“In Palestinian culture, people live for each other. There is no negative competition between you and your neighbor, you live off each other. You won’t survive without the one next to you, and this is why we don’t have poor people in Palestine. There is no poverty whatsoever. When I say poverty, I mean lack of food or housing. There is no such thing, we don’t have homeless people. There isn’t one in the entire country. That’s because although our situation is so much worse than most countries, we don’t have this desire for luxury the way some others do. That was another big shock for me when I came to the U.S., when I realized what interested people. It’s so different to me. Working just to make money, it’s not what people do back home. People don’t even have bank accounts. You keep your money in your room, and no one steals it because you share with everyone. If I don’t like a specific meal that my mom cooked one day, which is very rare, I can go knock on another door in the camp, can I have a plate of that? And people say of course you can. And I’d eat with them because I know them, I know everyone there. We live as one body. Because otherwise we could not survive, we have to live this way and help each other.

You always feel like you’re special, different. Once you step outside of the camp you feel like you’re different than people who don’t live in a refugee camp. At first I wondered if it was my personality, but at some point I realized that politically I was completely subjective, I was the core of a sixty-eight year conflict. You start feeling that people look at you differently when you’re with your friends outside of the camp. All Palestinians suffer, but the camp is the target of the occupation. What you go through on a daily basis shapes your life completely differently than someone who lives just two meters away, outside the camp. It’s sad, but that’s what it’s like. So I don’t really remember when I first realized how things were, I think it was through soccer actually. We had a soccer team for the camp, and we won this big tournament, but throughout the tournament we were looked at differently. The conversations we had with each other were different from other people, and I began to question why. We bond much better, we respect other people way more than others do. We’re very competitive, but at the same time we have this respect for the Other, and I’m saying “the Other” because I have to say it, because their experience is not similar to ours whether I want it to be or not.

I really like the saying: “If we don’t become one, we will die one by one.” That’s something that I always keep in mind. I never thought about it back home, because we are one. When people try to divide us, that’s when we become weaker. We have to feel each other, we have to. Regardless of the distance or our backgrounds or where we come from. Regardless of what we think is right or wrong, we have to connect to others. That’s what I think is really important.”

“It’s a challenge to accept yourself, because no one can do it for you. You can’t really go to anyone for advice, you have to deal with it by yourself. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one, but I know everyone goes through it. I think we feel alone but we’re really not. At the same time, you can have a lot of similarities with another person but at the end of the day, your life and your experiences are unique. So the things you learn are unique to you, and you have to decipher those experiences for yourself. You have to figure out what they mean to you and how you want them to shape you. I think life is tricky in that way. It’s such an interesting paradox; we’re all together in the sense that we all feel alone. That’s why I think friends are so important, to have people to share and decipher those experiences with.

The way you put words together and the way you say them can either make people feel negative or empowered. I’ve always found the strength of words to be very unacknowledged. People don’t think about the power of the words that they use enough, and how they can affect others. It’s one of the biggest ways we communicate, not just through words themselves but also through tone. I’ve always found that to be extremely fascinating. You can use words to help people or hurt people. I’ve always been careful with my choice of words and how to be positive.”

“Art is going to make a difference in your life. It’ll save you emotionally, and it may save you physically. I know that because I almost died and I was in a wheelchair and I just sketched and sketched and sketched. If I wasn’t in the car accident, I never would have went to Emmanuel, I never would have become an art teacher. It was my path, and it looked really bad, but I held on. Because there’s a reason. I say that now, because of the situation I’m in right now. When Jack was first diagnosed with dementia, all I thought about was the fact that we weren’t going to retire together and travel. And then I realized, so what? Gotta make lemonade, honey. It’s been a longer process than I thought it would be, but I did it before and I can do it again. That’s what I think about life, and I think I am so incredibly lucky. My mother said we were piss-poor growing up, but I didn’t even realize it. Just because we were fighting over the one pork chop? Once my brother stabbed me with a fork because he wanted the pork chop, and that wasn’t the special needs brother! My mother made giant pans of chicken soup. She put the whole chicken in the pan, and she’d cook it for hours and get all the flavor from the chicken. There wasn’t a lot of chicken in there, but it was yummy, I didn’t know that was a poor person’s chicken soup, I just knew it tasted good. I think life is funny, life is funny. There’s a reason for everything that happens."

“I’m going to take education courses so I can teach theater to children. I feel that theater helps children, especially children of color, build self-esteem and it really brings out their confidence. When I was in elementary school, it helped shape my thoughts and my future and I know it’s a good confidence-builder for kids. So teaching theater to children is how I plan to use my degree. I am a contemporary Muslim in the Lost Foundation of Islam. Islam just means “truth,” that’s it. There’s so many lies we’re told from an early age. One of the first things children are taught in school is that Christopher Columbus discovered America—but there were already people here, there were established cultures that already existed. I don’t think I had many challenges growing up. I was always taught by my mother that I could do anything. I knew I could always go to college. I guess the only challenge was not being born rich, but still I don’t think I had a hard time. I’ve always had an incredible family, and that’s all you need. You can have all the money in the world but have all kinds of problems.”

“Every human and animal and plant deserves to have the life and respect that it needs. Every day I say the same thing. I have to keep remembering these truths because society wants us to forget. They want to distract us, keep us unhappy, keep us working to live and to buy things to make us happier. We all suffer from neglect in some way or another, because that’s what keeps this system running. In order to be a part of the game, you have to forget about certain things that humans need. Compassion, understanding, appreciation, equality. You get caught up, anxious, you have to keep busy. We’re taught to neglect love and loved ones and the people who truly make life worth living. Mentors, leaders, family, cast them aside to chase fame and “individuality” at any cost. Neglect began when we started attaching value to things. Instead of just appreciating everything, we started putting different costs and labels on them. Classifying things as better and worse. Classifying people as better and worse. All humans need to be given attention and appreciation and love because we are all valuable.”

“I’m a gay illegal left-handed human being where I don’t belong. I’m like the opposite of everything. I have a puppy. Most of the time I’m either working or taking care of my puppy.

There’s a certified master chef where I work. Because he has authority or whatever, he thinks he has the right to step on people. I’m not a cook, I’m below the cooks, but I think the dishwasher is the most important job in the kitchen. If there were no dishwashers, there would be no dishes! Being an immigrant in this country is really degrading, so degrading. I really can’t do anything. The only job you can take is dishwashing, or doing the dirty work. You can’t rise above that level. They say anything is possible, but the American Dream is so limited. You can achieve it, but only if you look a certain way and have a certain paper. If you don’t, you’re fucked.

In the beginning, my siblings weren’t okay with it at all. My brother said he wasn’t going to talk to me ever again, and that I would go to hell, all the usual shit. But now they want me to be gay. They know that if I was straight, I just wouldn’t be me. They think I’m awesome being gay.”

“It came like an epiphany, an instant thing. I don’t know when or where I was. I was at my lowest, and then I just jumped out the fucking hole. I guess sometimes, like they say, a person can’t really stand on their own two feet until they know how to fall. I feel like I’m in a better place now, but I want to try and go back to college. I don’t know what I want to do anymore, because I want a career, I want to be set in life, but I can’t be happy if that takes me away from my daughter. I’ll work as a clerk at Stop & Shop my whole life to make sure she’s fine, and then hopefully she won’t have to live like how I’m living. I’ve gotta make her better than I am. I just love her. People will always ask, what’s it like, being a mom? I don’t even feel like a mom. She’s just my soul mate. That is me, walking outside of my body. I don’t know how else to explain it. I’m not the perfect mom, but I just don’t want her to get her heart broken. I hope that she is stronger than I was and doesn’t believe anybody. I want her to be one of those girls that are so focused on school, sports and hobbies that she doesn’t have time for people trying to take advantage of her.”

"When I came to Canada, I was thirteen. Growing up in Haiti…let’s just say that it’s a part of my life that I could never and would never change. I think it’s great to learn about what poor countries are really like, because the media doesn’t accurately portray how people live there. It’s important to witness and experience how people in these countries live. I consider myself a blessed girl, because I always saw people who could not go to school, could not even eat, and I could do those things. In Haiti, I learned to never take anything for granted. I write songs and poems, and I perform them both. I love art, and everything I do I try to put passion into it. It’s important for me to put my heart into everything. Everybody can write, you know? I think that putting your heart fully into whatever it is you do is the best thing you can do for yourself. When I was introduced to slam poetry, I decided to write, really write about what I saw around me and noticed about the world I live in. I write about problems in society, poor countries, residential segregation, things that people might see but don’t really notice or think about. A lot of problems are seen as the natural order of things, but they’re not natural. When I write slam poetry, I don’t really write about anything specifically. I just think of how people around the world in different situations feel. I put myself in their skin and write, imagining what their story is and what they feel. When I write, I try to think beyond myself and use writing as a way to understand other people from different backgrounds and experiences. It helps me see the bigger picture.”

"I like acting, I like being in control. I want to be the President. Since I was little, I’ve wanted to be an actress and the President. Those are the two things I’ve always wanted to do. As an actress, I want to be able to take on a lot of different roles. I want to be a lot of things when I grow up—an FBI agent, a veterinarian, everything. If I become an actress it will allow me to achieve the other things I’ve always wanted to be too.

My dad and I are closer, my mom and I have had a tough relationship. I used to not tell her about anything. I’m gay, and my dad knows. My mom doesn’t. My dad is kinda accepting…I think he feels that it’s just a phase that I’m going through. Which it’s not. My mom comes from a very Christian background, and she’s a lot less accepting. I knew in the fifth grade. I’ve always kind of known. We’re getting to that point, and she is awesome and cool, but it’s still hard. It’s difficult to explain. Her childhood, she doesn’t want that for me. So she’s trying so hard, but in trying so hard it’s becoming that. She didn’t have a good relationship with her mom, so she wants us to have the perfect relationship. My uncle is my dad’s brother, so when all that stuff happened she hated my dad. I love my dad, I always will, and she always talks bad about him. It’s uncomfortable for me. I mean, sometimes I agree with her. My dad has two other kids from two different moms and they’re both crazy. I wish she’d talk to my dad about problems though, I don’t want to be the middle person."

“I’m in seventh grade. When I graduate I want to go to a charter school. I want to go back to Nepal after I finish my education. I will take my family back. My mom doesn’t have a job here, only my father works. He works in a laundromat. He works long hours. He leaves at 1pm and comes back at 1am or 2am. He was driving a truck in India when we were in the refugee camp. He couldn’t live with us because he had to find a job and make money, but my mom lived in the camp with us. The Nepalese refugees in the camps couldn’t work, the Nepalese government prohibits them.

When I grow up I want to be a doctor because I care about other people and I want to help other people. I miss my friends in Nepal. We played outside, we went to the river to swim. The river was very cold. I only hang out with my friends in school here, we don’t play outside of school. We have ten minutes for recess.”

"Respect is the most important thing to me. Even if I don’t know someone, I will respect them as a human being. I’ve in a lot of situations when I wasn’t treated with respect. When I was young, I think people often made negative assumptions about me. Now, maybe it’s because I’m in a different country, it doesn’t really happen anymore. When I was young in Paris, I was followed in supermarkets by the security guard and I didn’t know why. I was just getting milk for my mom. When I come back to Paris to see my family, I notice that people look at me differently now compared to when I was younger. Style is very important. People judge you and treat you differently depending on how you dress. I like to wear Jordans and a snapback and joggers sometimes, and it doesn’t mean that my interior has changed. I’m still the same, but people treat me differently when I wear clothes like that.

When I’m sad, I always think about others and I think about religion, because I’m Muslim. I pray five times a day, I wake up at six every morning to pray. The beauty of this religion is that everyone practices it the way they want. A lot of people have assumptions about Muslims, and a lot of people are shocked when they find out I’m Muslim. Like it doesn’t fit who I am. In every religion there are extremists, they don’t represent how most people practice that religion. A lot of Muslims don’t want to say they’re Muslim because they’re worried that people will misunderstand and judge them. Helping people really helps me feel better when I’m sad, and I try to remember that when I’m sad, someone else is also sad and worse off than me. I try to remember what I’ve done in my life so far, and tell myself, you’ve done this, this and this and that’s not bad. So keep going.”

“My daughter had moved down to North Carolina with her boyfriend, and I hadn’t seen her for seven months so my other daughters and I drove down to visit her for Thanksgiving. We got there early Thursday morning and had a nice Thanksgiving Day. We went to the movies to see that movie with Denzel Washington that had just come out, Non-Stop or something like that. We saw that and had a happy time. We were so happy. That Saturday, we planned to drive to South Carolina to go to Myrtle Beach and some outlet stores. And my daughter says I can’t go, I have to pick up Keith from work. But we only live twenty minutes away, so I’ll stay home and pick him up and then we’ll meet you there. So I said okay, and we all got in the car to leave. She came to the car and hugged us and said I love you Mom, she told her two sisters that she loved them, and that was the last thing we ever heard from her. As she was going to pick up her boyfriend from work, they said she was speeding around a curb, and her car went out of control. She went across the highway into a cornfield and her car hit a gas line. Her seatbelt was broken so she didn’t even have a seatbelt on. She was ejected out of the car and broke her neck, she died instantly. But it was a blessing in a sense because they told me if she had stayed in that car, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize her. All twisted and bent. That’s the thing that helped me through it. It was a blessing that we got to spend that time with her before she died. We’ve all got a time to go. So that’s it, now I’m traveling around and going where I want to go. I value my salvation with God and my children and my grandchildren most. And I value happiness. I like to be happy. I like to talk to all types of people, all races. God loves everybody.”

"I’m not a hippie I’m a freak, an artist freak. I’ve always kind of felt like someone on the perimeter of things, in a willing way. Observing everything, watching things from afar, and I’ve always operated from that standpoint. Drawing has been a way for me to observe like this. What gets me out of bed in the morning? Projects, I think life should be full of projects. And people, interesting people. I like enjoying the life that I’ve built for myself, for Sue and I, and all the interesting people we’ve met. I was brought up a Roman Catholic, we went to church every Sunday and I was an altar boy for years. But as I’ve got older, and watched the news—there was always news on at the house—I started to see that reality wasn’t matching up with the idea that there’s some kind of benevolent, loving god who is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-loving. I don’t see evidence of that. So in other words, I’ve become quite atheist. I actually belong to the American Atheists, you know, card-carrying, we would have state-wide meetings at our house in Warwick. We’re less intense about it now, but for a while there we were in that stage. In the news, it often seems that religion polarizes people and they end up killing each other. Historically, it’s been horrible. The anti-Semitism, all that crap, it’s all over the place. I’m a proud atheist, I believe that this is the life, and then bye you’re gone. That’s fine. I like scientific pursuit, medicine, and I love astronomy. We’re given this chance at being conscious entities on a planet in the middle of nowhere, we’re able to check our situation out in the universe, and it’s just amazing to think about. So I try to maintain a certain presence of mind, about how special life is. Why is there anything? Why are we here? It’s beyond human knowledge how this came about. I mainly just try to keep my life interesting and pursue music and art. I try to be nice to people. This is the only life we have, after all, so it’s important to be kind."

“Now that I’m older, I think about the extent to how much my voice matters. I don’t want to be arrested. I’m not interested in marching the streets and being tear-gassed. I honestly think the most revolutionary thing in the world would be for me to feel the freedom to be myself. Without having to think of all these things, to express myself, and do the kinds of things I see the straight white guys around me doing with impunity.

In terms of how messages and images impact people, I struggle with understanding the full extent of how I’ve been affected by them. And how others in society have been affected; how stereotypes ghoul their perceptions of other people, their perceptions of themselves. It’s scary how much social messages can affect our treatment of each other and ourselves.”

“I think I came to realize that the self you’re trying to create can be anything. Am I goth, am I emo, am I whatever label I wouldn’t even know because I’m old…who you choose to be is not who you ultimately spiritually and fundamentally are, it’s just what you’re being. So the real question is, what script are you reading from? And realize that no matter how long you read from that script, you always have the option at any given moment to put the script down and pick up a new one. So as far as the question you asked about defining myself, I think that fundamentally whatever the sentient being is that I am, I was at the moment of conception and I will be at the moment of my death. Who I present myself as, as a man walking around in the world, it’s really a combination of things. It’s how willing I am to submit to the path that I am fundamentally on, and/or what script I choose to read from in my daily existence. And that is compounded by the fact that I have a three-year-old son who was born with dwarfism, who is going to be a little man in a world full of men. It’s imperative for me to be a good dad and show my son how to be a real man, which means humility—which is hard. And it means that I don’t have the luxury of continuing to be an idiot for the rest of my life. I am in a position where I have to man up, which in my case doesn’t mean being super macho, it means the opposite. It means being willing to be wrong, being willing to be sensitive, and walking a respectable path.”

“I wear a hoodie every day. To remember Trayvon Martin”

"My dad just passed away recently, a year and a half ago. That’s a whole other thing that I’m still dealing with. Watching the most powerful man in my life become nothing was so heartbreaking for me. Even just talking about him right now is hard. I might as well just tell you the whole story. This tumor, it just deteriorated him in four months. Every day he got worse. Sorry to make it shitty, but that’s just the truth. Right now there’s a lot of shit going on with the money in the family, which I’m not interested in. I fucking hate it. This is such a weird thing for my mom to go through, because she actually left him a year before he got sick. After thirty-nine years of marriage. Out of nowhere. Then the tumor came ten months later, and none of us had a clue. So she’s in a really fucked up position right now, trying to deal with money and everything. I don’t even want to be involved. My sister is all about the money right now and I’m like, I don’t give a fuck, guys. I buy cheap toilet paper and two dollar beers, and I’m happier than all of those motherfuckers. My mom’s in France, on her fifth week right now. I’m lucky if I make it to Scarborough this year. So I’m the black sheep of the family, but I’m a happy black sheep. That’s all that matters.

My passion is music and food, the two things I’m really good at. The food is my favorite right now, because it pays the rent and the seasonal ingredients right now are so great. Rhubarb, fiddleheads, everything’s in season right now. It’s a selfish thing for me to do, I like pleasing people. Through music or food, watching someone enjoy something I did is the best. It makes me feel better about myself. I love to cook for people, it’s what makes me happiest.”

“I love literature because it makes me recognize parts of myself that I don’t know yet, that I’m not fully familiar with. I read about these times that happened before me in places I’ve never been but they resonate with me, I can relate to them. It makes me feel as though I’ve lived for a really long time. It’s incredible that these writers lived 200 years ago, all around the world, yet what they say is exactly what I’m feeling. That’s what literature does, it goes beyond time and space and brings you into the mind and soul of another human being. If you’re the kind of person who has always felt a little like an outsider, it’s such an amazing feeling. It affirms how you feel, it’s like you’re being understood by a person whose life couldn’t be more different than yours. Life is great but it’s so much better with love. I have all these great experiences now but no one to share them with. There’s pressure in society to not give a shit. But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t give a shit. Everybody wants to be loved, to have love.”

“I am Muslim, I have faith. After 9/11, Islam was suddenly viewed as a bad religion. People just don’t know what Islam really is. For me, what really matters is not following all the rules of the religion. I don’t believe women should wear certain things or that homosexuality is bad. People should be able to do what they want, people are just born the way they are! The rules I follow are don’t steal, don’t lie to people, don’t kill people, that sort of thing. I need faith. If I lose my parents, I need something to help me believe I will see them again someday. And I need something to remind me all the time that I can be as great as I want to be, but I will always be nothing compared to the entire universe. I believe there’s something greater. I believe that the big bang occurred, but I think something caused it, this is how I perceive things. For me, there’s no way all this came from nothing. I believe there’s something or someone, and it is far greater than me and what I know. When I do something really great that I’m proud of, I’m happy with myself but I acknowledge that other people and other factors helped me achieve it.”

“I have a younger sister. My parents had her later on, and she’s the baby, almost nine years younger than me. She has some disabilities. She was fine until she was sixteen, and then she got sick. When they say it takes a family to raise a disabled child, it’s true. I felt like I was a co-parent. We all kind of chipped in. I’m kind of her parent now, and I think that’s what stabilizes her, knowing that she has somebody. She has my brother and sister, but she talks to me every day and she has my days off all planned. I enjoy taking care of her actually. I don’t see it as a burden. I’m lucky to have her. It gives my life some meaning. My life was far from perfect. When I was younger, I did my fair share of partying, almost to the extreme. But I grew up eventually. I grounded myself, got focused again. Everything is hills and valleys. There are good times and bad times, but overall, life has always worked out for me. I had some very nice boyfriends and some real jerks. I was shy growing up, and I think waitressing brought out my personality. I think that’s what I liked about it most. I try to not take life so seriously. You can’t fix everything, only some things. Sometimes you learn to be grateful for the small things, like with my sister. When little things go well with her, to me, they’re big.”

“Over the summer, I made a list of my purpose in life which I think is still true. The first one is to feel fully, and to not shy away from it. The second part of that is to love deeply, to not shy away from that deep, wrenching, terrifying love. Let it happen, let myself be heartbroken if necessary, and just keep going, feeling, loving. Expecting pain but not running from it. Understanding that it has a very solid purpose, that’s my goal. The second part is to create something beautiful. I love to write, we’ll see if that happens. I do poetry right now, but I’ve written one short story that I think is going somewhere. I just like it as a practice, a hobby. I could see myself working for a small literary press, or starting one, or some sort of literary magazine. I’d like that. I could see myself being a practicing psychotherapist. But in either case, I want to be creating something beautiful.

There’s a Viktor Frankl quote that goes, What is to give light must endure burning, which is how I think about love and passion. And why pain is necessary, because it ultimately gives you a stronger source of emotion and vision. I also love everything Clarice Lispector writes.”

“In the beginning, it was the universe against myself. Today, I’m the only person I compete with.”

“It’s not the photographs themselves that I love. It’s the process of shooting them. Making observations makes me feel that I am…existing. You know? This has little to do with the reason I pursued a PhD degree. I didn’t grow up in a financially…my family was very poor. I thought that I should pursue a career that could financially afford me a stable life, but also give me the freedom and enough time to travel. I saw my professors back in college living a life so easy, so I thought maybe that was the way to live…but I also started to think about the meaning of life in general. What’s the point of making money, what’s the point of getting married?

One day, I came up with this conclusion about the meaning of life. We’re all going to die. So on the day you’re dying, inevitably you will think through all your memories. Popping up like a slideshow, like a movie. That’s the only thing you’ve got, in the end—this movie. Imagine you’re watching this movie. You don’t want it to be boring. You want it to be meaningful, inspiring. So you have to live a life that can inspire people. And from that moment on, I realized that you don’t have to accomplish something that society thinks is remarkable, that other people define as great. You can just start with the people around you, to observe how other people live, to understand their situations. Through other people, you can have more experiences—we all have different backgrounds. I like to get to know people from other places, other cultures, and imagine what their lives are like. One way to do that is by taking photos and making observations, and that’s a way to start trying to understand other people.”

“What’s most important to me? Oh wow, I’m gonna say it and it’s gonna sound cliché and fake, but I value being real with people. Just showing up and being genuine with people, that’s huge. So I say that, and I like this project, I support this kind of thing. That’s what it’s about. How do people redeploy things, who controls representation, what is it to represent someone, who has the power to represent someone? So trying to be as clear with people as possible is important. Knowing from my own lived experience how difficult it can be, especially when one of the loves of your life is someone who has Aspergers, and how much you have to work even when you think you’re being transparent. Nothing can be assumed.

I try to maintain the line between giving a fuck and not giving a fuck. I try to stick to certain core values, I’ve gotta treat people right, I’ve gotta treat people how I want to be treated. But then otherwise, I can’t control what you think of me. I can’t control your attitude towards me. So in that respect, I don’t give a fuck.”

“In 2003, because of the war, we went to Jordan for three months because we knew something big was going to happen. We watched it all live on T.V. Our home was across the river from the Green Zone, where the bombs were targeted, so it was too dangerous for us to live there. We were happy and sad at the same time that we moved to Jordan, because we escaped torture and war and the government, but we were sad because it was our country. When I went back, it was disgusting, messy and dirty. Even the mentality of the people had changed. I don’t care about money, if I have money or not. Knowledge is far more important and powerful. You never get bored of knowledge. People say that it’s hard to gain money, but I disagree. It’s hard to spend money. It’s hard to decide what to place monetary value on. We are spending money on things we don’t need for the rest of our lives. It’s hard to know where to spend it or how to spend it. Knowledge, you continue to gain, it takes you higher and higher. You make money to spend it, and then you have to make more. I believe in God. Knowledge is the most important thing given from God. We have to know things, not just pretend that we know. People pretend that they know everything, which is why they keep arguing and refuse to learn anything from each other or admit that they could learn something new.”

“As soon as I got to Montreal I just started doing street art, painting when I could. It was a lot easier to do here; there were less people and it was quieter. When I started was the perfect time, because it was before the street art community really blew up. It was very small, very tight-knit. I made sure I was everywhere, early on. Now it’s much more of a norm here, with the Mural Festival and things like that. There’s always a lot of art going on, and it’s cool to be an item in this huge community of artists interacting in public spaces. It’s cool to have people know who you are, and be a character, a cog in this thing. People are looking at your stuff even when you’re not realizing it, and they’re being affected by it. I think a lot of painters don’t have that same reach to so many people, to be able to affect—and be affected by—so many people. Some people don’t show their work to anybody. And nobody’s being affected by it, so I think it’s kind of useless. You should show stuff to people. Making people smile and laugh with my art, I like that. When people say I see your stuff every day and it makes me happy. This year, a kid came up to me at the Chromatics block party and asked me to draw in his book, told me that he loves my street art. Then he started tagging me in his posts when he makes a new painting. He’s making cool stuff and his parents are supportive, it’s great.

My actions and my art are both very important to how I define myself. I value hard work and respect for other people. Sometimes people disrespect my art because they think it’s kind of toyish and childish. I don’t really give a fuck. I work hard and I’m very focused. I get a lot of positive affirmation, but I still do notice the negativity. I notice it mostly from family. From both my parents.

I’ve learned that value is official. The value of things, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Art is fun, it’s creative, it has no real purpose to help us survive. It’s this weird human quality—we don’t technically need it, but we do.”

“My husband is very exciting and spontaneous, that’s what I like most about him. We always have fun doing absolutely nothing or everything at the same time. Whenever we find time for ourselves, when we both have a day off—which is rare—we’ll randomly just choose to do something. One time, we decided to go get tattoos together. It was eleven p.m. and they were only halfway done with my tattoo, hadn’t even started his yet. We wanted to finish our tattoos, but we only had half an hour to finish them and catch our train back home. We decided to stay and finish our tattoos. We roamed around the Bronx late at night, very dangerous, and we ended up staying at an hourly motel because the trains weren’t gonna start running until five the next morning. We stayed up all night taking shots, talking shit, recording the fucking hotel room from hell. We left around five a.m. and roamed around the Bronx again. We went to White Castle, he was drunk out of his mind at this point. He walks into White Castle, greets everybody in there, and he says oh I’ve never been to White Castle before! I’m gonna order everything off the menu! It was an experience, I must say. Life is hard. That’s what I think about life. I’ll say this. One thing I got from my mom is independence. I don’t have to rely on other people much, I don’t have to ask for things all the time. It’s better to be an independent person, instead of constantly relying on people for this and that. It’s good to at least try and do things by yourself. That’s gotten me through a lot of things. I mean, I have gotten a lot of help throughout my life, but there’s a lot I’ve done by myself, which feels good. It’s nice to accomplish something by yourself.”

“Eighteen years old, fresh out of high school, I was at the top of my physical form and I thought I was extremely healthy. No one expected me to get sick, my family and friends were all just so happy I was going to college. I was very excited to be at Brown—I bought a bike, I got into the Jabberwocks accapella group, I did all those things a new college student does. I was ready to start my life. I started having really bad back pain, and I had no idea why. I thought I had sprained my back or something. So after suffering through that for about four days, I finally ended up in the hospital. By that time I was screaming in pain, so they put me in the emergency room. After three days of blood tests and painkillers, the doctors told me that my blood levels were off, and that they thought I had leukemia. At this point I didn’t really hear what they said; I thought I had misheard them. All these things you take for granted start being stripped from you. Things like being able to taste, being able walk on your own, being able to stay awake throughout the day, being in a good mood, even being able to smile. I learned so much from my experience, all positive lessons. I know now that every single day is a gift. The size of the gift is influenced by what you make of your day, if that makes sense. You can wake up and think I have so much work to do today, it’ll be awful, I’m going to lay in bed as long as I can, or you can tell yourself that each day is a great opportunity to learn something. The past year helped me truly understand the situations of others and taught me how I can help them using the knowledge of my own experience.”

“Nothing is more important to me than being wrong. I figure, you’re wrong more times than you’re right. If you don’t listen to people who you disagree with, and try to get an understanding of every single way what you say and what you believe could be interpreted, your beliefs aren’t secure. You’re not secure enough in what you believe if you’re not willing to interrogate it. You never know what your views might change, and if they do that’s okay. I want to be an attorney. I want to work in criminal defense or for the rights of sex workers. I think it’s a women’s rights issue, and I think that if sex work was decriminalized, there would be less trafficking of young girls, and also lower STD rates. Women would be able to prosecute any kinds of abuse or disrespect they experienced. And from a fiscal standpoint, more taxpayers…it’s good for the economy! I really don’t think that making something illegal makes it go away. Now what we’ve got is this huge underground market of girls being exploited, and that shouldn’t be happening. If it was a legal business, there would be more oversight.”

“I don’t know where I want to go after college. Lately I’ve been having a lot of familial guilt. I’d want to stay around and help my parents, because they raised me and I didn’t turn out that bad. I consider myself very lucky in my upbringing. I had somewhere to stay, and never had to worry about losing my home. But as I’ve grown older, and I think everybody does this, you start to see the cracks in everything. I feel like I’m drifting apart from my family. I guess that’s just leaving the nest, but it’s kind of shitty. I love my family, but at the same time I want to get the hell out of there. I live at home and I commute to school. Mondays and Wednesdays I wake up at 5 a.m. Sometimes it’s hard to go home. It’s not a bad place; I feel safe and I’m not threatened, but it’s so stressful.

“I like baking because I can just get in the zone with it. I like the chaos, the chaos of the kitchen. With baking, you’re trying to organize the chaos while creating the chaos. I love baking bread. You put it together, you leave it alone and it does its own thing. It’s like making a little bread baby. You do what you can, and then you have to let it grow on its own and hope it’ll turn out okay.”

“I’m a small person, of small stature. I’m in my forties, believe it or not, and most people think I’m twenty-five years old. Even though I’m an adult, sometimes I get treated like a little girl and pushed out of the way when I have an opinion about something. Treated like I don’t matter. I do matter. I matter to a lot of people. I’m healthy, and I’m happy and grateful for that. I don’t have to be physically tall, God made me tall in other ways.

It was a lot, losing my dad and my sister. My dad died in ’91, and even though it’s been a long time I still…I wish he was here. I think a lot of things would be a little better if he were here. Sorry, when I try to talk about him I just get emotional, and it’s because my birthday is tomorrow and his birthday is on Monday. So even though I’m happy, with my family, celebrating in Canada, it’s upsetting that he’s not here to celebrate. He’s in my heart but I wish I could physically see him and celebrate with him.

Then I have eight nephews and four nieces. They’re always calling me mom, since I’ve always had them with me, I’m around them a lot. When they were infants and their mothers weren’t around they would always call me mommy, and I like to hear that word. I just like to be called Mom. My sisters always say I’m lucky that I don’t have to deal with everything that comes with having a child. But I want that.”

“Why do I like writing? It’s like, for people that don’t really know you, it’s a good way to live in a world you never thought of. Creating something that turns you on in a way. You wouldn’t write about something that you’re not interested in. Even if you write about something that disgusts you, it’s important to you somehow. Some people make movies, some people draw…writing is a good thing for me. Certain things, I just get obsessed with. At school and in life, I don’t think you should be doing anything that doesn’t excite you. Every day you should be excited. If you’re not, why are you doing it?

In the shelter, we had these chores we had to do. They would only charge us twenty dollars a month to live there, and it was clean and safe, but you had to contribute. I was old enough, so I was supposed to be doing the work. It was fifteen hours a week of chores. My mom would do it for me in addition to her own work so that I could focus on school. She would have to do her fifteen hours, she’d have to do my fifteen hours, and she also had to work at Food Lion. So she’d come back from her job and she had thirty hours a week of chores. She would lie and say I did them, but we both knew she did them for me so I could work on school. I had this huge pressure on me—more appreciation, really. I had to do well, I had to. It was good that I had that experience.”

“I feel fine about it now. This whole experience makes me think, both times were not that bad. You can’t really compare these things, but I know it could have been a lot more violent…and what scares me is that these two things affected me so much. I can’t imagine what it’s like when women go through this without support, when it’s violent, when they’re scared for their lives. Later, I want to work for an NGO that serves women who are victims of that kind of violence. I wish I could tell my mom, I really wish I could tell my mom. But she’s a lawyer, she would make me go to the police and I don’t want to do that. I’d like to make documentaries. Raising awareness is one thing, but later I’d like to do something that actively helps women. I know that I won’t be happy at a job that doesn’t make me feel as though I’m doing something. I can’t stand office jobs, making money for some huge corporation. I’d like to travel. I think I’d have to do a degree in social work. I’d like to give support to victims who don’t have it…in different countries, or to young girls.”

“I was born in China, but I came to New Zealand when I was two and a half. I grew up in Dunedin. My parents were married in China, and then my mom came to New Zealand first on a research grant. Then I came with my grandparents, and my dad came after that. They got divorced when I was four, I’m not sure exactly when. I saw them all the time so it was fine. I lived with my mom and my grandparents, my mom’s parents. My mom knew a lot of Asian families, so I had a lot of Asian friends when I was growing up. There’s some diversity in New Zealand but it’s pretty white. I never faced much racism though when I was growing up. I mean, a little bit. At one point we moved to a different area, and I went to a new primary school. I think I was there for a year, but I’ve kind of blocked it out, because that was one of the only times when I had a lot of trouble being Asian. I don’t know why, but the kids in that school made fun of my name and stuff and the teachers didn’t seem to care.

For my final year project in uni, I was looking at gender issues. It’s been a while since I’ve had to explain it, so I’m trying to think of how to describe the project to you. Basically it’s meant to be a primary school teaching aid. I made magnetic dress-up dolls and I based their clothes off of what the male and female characters always wear in fairy tales. They’re just so heteronormative, the prince always saves the princess, blah blah blah. I wanted to create something that could be used in the classroom to help kids create their own stories, dress their characters however they want, do whatever they want.

On the internet, on the street, sexism is there. For me, it’s not about a specific experience, it’s all the little things. Nothing major has happened to me, but even just hearing about things that happen to other people…and it’s so ingrained in our society, sometimes it feels hopeless. How do you get people to change the way they think? Even I realize that I’ve internalized a lot of problematic ideas. I’ll automatically think, men are like this and women are like this, without even realizing it. I’ll think oh, I’m being such a girl when I do certain things. I catch myself doing stuff like that, and at least I realize that I’m doing it after it happens, but there are so many people who don’t realize they’ve absorbed these stereotypical and normative ideas. It feels overwhelming.”

"Social justice issues are important to me because I like people. Despite calling myself The Monster King and joking about devouring all humans and turning them into bugs or whatever, in general I like people. I guess I have this naïve belief that everyone is good inside, even though at the same time I have no compassion for people who have no compassion. I guess that’s a bit oxymoronic. In any social justice conversation, there’s always someone who argues that we shouldn’t care about rich white people or people in the Western world’s problems because it’s so much worse in third world countries. But there’s only so much we can focus on, right? We’re people and worrying about other people shouldn’t necessarily mean we should abandon everything else altogether. Some people actually do that and that’s great, but the notion that you should stop doing something if you’re not doing the best is rather childish. Often, anyone who complains about that is being hypercritical, and why are they using their time to criticize someone else on an Internet forum when they could be using that time to do something useful and constructive?

I like everything about video games. The interactivity of them. I’m a bit of an egotistical person, and there’s no better media in which you can use your own touch while still experiencing the artist’s intent. I use artist loosely. If you look at Mario, there’s certainly a craftsmanship to it but there isn’t really a deeper purpose. But I think that games can be art just as much as any medium. I like the game aspect too, I’m very competitive. I like to win and even though I have my sore loser moments, it’s cool to learn what will make you win. And of course I like the fantasy aspect, I like that it’s usually imaginative. I like all sorts of games except real sports and real cars. I don’t want to play real football on a screen, I want to play games where I fight aliens and dragons and go on a crazy adventure, you know? I like exploring different worlds. And being able to create these worlds is even more amazing. The mechanics of it, creating an interesting world that is functional and fun. Creating fun is a really strange science, making fun for another person.”

"How do you describe something that’s unknown, that doesn’t make sense, that’s intangible? I think everything has a spirit, and we’re connected to the things around us. I respect everything, that’s important to me. I think we’re here to make life better for other people, I think we have a responsibility to each other. Sometimes I think I’m a pretty selfish person, I spend a lot of time by myself trying to figure out my needs. I don’t know if that’s selfish or not. Because if you’re happy, you’ll make the people around you happy.

I’ve had a lot of bad things happen, that have made me really resilient. But sometimes I don’t want to be strong. I think I’ve had to put up a wall, and sometimes I just want to be vulnerable. But the times that I have been vulnerable, I’ve been hurt, so it’s hard. But relationships—with friends, family, or lovers—you can build something together that makes you both stronger."

“My daughter Katie studied French and linguistics in school, she’s just graduated. But that’s the surface-level story. Underneath that is both joy and sadness. I’m so happy to have been involved in raising this kid and watching her grow into a wonderful young woman I love being around. But it makes me sad to realize that those moments are so fleeting, and I can’t go back and relive the past. Now that I’m sixty, I’m starting to wonder what the next twenty years of my life will be like, if I even have that much time. It’s happy and sad; that’s the countervailing nature of the human experience. Sometimes I just have to realize that I can only do the best I can with what I have. People move on and have their own lives. I’m missing her, but I’m happy that she’s off being her own person. The thing I love most about humans is our capacity for empathy.”

“My family is the most important thing, we help each other no matter what. As I was confronted with these choices about what I wanted to do in life, I also struggled to balance individuality and collectivity. Me vs. the family. If I choose the life path I want for myself, what are the consequences? My friends here would say that I shouldn’t feel responsible for my family, but I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t okay with that mentality.

I just want to tell everyone if you have a passion, never ever let it go. Now that I’ve come back to dance, I feel a strength that I’ve never felt before. Now I’m convinced. It’s for my survival. It’s not just a hobby or a passion, it’s essential to my survival. I never knew that before. I thought I was selfish for choosing dance. I thought I was irresponsible for choosing something I loved if I had the option to make more money doing something else. But to me, dance is the manifestation of two worlds, my two parents, their two cultures.

When I heard the drums, the sound brought me back to my childhood. The freedom, the magic of it. Whenever I dance African dance, I think the little girl inside of me comes out and is happy. A friend of mine told me, when you dance, you seem so young. What he said was true. I think it’s the little girl in me that is dancing. When I dance, I am so happy, I’m laughing all the time, I’m so elated and free.”

"The woman I aided for four years, I cried when she died. By the end of her life I was working as a buyer for the company full-time, but I told her I would come every Saturday for nothing, I’ll come and give you a whole bath and I’ll do your hair. So every Saturday I would see her. I loved her, you know, like a mother. And one Friday the son called me and told me she had died. By the end she was pretty bad and I knew she was dying, because she had lung cancer, but she didn’t want to go to the hospital. I loved her.

My family knows about the sexual abuse. But unless you lived with the experience, you don’t know the impact it has on a person. That’s why I was fortunate for my first boyfriend. He always had a good thing to say about everyone, no matter who they were or how old. He was a good person. Everybody loved him. A rare good guy and he was only fifteen. He was talking about becoming a doctor, delivering our baby into the world on a sailboat someday. I was fortunate to have him in my life. That’s one thing I would like to tell him today. I’m so fortunate. I want to write him a letter and let him know that this quality, I hope he still has it, it was so beautiful. All the little things he would do just to cheer somebody up…he would think of me before he would think of himself. And he was taking care of everybody. I want to tell him that. Because I don’t think anyone ever has.”

“What I value most is the idea of individual freedom. We talk about freedom from, but we don’t talk about freedom to. Freedom to do, freedom to be, freedom to love whoever you want, freedom to go wherever you want, and I was really moved by that idea. I think that idea has driven me—in my work, in my lifestyle, I’ve always tried to find ways to liberate myself. It dawned on me that if I really wanted to get into social change, social transformation, I had to focus on the educational system. I had to get into the classrooms and work with kids. It’s all about helping kids think differently. If you can create a generation of kids who think differently, that’s a revolution right there. It was the best thing I could have done, because within the year all that Marxist stuff I’d been studying before went right out the window. It was just impractical. I much preferred to deal with finding refuge for seventeen Haitian kids than some lofty theory. Who cares about that? These kids here need a job, they need to eat. When you’re fifteen, you don’t know who you’ll be when you’re thirty. You’re on a journey. Leave the possibilities open, don’t be so quick to define yourself. Don’t box yourself. I hope my kids grow up open. You can’t pass your values and your politics on, and I don’t want to. I want my kids to be who they are, and it’s my job to support and affirm them. But I hope they are free beings.”

“I was born in London, right in the city. It’s just me and my mum at the moment, but when I was growing up my sister was living with us as well. I have two sisters and two brothers, much older than I am so they all moved out a long time ago.

I work at Kensington Palace and it’s lovely. All the guides here used to dress up in historical outfits, which was wonderful. I loved wearing the huge skirts and corsets. I don’t wish I was born in that time, though, mostly because of the medical treatments…the practice of bleeding, for example. And blistering. What they did was, they get something incredibly hot—white hot. They burn you, wait for your skin to blister, and then they pop the blister. The idea was that it would get rid of the yellow bile, which I think we call plasma nowadays. Of course the blistering leaves you very weak, prone to infection and sometimes death…not the best medicine, I don’t think. Somebody once told me that Queen Anne became so ill that they blistered her all over her body, ran out of space and shaved her hair off so they could blister her head. Yeah, that one of Mark’s favorite stories.

I don’t get to tell this often because she never lived in the Palace, but my favorite princess is the Holy Imperial Martyr Saint Elisabeth Romanova, also known as the incredibly beautiful Grand Duchess Ella. There was lots of drama in her life, she marries into Russia, her husband was assassinated, she becomes a nun and then…I’ve got a massive picture of her up in my office. I came straight to this job after Uni and I’ve been here six years now. I studied psychology and drama. I don’t know how I ended up here, but I’m happy I did. I just sort of happened one day, and I never managed to leave.

But yes, psychology and drama are my subjects. I went to the theater last night, actually. I like performing, but I haven’t done it in such a long time. It was great, I used to love dressing up. In one of the favorite plays I was part of, I was a clown. I didn’t wear a nose, though. We decided against the nose because I’m so small and the nose was just ridiculously big. I miss those days, I miss dressing up. We used to dress up here, actually. We all had our own projects that we led as well, and I did dress-up with the kids. I quite like kids, it was good fun. Then the actors came in and they didn’t want our costumes to clash with the actors, because we were staff and they were supposed to be acting out the history of the palace. I guess it makes sense, but I miss the costumes. Most people don’t like corsets, but I like them. In society today we’re expected to reshape our bodies to fit the norm, but in those days your underwear did it for you.”

“Gender discrimination is a thing, especially in Pakistan. I’m very empathetic. I might be angry at Dad, at times I am, but I understand him. He was nothing. And then he built his family up, he made all the decisions, he bought a house for his parents and settled his brothers down, gave them money and married them off, taking care of all the expenses—I understand why he’s so controlling because in order to do all that, he had to be. But I’m frustrated because I get why he’s doing that, I get why my mom and my brother are doing that, I get everyone—but they don’t get me. And they don’t try to.

All this racism and stereotypes, we are not born with them. If we throw together kids from 10 different parts of the world they don’t know black from white or developed world from under developed, they will just play. But if we make middle-aged people from 10 different parts of the world interact, the picture would be a different one. Why? because kids know how to love beyond borders and love without fear.

The things I’m passionate about are archaeology and reading. I love making friends. It sounds weird that it’s my passion, you know, because it’s not a career and it doesn’t make money, but I just love meeting people. And I like helping people. This world, it’s just by chance that you were born in this part of the world and I was born in another part. And that I’m from a rich family. I have so many opportunities that other people who are just as smart as or smarter than me do not have. And it just doesn’t feel right to me. I’m not being ungrateful towards God, because I believe in God, I do. But it doesn’t feel right. It’s my responsibility as someone with so much advantage to try and spread those resources around more equally.”

“I can’t even begin to explain how dramatically my life has changed over the past few years. I’m twenty-one. I grew up in a very famous family. My family is very artistic, and lots of them are artists who have work in galleries around the world. So I came from a lot of money. I think that was a huge blessing in my life because I grew up in a world that was saturated with art. But unfortunately, behind all this beautiful artwork and creativity, there were horrible people in my family and horrible actions that were done and weren’t talked about.

I grew up in Ottawa, which is where my entire family is. As soon as I had the chance, as soon as university rolled around, I just bolted. I went to Toronto and I got into the journalism program of my dreams. It was so unbelievable. But then I started modeling, and I got really vain. When I went into the industry, people claimed that there were no eating disorders, no cocaine, none of that, but it’s such bullshit. Completely. I remember the first time I went to a shoot, they actually rescheduled the shoot and told me that the next time I had to show up with a twenty-four inch waist. The industry was so bad for me, so superficial, and I became extremely dependent on drugs and other people. I had a boyfriend at the time, he was a DJ, and he was really into drugs too. I had lots of money from my family, and then he had lots of money from DJing, and I was also getting money by modeling…so it was this vicious cycle. I wasn’t healing myself, drugs were only a band-aid solution. So I went through a horrible period of my life for a year and a half, I was this person that I’m so happy I’m not anymore. I feel so blessed to be here; Montreal truly restored my faith in myself.”

"I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was eight. I’ve had that since I can remember. It’s an autoimmune disease, and the way that they explain it to kids is that it’s your body’s immune system messing up and attacking your tissue instead of invading things.I was very ashamed of it. I didn’t tell anyone about it for ten years. I can talk about it now, but between age eight and eighteen I didn’t tell any of my friends about it. I wouldn’t talk about it with my parents much either, so it was something that I dealt with internally, alone. I felt very broken, like I wasn’t working properly, which is a terrible way to think about it. I want to make kids realize that everybody’s body is different, there is no ideal body, that’s a construction and it doesn’t really exist. You shouldn’t be thinking of your body as something that’s perfect and later gets slightly broken, you should think of it as well, you could have nothing, but you have a body that allows you to exist.

Half of my research group is actually women, which is nice. Because then I feel like I can talk without being afraid that I’m representing all women. If I make a mistake, it’s less pressure, and I as an individual made that mistake. Whereas if I make a mistake as the only woman, guys can use it as an example about how women in general are bad at math. That post-doc, who I work with a lot, is thinking of leaving academia because she doesn’t want to keep dealing with the sexism. That’s not great, it’s nice to have her. It’s scary to me that even though she made it so far, she doesn’t want to stay. I’d always assumed I’d stay, but since I’ve been having such a bad time the last couple of years, I’ve been really questioning if I should be here or if I should go do something else. The thing is, I can’t really picture myself doing anything else."

“In regards to who I am, I would just say that yes, I have an extensive background in broadcast journalism, I have an extensive background in communications, and I am an actor, I am a singer, but I feel like all these things are just different conduits I use to express myself, and it’s not necessarily indicative of who I am, they are a platform that I use to express who I am at the core, and who I am at the core is a humanitarian. I believe in the literal sense of the world and the general sense; I care about the welfare of people: physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. I have learned over the years that this is my thing. This is what gets my heart pumping fast, this is what makes me feel great and right. I’ve worked for a major network as an executive assistant, a production assistant, and that’s all fine and dandy but I enjoy when I’m able to make a connection with somebody. I’m happy when I can help somebody and bring them a sense of ease and comfort in their crazy hectic life and I identify with that, I can bring a sense of peace. My heart grows bigger and I get so weak in the knees when people smile, you know? When I meet someone and they just fucking get it! I’m very keen and sensitive to energy.”

“Music is therapy to me. There’s some kind of biological reaction when humans listen to music. When I started writing, I was able to get things off my chest and onto the paper. But music alone, just instrumentals, soothes everything. I wake up to music. I’ll go shower and play music in the shower, I’ll go back to my room and listen to music while I get dressed, do some work with music playing…I read books and listen to music. I’ll go outside and I like walking if I can listen to music. Then I’ll come back to my room, do more work while listening to music. I go to sleep with it. So I don’t know what it would be like to not have music. It would be like not being able to walk. To me, music is the strongest vessel for knowledge, especially for the most important group of people in the world—the youth. We’re our future. And we listen to music every single day. Music has an incredible amount of power, and that’s what you realize when you’re performing and every single person knows your lyrics. All those people…they pressed play and that song will be in their head forever now. If the song is powerful enough, it will be there forever. That’s the power of music, and the power of words.”

“Besides teaching kids how to work with each other, how to depend on each other, I think the way a team sport builds interconnectedness is why sports are important to me. How people can develop great relationships because they played a sport together…concentrating on the team rather than just yourself, doing your part. If you do your part, and everyone else does their part, then everyone succeeds. You don’t elevate one person over another. You win together and you lose together. And that’s missing from society, there’s too much emphasis on individuals. I think in some cases, people forsake what they should do for self-preservation. If you look at that world, you can see how people are just out for themselves, and it’s sad. People don’t know how to give themselves, how to love…they don’t know what it means to sacrifice. To give something up to help someone else. If you put yourself off on an island, you never experience that, and that’s why sports are so important to me. What makes life worth living? Having the love and respect of my sons and my wife, being able to do the things I want to do and not be a burden to anybody, being able to go where I want to go and do what I want to do, and just not get in anybody’s way. ”

“My dad is a musician, and my mom was an art dealer. They were trying to tell us kids to go into non-creative jobs, but my sister ended up graduating with a degree in Fashion Design, I want to be an artist and my brother wants to be a musician. My father traveled a lot when he was younger. He traveled for work and for fun he has so many stories that after hearing a bunch of them, you start to feel like you've been there or even lived some of it. I've always had the love to travel, and I've made myself a promise to travel the world before I’m 25 with my friends who also want to go. One friend said he wants to travel because you get to learn all the different ways people live their lives. After I heard that, I wanted to travel even more.”

“Instead of trying to change the world, I’ve decided that changing myself is a big job, and I’m sticking to that one. The ripple effect is big. When I heal myself I can see how it affects the people around me. It’s all about choices. I guess all I really want to say that if you’re hurting, if you’re in a bad place, if it just doesn’t feel right, do something about it. We live in a society with so much information available for us to heal, whether it’s emotional, psychological, spiritual health, I feel like we’re in an abundant world of healing now. We just have to take that first step and experiment with different methods. I think we’re all wounded. What I’ve really realized in the past couple of years, especially because I have a history in political activism, everyone has a responsibility to heal themselves. We all just need to stop projecting our hurt, our pain, our suffering onto everyone else. Conflicts, wars, divorces...there’s so much internal suffering that we don’t express in a constructive way. We end up walking around bitter, projecting fear and mistrust and whatever it is that destroyed us from the beginning. I only have one life, and I’ve just grabbed onto it, and I’m going to enjoy it until the very end.”

“When I look back on my life, one of my happiest memories was when my father married my step-mother Eunice. My mother passed when I was five years old, and my father wanted me to have a mother. Eunice told me, I’m not your mother, and I’m not going to take anything away from your mother, but I love you and I’m going to take care of you. And she did. I got married and left her at home, and I wish I’d done more for her before she passed. The other happiest thing is my wife. She’s…well, she’s an amazing lady. She’s been working at the same job for forty years, and every morning she wakes up at four o’clock. She had three kids, five granddaughters, and she’s got me. She’s an amazing person. I also like to have time to myself, to hear myself. I listen to music a lot, I really love music. My favorite group is The Temptations. They took me through a lot of times, like being an only child. I got picked on a lot, I got jumped on a lot, and that’s why I left school. At that time, my uncles and my father had gone through WWII and they were tough guys, manly men. I couldn’t explain what was going on to anybody. When they asked me why I didn’t go to school, I would just say I don’t know, I just didn’t go.”

“Now, I celebrate a year and three weeks sober. I’m still doing good, still thinking positive, I’m doing so many things I never thought I would do. My mind was stuck in the streets. I’m also working with the Coalition for the Homeless, working with recovery centers, I’m training to be a recovery coach, I’m trying to do everything I can to help people. When I was out there, I needed the help, and people reached out to me. So it’s only right that I do the same, give back. I want to become a recovery coach and go into the ER, giving people direction, showing them where they can go. I want to be a counselor, I want to be a licensed chemical dependency professional. My ultimate goal is having my own office, having plaques on the wall, having my kid’s pictures, wearing office attire, and have people come to me when they need help. That’s my ultimate goal. So everything I’m doing now is a stepping stone to me accomplishing those goals.”

"I don’t believe in goals, I’m not a goal-oriented person. I can’t think of single moments in my life that have shaped me, I think in terms of how I progress to something. I don’t like goals because I don’t want to shape my life and actions around accomplishing certain things and then moving onto the next thing, I want to progress with intentions. Goals are rigid, and in pursuing the goal you can blind yourself to other things that are going on, and even lose sight of why you set the goal in the first place. Your circumstances could change and the goal is no longer good for you, but you keep working towards it because you feel like you have to achieve it. But why? Goals work for some people, but I personally try to focus more on living and acting with intentions instead.

If I took those social lessons and messages away, what’s left, who am I without what I’ve internalized? It’s frustrating, I can get lost in these thoughts. I just try to do what makes sense to me, it’s my motto—do what makes sense. But to you. Because what makes sense to me isn’t necessarily what makes sense to you."

“As for the history of the palace I work in, there’s a lot of debauchery. There was a boy named Peter Wildboy, found in 1725 wandering the forests of Hamlin. He was a real-life Mowgli, he couldn’t speak any language, only grunts and snarls. He had an amazing ability for climbing trees. People believed he was brought up by wolves. So they took him to Kensington Palace, his notoriety was very wide. He was a curiosity for ten years, so people used to come to Kensington palace just to see Peter Wildboy run around with no clothes on and stuff like that. The reason why I say it’s a strange story is because it would be seen as child cruelty today. It was slavery. He had a collar, we’ve got it on display upstairs. What’s strange is what’s socially acceptable then, and what’s socially acceptable now. You can’t judge them in those days, because they didn’t know much. If you believe people were brought up by wolves, you’re a little crazy. But Peter was used as a cult curiosity, something to laugh at. Something to say oh, look how strange that is. They dressed him in court dress, tried to, but most of the time he would rip his clothes off and run around naked. Most of the ladies in the court would faint. He was famous for around ten years, because when they found him he was around ten. He had a short shelf life; nobody wants to see a 25-year-old man running around naked. They sent him away to a farm to live out the rest of his days. He lived until he was about seventy-five, which was an amazing age in those days.

We might think we’re enlightened, but the human condition is that we will hurt each other to further our own cause. It can be society-based slavery. Maybe you’ve got a kid, the kid isn’t doing well in school because it’s a bad area, you don’t have healthcare, so you end up working three jobs and you have to take the bus to each one because you can’t afford a car…your whole day is trying to get money for your family. The healthcare system in America really doesn’t work for me, our taxes in London are high but they pay for everybody to be treated. If someone falls down in the street, they get taken in an ambulance to the hospital and don’t have to pay for any of it. I might be paying high taxes now, but I know that if I fall over somebody’s going to look after me. In America, from what I’ve heard, the mentality seems to be well I’ve paid for this, why do I have to pay for other people? The way it works out here, you’re paying for others but you’re really paying for yourself. It’s all about society, not just about yourself, I think. The way you build a functional society is by thinking about the whole, not a single person. I use America as an example, but it’s the same in every country by different degrees.”

“I went to prison for young people, a juvenile detention center, until I was seventeen years old. After that, my parents came to see me in this office with security guards and everything. And my father told me then that he was not my real father. He was crying, my mom was crying, I was trying to act like I didn’t care. I was emotionally fucked up back then, I wasn’t expressing my emotions. So I blocked the tears and said it was okay, it was fine. Then on my eighteenth birthday, my parents told me that they wouldn’t take me back in their house. So I was on the street the day I turned eighteen, with my bags. I was full of rage, how do you say this in English, angry all the time? In French, we say ressentiment. It feels like you’re always mad. I was full of fear, I was full of shame, bad thoughts and negativity. So I went back to therapy a third time. I started Alcoholics Anonymous. I became more spiritual. All my life, I was just thinking about myself, I was egotistical. Now I care about others, and that’s what helped me. I had been so affected by the trauma I experienced that my mind was diseased and I was so selfish. I accepted that one day. It took ten years for me to tell someone that I was raped. Ten years. Which was six months ago, I was sitting in therapy and I finally said it out loud. I’m thirty years old. After that, I forgave everyone. And I forgave myself. I love talking to people and helping people. I became a counselor three months ago. I’ve helped six people so far in the program. It cures me of my selfishness to talk to others. After I have conversations with these people, I float. I’m so happy. It makes me feel good. I feel good about myself now—I don’t drink, I don’t smoke weed, I don’t do drugs. I’m vegan. I go to raves and concerts sober, and I have more fun. It doesn’t bother me if someone smokes weed in front of me, because I make the conscious choice not to. I’ve found strength within myself and I’m at peace with who I’ve been and who I am.”

“I like it because I work with patients, I work with people every day. It’s exciting, because in the neurological field, most people get progressively worse. It’s very rare to see someone improving. But in my research, I get to see that at their follow-ups. I see them at the worst time of their life, because they have an issue and there’s no treatment. Then I pair some of my research with a treatment, and I see them a month later and they’re telling me things like I can eat soup on my own, I can drink a cup of coffee with one hand without spilling. There isn’t really a specific patient that’s stuck out to me, because they all do. I see like eighty of them. There was one girl my age, and she has a head tremor. Her head involuntarily moves. She’s twenty-four, and it’s embarrassing to have a tremor at such a young age. You’d think those diseases are only for seniors. Seeing her get better was great. Now she’s working, going to school, she’s got a boyfriend. It’s such a rewarding job, it’s only twenty percent of them who don’t get better. The other eighty do.

The way you treat others, I think that’s important. And also the way you respect yourself. If you don’t respect yourself, no one is going to respect you, right? I was brought up respecting myself. My parents are pretty religious, and that kind of goes hand in hand. I value trust and honesty. That’s the number one thing to me. Because when you lose that, what’s the point? I’ve learned to be less self-conscious. You know in high school, when your hair is a bit off, you think it’ll be the worst day of your life? Then I realized that everyone else is too absorbed in their own shit. I’m pretty happy. I don’t really get sad. I mean, I’ve gotten disappointed, but I take life the way it is. When I get disappointed I just realize that’s just something that will happen.”

“If I were to truly define who I am, it wouldn’t be a definition. Once you find out the true nature of who you are, you can’t call yourself any one particular thing because that’s bottling up a force that you can’t bottle up into one single definition. It’s something that’s so vast and powerful that you can’t call it one specific thing. But as far as a title for myself, I would just say: spirit. In physical form. And that would be it. A spirit has no limitations on what it wants to do. I don’t think of the future as years away, the future can be ten seconds from now. I just have to live now, understand what it is I’m focusing on, which is being my true self. I used to say stuff like I wanna be this, I wanna be that…I want to be more than that. I am more than one thing. Because once you know who you are, you know not what you want but what you’re supposed to be. It’s not about wanting things, it’s about being things. We’re human beings.”

"The most important things to me are family and honesty. Being honest, having good morals, I try to be that for my sons. I have two, my oldest one is twelve, his name is Davon. My youngest is seven, and his name is Derick. They get along pretty good, different mothers though. I work really hard to be a good role model. If I mess up, it’s important that I let them know I messed up. So that they know to not do the same thing in the future when they get older. Moving out and being on my own was great, being independent. I got in trouble once, and that changed my life and how I thought about things. After my son was born, my first one, I stopped doing a lot of the things I used to do because I knew I had a son, someone I had to raise. Having a kid was a big life-changing moment for me.”

“The think that the reason I like rugby so much is because it challenges societal expectations of women, and I like not fitting into whatever mold you think I should fit into. As a child, I had sexual abuse in my background. That’s one of the things that drove me to find my power, and wanting to help young women find their power. I’d like to work with young women who have been abused in that way and introduce them to rugby. Because they’re angry. And I know because I was angry and I used sports as my outlet, because what am I gonna do, punch a wall? I turned out to be an okay person. So I’m living proof that you can be okay, you can come through it, you can use part of it to fuel yourself, to get forward, to help yourself get stronger or to help others. Or you can constantly be at the expense of it. And I decided that I was not going to be at the expense of my memories my whole life. Obviously people get care and everything but sports is something that’s so transforming for me. Even just having a little bit of success with throwing a ball if you’ve never thrown a ball in your life. A lot of abuse victims experience the feeling that they’re stupid. I want to help someone get through that. I want to show you that you can be more than what you are and what you think of yourself and what you’ve been told about yourself, you can be way more than that. I want to be a person that can show you that.”

“I don’t like to follow the norm. It’s nice to live in a multicultural area and not have the stress of pushing your kids at what you think that they should do. I don’t conform to different preconceived ideas of raising a family. I raise my family in a healthy was but I give them a lot of freedom to do what they want. Because I felt like I didn’t do a lot when I was younger, outside of art school and going on a few trips with my parents. I feel like I’m making up for lost time now. I just don’t like to have people advising or judging or telling me what to do. I don’t feel like I can carry on with people’s idea of the type of person they think I am.

You can’t play it safe all the time. There are disadvantages to that. Everyone is always going to have a criticism or judgement of me, even people that care and love me. I’ve always tried to please other people. I was that way earlier in my life and it was just terrible, because I don’t want to live with regrets or miss opportunities. You have to go for what you want to do, even when it’s against the norm. Even when it’s against what everyone else says you should be doing.”

“I feel like I’m no longer on the path I grew up following. My family is very conservative. I was raised a Muslim and I am still a Muslim and I pray every day and I believe there’s someone up there, but I think at times I feel that other religions also speak the truth. Which one has more truth, I don’t know, but I’m quite happy being open to studying other religions. I respect you, and I respect everybody else. I absolutely love Buddhism. So I would say I’m a Muslim Buddhist. I don’t know if there is such a thing, but that’s what I am. I just wish more people traveled, I just wish people from different religions and different backgrounds sat together and talked to each other because deep down we all want the same thing. But for some reason people are segregated and they stay that way because they never interact. For the past twelve years, Muslims have been looked at as if all of them are terrorists. Yes, there are some stupid idiots, but I’ve never met a Muslim who thinks violence is the right thing. Islam, Christianity and Judaism all say similar things; you have to love our brothers and sisters, you have to take care of your neighbors…And if you’re taking care of your neighbors, well, your neighbors could be anybody. They could be Muslim or Christian, doesn’t matter. So we’re all the same, we all have to take care of each other. We’re all brothers and sisters, I think. I travel because I know wherever I go there will always be nice people. And I always end up meeting nice people because I’m expecting that. If you look for good things, you’ll get good things.”

“My stepfather always told me that a lot of things in life can be easy. If you do only positive things, you’ll have a positive impact. If you do negative things, even if they’re small and even if you do a lot of positive things too, you still did something negative and you still made a negative impact. That’s why I try and be positive in every little thing I do, in every interaction I have. I look people in the eye when I talk to them, I’m very attentive. I might come off as a tough guy, but as soon as you talk to me, I’m all smiles. When I shake someone’s hand, I shake it hard. I show people as much respect as possible. I’ve figured out the habits and rules I need to follow to continue to evolve myself into the man I’m proud to be. That’s just the way I try to go about it, you know? Because I believe in the next five years I can actually make a difference for a lot of people. I want to build a house for me and my grandparents. I want them to no longer worry about the stresses of their housing situation right now. I have a plan to do it, I know how I’m going to build it, and I’m going to do it myself.

My mom always told me Tommy, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect the same results. I understand that now. I won’t make the same mistakes anymore. I love looking for the beauty in everyday things, I love meeting people, just like how you and I worked out. I love having a good conversation, having an adventure.”

“Something I’ve had to learn is think before you speak, learn before you do. Or before you expose what you do. It’s self-explanatory, but expression isn’t emphasized enough. Language is a beautiful thing, and it’s also a very elaborate thing. I think it can be used eloquently and specially in so many ways to get your true point across. So think before you speak, but also think and speak. You know, communicate. Some of the biggest flaws and historical issues, wars, they’re based on communication or lack thereof, or someone who isn’t willing to change their perspective. If people just communicated and found some common ground, major conflicts would be avoided. But then the ego comes into play. Curb your ego and detox yourself of your self-importance. When it comes to relationships and growth with other people, it’s essential to do that. And for anything you do, pursue knowledge first. Whether you take college courses or go to libraries or use the Internet, educate yourself in something. Work on it in your basement until it’s ready to come out; a lot of ideas come out half-baked. I’ve been a little too analytical of some of the things I’ve tried to do, but that’s because I strive for quality. Studying is important, studying who’s done what you want to do, how they’ve done it, and how they’ve done it well. These are important things to know as you blaze your own path. Learn from the mistakes of yourself and others and make your experience within this greater thing unique.”

“I started kickboxing when I was seventeen. Compared to most of the people who do it, seventeen is pretty late to start. But I had a negative judgement of it before I began. I thought it was barbaric, I thought it was violent and I thought violence was always a bad thing. I had a friend who really wanted to try it, and she kept asking me to go with her. I finally went just to get her to stop asking. I loved it right away. I can’t explain it in words, it’s just the feeling you get from the motions, the movements, I like it. I got more and more into it until I started to compete, and that was a whole other level. I stopped judging the sport because it wasn’t at all like I expected it to be. The men at the gym were nice to me, very supportive, same with the women and we all helped each other out. Even in competitions—we would fight obviously, but afterwards we would hug and thank the other person. You never really compete with the other person, you try to challenge yourself and they’re doing the same thing. Your opponent is actually the one who helps you push yourself. And you do the same for them. Then I started teaching it, and I can’t live without it. I even did my thesis on it. I went into different martial arts, Judo and Karate and everything, and I was studying social work at the same time. So I mixed my social work with my kickboxing because I noticed that kickboxing really helped the girls I was advising as a social worker. I saw how they changed after taking my kickboxing class, not in a physical way but a mental way. It’s very empowering, it lets a lot of stuff out. It’s a way of expressing yourself because even though I teach the same thing to all the girls, they all do it in a different way. It’s not like aerobics, following what the other person is doing, you have to use your mind. To avoid, to counter, it’s like playing chess with your body. At my other job as a social worker I saw that my clients weren’t always able to communicate verbally, it helped to express themselves in other ways like kickboxing. So I did my thesis on using the body as a way to empower women. Conversations and experiences with people that have stuck with me the most are times when another person was there when I needed them. It’s not really about what they said or what they did, I just remember the feeling I got from knowing they were there to support me. Sometimes you can enjoy being alone, but it feels so good when you don’t want to be alone and someone is there. I like that my job allows me to be that person for others.“

“Immigration was an experience that definitely influenced who I am. When we moved here, my parents were always out looking for jobs, so I was the one taking care of my sister as the older brother. I got a lot more responsibilities at a pretty young age, compared to other kids at least. I had to learn a new language as well. And just coming here, it’s a totally different world. When I went back to Brazil, it was an interesting experience because I could now relate to both things and reflect on what’s good and bad, right and wrong about both places. I could compare how people live here to how people live in Brazil, and it was eye-opening. The main difference is probably how houses here and in the U.S. don’t have fences or walls around them. In Brazil, every single house has a huge wall, and some even have electric fences. They’re crazy about security, because they know that they can be robbed at any moment. There’s this violence present in Brazil that isn’t here. Another big difference is food. Canada and the U.S. have similar food, but compared to Brazil, fruits and vegetables taste different. Oranges and pineapples are amazing in Brazil. The party culture is really different too. Life is harder in Brazil, I won’t lie. But Brazilians are always trying to find something to cheer for, something to be grateful for, something to celebrate. There’s a lot of parties in Brazil, we have the beach, and people are happy there. It’s not that I think people in North America are unhappy. But happiness has a higher cost here, because people are used to having so much. So to be happy, they need to always have more. In Brazil, for some people, just having food is enough, you know? Being close to their families is enough. I feel like here, people are more focused on material goods. That’s the main difference.”

“You must forgive yourself first, for all the things you haven’t done and all the things you haven’t done well. Then you must learn to love yourself and be kind and gentle to yourself. It’s so difficult to truly apply all this to yourself. But how can you really treat others that well if you haven’t yet achieved this full compassion for yourself?

I don’t want to just focus on one talent, and it doesn’t take a lot of talent to do a lot of things. It takes guts. And that’s hard, but I tell people: it takes one week to change your current life. To close all the telephone and Internet accounts, to find new tenants for your flat, to pack your stuff, to sort through what is important and what is irrelevant, it takes one week. And it takes a thousand Euros to move to another place and give yourself two weeks to find another flat and another job, just to start. And anyone can do it. One of my missions in life is to remind people that they should listen to their own instincts, that they shouldn’t give up on the dreams they had as a child. Because whether you’re six or fifty or ninety, your soul is the same, it’s eternal. When I talk to someone, I want to see what they have in their heart. It’s easy to tell what they wish they could do, and I want to give them hope that they can achieve it.

I grew up bilingual, and it was very difficult for me in school to assimilate the two languages. Eventually my parents figured out that I was a bit dyslexic, but I wasn’t taught any differently and I kept learning the two languages along with the other kids. It took a bit longer for me to learn, but I eventually got it. Today I speak four languages.

There are so many ways to talk about thinking, and it’s so interesting. In French and English there’s only one way to say “I’m thinking.” Language brings different depth, different layers, into your own intelligence and reflection.”