• last year
Claire Wineland Dies at 21 and Leaves Beautiful Message

Cystic fibrosis activist reveals the most important lesson she learned while living her life in a hospital room. Her powerful speech urges you to transform the way you think to live the life you never thought you deserved.

Category

😹
Fun
Transcript
00:00 When you pity people who are sick, you take away their power.
00:04 That I am sick, I will probably always be sick,
00:09 and yet I am 100% content and happy with my life.
00:15 100%.
00:16 (Applause)
00:18 And I have something called cystic fibrosis,
00:21 but I'm actually not here to depress you all about cystic fibrosis.
00:26 I'm actually here to talk about how do we change the way that we treat sick people.
00:31 How do we stop pitying them and we start empowering them.
00:35 The way that our society works, we teach sick people that when they are sick,
00:40 somehow, someway, they cannot be as happy as normal healthy people, right?
00:47 We teach them that their happiness, their contentment in life,
00:52 their joy in life is tied to how healthy we are.
00:56 I remember I was around seven or eight years old,
01:00 and I was flipping through this magazine,
01:03 and there's this really beautiful picture of this artist
01:06 in their New York loft apartment.
01:08 I'm sitting there, and I look around my hospital room,
01:10 and I'm like, "I wish I was there."
01:12 And I had a moment where I was like, "But I'm stuck in the hospital."
01:16 And I thought, "Well, you know, there's a Target right down the street
01:21 that has some twinkle lights and some throw pillows,
01:24 and I have a room. I have furniture.
01:28 Why don't I make something out of this room?
01:30 Why don't I deck it out?"
01:32 So me and my nanny decided to completely redo the hospital room.
01:36 And I don't mean like just put some pictures on the wall.
01:38 I mean like completely redo the room.
01:41 We were like moving around the furniture.
01:42 I was like sweating. My machines were beeping.
01:45 The nurses were coming in like, "What are you doing? You're crazy."
01:49 And by the end, we had completely transformed the room.
01:54 And nurses and doctors from all over the hospital came in to see it.
01:58 And so every time I ended up going into the hospital,
02:00 I would deck out my hospital room.
02:02 I started to realize that people who are sick,
02:06 and nurses and doctors as well,
02:07 everyone in the medical community, everyone in the healthcare community,
02:11 get so stuck in this notion that a hospital room
02:16 is this cold, sterile, white place where we go to be sick.
02:21 And that that's all that it can be.
02:23 And we get so stuck in that that we cannot see the possibility.
02:28 We can't see what we can make out of it.
02:31 We don't see what we can do with it.
02:33 I started realizing that our lives in a way are like this, right?
02:38 Our lives are like empty hospital rooms.
02:42 We get so stuck in the idea that, "Oh, it's supposed to be good or bad."
02:46 That, "Oh, if we're sick, well, you know, then it's cold and it's sterile."
02:51 And we just have to live with it like that.
02:53 We don't let ourself realize, we don't let ourselves see
02:58 we can make that hospital room beautiful.
03:02 We can make our lives into a piece of art.
03:06 We all have that ability.
03:08 We all have that capability as human beings
03:12 to turn these empty hospital rooms,
03:13 to turn these lives into something really beautiful.
03:16 We look at people who are sick and we pity them
03:21 because we believe that their sickness means their life has to be
03:24 inherently less joyous than everyone else's.
03:27 Yes!
03:29 Life is not going to stop unfolding itself to you just because you're sick
03:37 or just because your life isn't how you think it's supposed to be.
03:42 There's still going to be beauty.
03:44 I can honestly say a majority of the happiest moments in my life
03:50 have been when I'm sick in the hospital.
03:52 Honestly, and think about the implications of that
03:57 because I have lived the kind of life
03:59 that all of you spend your entire lives running from.
04:02 I've been sick and dying my entire life
04:05 and yet I am so proud of my life.
04:08 What does that say?
04:11 No, really, what does that say about the way we're all living our lives?
04:14 We're waiting to be healthy.
04:16 We're waiting to be wealthy.
04:18 We're waiting to find our passion.
04:19 We're waiting to find our true love before we actually start living
04:23 instead of looking at everything that we have,
04:25 looking at all the pain, looking at all the sadness,
04:28 looking at all the beauty and making something with that.
04:31 That's how innovation happens.
04:34 Innovation doesn't happen because there's some person
04:36 who's in a great circumstance and everything's going well
04:39 and they just get on a roll and they make something for the world.
04:43 Innovation happens, art happens because of suffering.
04:46 And when we clamp down to that suffering,
04:50 when we teach people who are sick,
04:52 when you teach a little seven-year-old me
04:54 that because I'm sick, I don't have anything to give to the world,
04:57 I don't have anything to create.
04:59 So I want to encourage you all,
05:02 next time you meet someone who's suffering and who's in pain,
05:07 instead of shutting down, instead of pitying them,
05:09 why don't you think, "I bet their life is so beautiful."
05:15 Really look at them and think, "I bet their life is so complex and beautiful."
05:21 We all get to be a part of this giant human epic story, right?
05:26 We get to be a part of human history.
05:29 We get to add to it.
05:31 We have something to give.
05:32 And we realize it's what we're creating that matters.
05:36 It's what we're adding to this beautiful story that matters.
05:41 When we start looking at that, we can change the world.
05:45 [Music]
05:47 [Music]
05:49 [Music]
05:51 [Music]
05:53 [Music]
05:55 (gentle music)
05:58 (gentle music)
06:00 (gentle music)
06:03 (gentle music)
06:05 (gentle music)
06:08 (gentle music)
06:11 (gentle music)
06:13 (gentle music)
06:16 (gentle music)
06:19 (gentle music)
06:21 [Music]