What Teenagers Want You to Know | Roy Petitfils | TEDxVermilionStreet

The guy you see in front of you is wearing a big shirt with a 34-inch waist, but I wasn't always like that. When I was 16, my mother took me to a local grocery store under the auspices of shopping and she takes me to the back. from the store where we see a burly six foot four butcher who has a big red beard and is wearing a white coat stained with blood, he was clearly waiting for us and waves us back with a bloody butcher knife and a look at my mom, not for the last time and I said mom,

what

are we doing here and she said, you'll see baby, so we followed the butcher back to this deep refrigerator and as we walk through this deep, humid refrigerator, the The smell of beef blood fills the air and I look? to my left and I see these cows that have been slaughtered and are cut in half cut in half hanging from these chains next to these little pigs hanging from chains that are being prepared for a cage in Boucherie and a milk cochon and the butcher He walks forward and stands next to this big black metal platform with a pole sticking out of it in a big circle at the top and starts explaining to Roy angrily, this here is a meat scale from Toledo, he said that we use this to weigh all these farm animals.

I see hanging from those chains and I look at my mom mom,

what

the hell are we doing here? and she said baby, your doctor called me today and said we have to get an exact weight for you and I said, why not? Go to the doctor's office, which is what we've done since I was born, she said, baby, you haven't been able to weigh in on the doctor's scale in years, it only goes up to 350 pounds, so she's 16. I'm on my feet. in this cool, humid air trying to wrap my head around the fact that I weigh 350 pounds that I weigh over 350 pounds but I'm thinking 351 Oh point seven at most and the butcher's impatience like, come on, Roy, come up here so we can I get an accurate weight and, like anyone who's been weighed, I think why is that going to make a big difference at this point and I step onto this cold, black steel platform and feel the cold deep inside. off my feet as I watched this long red needle spin up to 454 and I hear the gasp in my mother's voice and I look down and I see the shame and sadness and shame run down her cheeks and I look at this poor butcher who is having possibly the most awkward moment of her entire life, whose life and my mom looks at me and she tells me with her broken voice, we have to do something with this baby.

I said, "I

know

, Mom, we do, but we didn't see like 34." % of young people in America today I was born in a single parent home like 20% of young people in America today I was born in poverty my mom didn't

want

that for me for the rest of my life and she certainly didn't

want

that She wanted it for her grandchildren and for her, for me to escape poverty, it meant I needed a private education that required her to work up to four jobs at a time, sometimes leaving me alone after age 12 and a dilapidated cockroach. rat infested apartment in Genera Louisiana, where many nights she cried myself to sleep waiting for my mother to come home, but

know

ing that she is working so that I can be better and have a better life.

When I was a young teenager, I noticed that I started to have all these bad feelings inside of me and at the time I didn't know what they were, but I knew one thing: boudin and cracklin made them go away and in South Louisiana, especially in the Cajun country, we have no shortage of good cheap food, so I started numbing the pain with food and as any addict will tell you, it just took more and more of what wasn't working for the pain to go away and I became more and bigger and I attended a private center. school with a group of fairly rich people and from my point of view thin and pretty people, you can imagine that they bullied me, in fact they bullied me mercilessly from high school until my second year of high school, it seems that a lot of people who gained weight I didn't gain weight here in my stomach, I gained it in the upper part of my back, so one day I go to school and in a particularly vicious moment my classmates put on their gym and education uniforms physics on the back shirt. of one of my classmates' shirt and they had the sign taped to their back that said Roy and one of them walks up to me while watching this scene and puts his hand under the roll of fat on my upper back and he says? can you even feel that big boy?

I can't even feel the ribs on your back and the truth is I couldn't physically feel it but I felt it and I went home that day and it wasn't the last time I prayed for it. I wouldn't wake up the next morning and have to suffer that torture ever again, but I paid constant negative attention until 10th grade; while in my third year I was not the object of any attention, I walked through the halls of my school and no one picked on me and for a while I loved it, it was great. I went to school when people weren't bullying me mercilessly and I was like, yeah, this is cool, but it didn't take me long to realize that not only if they didn't bother me, they didn't even notice me, they ignored me and I remember that at At 17 I thought I'd rather be picked on and I learned a powerful lesson at 17 that has guided my life and the work I do.

Today I do that, unlike many and popular psychology, which says that rejection is not our greatest fear, our greatest fear is being invisible, but I graduated and went to college and all these people started approaching me and They were smiling at me and asking me questions about myself. I remember it vividly. It was a white Catholic priest over a black deacon. A Puerto Rican office manager. A group of people my age a little older and a Polish American transplant from Chicago who saw me. I remember today. I would describe it. It was like a psychic shock.

I had no idea what it felt like to be looked at. These people didn't seem to realize I was 500 pounds, or they just didn't seem to care, but they included me, they saw me, they accepted me. they invited me to go out places with them and from the day I walked into that Catholic Student Center about three years later, thanks to these people, most of whom include my best friends to this day and my best friend , my wife, lose almost 300 pounds without surgery but it would be a mistake, it would be unfortunate if you left here today thinking that I came to talk to you about how overcoming the challenges of poverty and obesity is serious and just as important as those challenges They are the challenge that I overcame was not being poor and it was not being obese the challenge that I overcame I overcame it with the help of people who saw me who helped me realize that I was not invisible today I am here to talk to you about how to overcome the challenges of invisibility adolescents in our country today cry desperately to be seen for the last 20 years it has been my mission to work with young people especially adolescents and give them the gift that those people gave me when I was in college and it was the gift of being seen and In my work with young people I have realized that what they want more than anything else is to be seen in the context of a meaningful relationship with adults, but this surprises many adults I talk to, they are like why if Teenagers want us to see them so much, so why do they act the way they do?

Why don't they just go out and ask for it? That's a good question in the words of dr. Bob McCarty's

teenagers

are rich in experience but poor in languages. The right

teenagers

in Bob a party are very experienced and have poor language, but they want us to see them in the context of a meaningful relationship. Once when he was leading a small group of teenagers, this 17-year-old girl who was a third-year high school student spoke up. Upstairs said Mr. pedophile, which is what teenagers often called me because they couldn't pronounce my last name, which is a little unfortunate when you do what I do for a living, she said: I know you don't have children, but if you did, would you and your my wife flies to Paris for two weeks and leaves your seventeen year old daughter alone at home with her unlimited black American Express card the keys to her Land Rover in the mansion completely alone now fortunately I had the means then to understand that this girl my parents were rich enough to be able to afford to have several lawyers hired and I didn't answer that question and the budding counselor said well what do you think? and she said you know I know I love my things don't get me wrong and she took out the black card and she kissed it and she said I love you and she said now I will kill you if you tell this to my parents but I love them more and more than anyone. of these things.

I just want a relationship with them and I know it. I avoid them but they also avoid me and I don't know how not to avoid them but I don't want them to avoid me and I look around the circle and I see eight heads nodding in unison agreeing with this girl in the last twenty years I have heard the feelings of this 17 year old girl expressed in thousands of different ways countless times by teenagers who want to be in our presence despite their verbal and non-verbal actions to the contrary, in addition to wanting to be in our presence, I also want the best gift we can give them, which is the gift of our attention to pay attention to them.

An 18-year-old who was about to be suspended from a local high school was once brought to my office. because he refused to get up after weekly school assemblies and sing the school's alma mater, he was a senior in high school and he sat in the front row and the administration and others didn't like it because when everyone else They did that, he didn't stand up, his parents were also worried because he was starting to show signs of depression and they were only worried about him, they had taken him to see two other counselors and they finally decided right.

I guess we'll try the big pedophile. and to say this kid didn't want to be in my office would be an understatement of the decade when he walked in with his brow furrowed, his hat not looking at me, he plopped down on my couch and said, can we? I just finished this and he had this accident, it was like it was a mix of the Bronx, Sicily in New Orleans and I said where are you from and he said Chalmette, which is a city near New Orleans that was devastated by flooding after the hurricane . Katrina and I said what brought you here to Lafayette, to Cajun country, and he said, Katrina and I said, tell me and he's serious, but my parents pay you good money to come here and talk to you about current events. all day.

Come on, you know, tell me, tell me what Katrina was like for you and he said my mom called me in the morning and she was screaming on the phone, Eric, make sure that whatever you want to keep for the rest of your life, go put it on. in a duffel bag and we'll be there to pick you up and your brothers and sisters in the van, but only in a duffel bag because we don't have enough room for you to bring all your trash and he said, so you know. we went to Baton Rouge and now we're settled here and all my friends are back in New Orleans and they're graduating from school this year and I'm not because my parents love this god forsaken city of Lafayette Louisiana and I looked at him and he He says, we're done and he said yeah, I almost just have one question, what was in your bag, he said, what, what was in your bag, Eric, he said what bag, the bag, the duffel bag that you packed and put in the truck. , said.

I don't feel like talking about this harvest, can we? We can go see. I know it's only half the possession. I'll tell my parents we went full time. You can collect your money. I said what was in your bag. Eric and his eyes glazed over. He came up and said my dad's soccer jersey. What school did your dad go to? He said: Holy Cross High School in New Orleans. What else was in your bag? My grandfather's high school diploma. What school did your grandfather go to? Eric Holy Cross High School in New Orleans. What else was in your bag and the tears running down his cheeks?

My uncle's on my dad's side and on my mom's side his senior ring and a state football championship. What school did they go to? Holy Cross High School in New Orleans. I said: let me see. If I understand you correctly, you are about to be the first man and four generations of men in your family to break this unbroken legacy of men graduating from Holy Cross High School and he is crying at this point and choked up. He raised his voice and said yes, and these bastards expect me to get up and sing my love for their tradition.

I left tradition at this school when I was barely twenty-five years old. They don't know anything about tradition. I'm sure something stands up and sings. and I told him: I don't blame you and we continued visiting him and he calmed down and we visited him for a few more weeks and I remember that his parents called me one day and told me you know what he doesn't complain about coming back. and it's getting better, Roy said, thank you for seeing our son, you know you don't have to be a psychotherapist to be able to treat teenagers, you don't need to go to graduate school and you don't need a duffel bag of tricks, but you need the will to You can see teenagers and they are desperate to be seen when you leave here today.

I have already prepared you, you will see teenagers everywhere,maybe even in a Jefferson Street pub illegally. and you will have the opportunity to see them or look away you will have the opportunity to smile at them which I would not have given as a teenager for an adult to smile at me lovingly you could approach them and you could ask them their name about the teenagers they are closest to you in your life, you could text them, send them a Snapchat, you can take them out for coffee, you can just talk to them, it doesn't take much, but they're desperate. to be seen, there is not one of us here who can go out and see every teenager and give them that powerful gift of attention, but each and every one of themeach one of us can go out here and see a teenager and in doing so, remove this cloak of invisibility from his life and give him the gift of our attention and the gift of being seen.

I know it will make a difference and I know it made a difference in my life on behalf of all the invisible teenagers in America today and on my behalf, thank you.