was supposed to be for others in her life.  She says, "we make our own little world and that is called, for some, addiction."

Here is some more of what she said:

"Acting — pretending was a matter of survival. High school is kind of like the real-world sometimes. But in the mental hospital, there was no pretending. The zig was up. We had classes about how to express how we really felt through music and art and writing. We had classes about how to be a good listener and how to be brave enough to tell our own story, while being kind enough not to tell anybody else’s. We held each other’s hands sometimes just because we felt like we needed to.

Nobody was ever allowed to be left out. Everybody was worthy. That was the rule just because she existed and so in there, we were brave enough to take off our capes. All I ever needed to now I learned in the mental hospital.

And so I’ve learned that if I honor my feelings as my own personal profits and instead of running I just be still but there are prizes to be won and those prizes are peace and dignity and friendship.

So I received an email last week and let’s now take to my computer at home.

And it just said, “Dear Glennonm, it’s braver to be Clark Kent than it is to be Superman. Carry on Warrior”.

And so today I would say to you that we don’t anymore superheroes. We just need awkward, oily, honest human beings out in the bright, big, messy world. And I will see you there."

You can watch her speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynxlhuYF0g

She understood that even in her situation she was still special.