#ffanationalconvention

So, earlier today (or technically yesterday since it’s 12:30 already), during our second session of our FFA National Convention, one of the national officers came out on stage to speak. She had canvases, stools and paint brushes set up behind her. I am very interested at this point, because, if you know me, I am into art. What I also found curious was the fact that all of the canvases were backwards. As she started her speech, I knew it was one that I wanted to pay attention to. It was about accepting yourself and learning how to change with your environment, but also knowing what is good change and what is bad change. She eventually got to the first canvas, and to explaining what they were for. Each canvas represented a person’s background and what type of environment they came from. When she turned the first canvas around, it was black. Completely, absolutely black. The black represented a young girl’s background. That person’s dad was an alcoholic and beat her mom on a regular basis. This girl always thought that she was always going to be in a messed up place, not ever really have any friends at school because they all knew about her parents, and thought she was going to be an outcast her entire life. She eventually joined FFA and met people who accepted her. She slowly came out of her shell, started moving along with making plans for the future, and making moves to get to those places. As she did this, she realized that she no longer felt useless to the world. Her world was getting brighter. While our speaker was explaining this, she was using blues and whites to cover up the black, slowly making the black look like it was a light blue on half of it. She soon went over to the second canvas, leaving the first noticeably incomplete, but obviously brighter than before. She turned the second canvas around to show a bright blue canvas with reds, yellow and oranges dotted around the top and bottom edges, like the autumn leaves after falling from the trees. This background was one that belonged to a seemingly happy, complete young boy. This young boy had a wonderful life, happy family, had what he needed in life. But one day, when he was in middle school, the young boy started getting bullied, seemingly for no reason. He soon started to fall into a dark place, questioning everything he knew. Was his life really as good as he thought it was? Did he do something to make the bully mad? Was he even really nice to anyone? When he got into high school, he took a chance and joined his local FFA chapter. He soon met people who stuck with him through everything. They helped him feel better after the bully came after him again, and reported the bully to teachers and higher authorities. Eventually the bullying stopped, and the boy went back to having a mainly normal life with new friends, and a new family. At this time, the speaker turned the canvas so that it was portrait style, not landscape like it had been before. When she rotated it, you could see that the brown that she had been using while talking formed a tree trunk, and there were leaves on the tree, and on the ground. The only thing seemingly “wrong” with this masterpiece, was the single, thin black line next to the trunk of the tree. It looked like the painter touched the brush to the canvas and decided that they didn’t want to do anymore with the painting. It was, much like the other, noticeably incomplete, when our speaker moved on. When she flipped the third canvas over, she revealed a beautifully, abstractly colored tree in the middle of the canvas, with a beautiful sky and grassy background. She told us it was her background. Lots of friends, a fantastic family, everything she could ever want or need. In high school, she had her FFA friends, and her non-FFA friends. At one point, she realized one of her friends was starting to get really angry easily, and told her other friends they were jealous of her. She had everything. She also said she didn’t like her FFA friends. So time went on, she tried to keep everyone happy by not talking about certain things around certain people, and soon realized she was covering parts of herself up. She was hiding things from herself and the others around her that she loved and cared about. She was no longer her true self. Eventually, she stopped caring what others thought of her and her other friend groups and started sharing parts of herself with others again, found out who her real friends were, and no longer tried to be someone she clearly was not. And she became happier and was more excited about some things again. She got back on her path where she felt she belonged. While she had been talking, our speaker had been covering up parts of the beautiful tree and landscape with white paint. You could still kind of see what was underneath, but you had to look closely. She wrapped up her speech by talking about how your background does not matter with wherever you go with your life, and how it does not affect your plans for the future unless you allow them to. That even if you come from a bad background (canvas one), you can still have a bright future ahead of you, you may just have to work a little harder to find the trail to get there. She also said that once you find the right path and support (canvas two), you can overcome anything, and still have your bright future, even if you have to work to get back on track. She also talked about how even if people will judge you and dislike you for having the things you have, you should never cover things up, hide them, or act like you don’t like them. You should be yourself, and find the people that accept you for who you are. People that accept you for the person you are when you are completely open with what you like/don’t like, and who you are friends with. She also pointed out how all of them were incomplete, and kind of messy. They were all incomplete, because that person’s journey was not over yet, and they still had strokes to make with their brush before their journey was over. They were all messy, because even though we can try to keep everything looking beautiful, we are going to mess up. We are going to make strokes that we don’t like, and can’t erase. But that’s okay. Everyone’s canvas is different, everyone makes different strokes, and while we should still be aware of the choices we are making, and what type of strokes they will leave, we should also be ourselves, and not try to be someone we are not, just to make others happy. Our canvases should be beautifully messy when our journey ends. 

Speaker: Valerie Earley (I believe. I could be wrong, it’s really late and I’m doubting myself.)

I know this is an extremely long post, but hang with me. Just a little bit more. I promise.

I felt this speech on a personal level. I found I could relate to it in ways I thought I would never relate to a speech like this. I am always trying to cover things up, because I am, like the speaker, one of those people who has a group of friends in FFA, and one out of FFA. They don’t overlap, and some of the people in one group don’t like people in the other group, and vise versa. I always feel like I can’t talk about one group around the other, and it always makes me feel a little weird not being able to share with the other group, but I didn’t realize just how much until she was talking about her own canvas. It actually made me cry. Not only because I realized that it was affecting me more deeply than I thought, but because I no longer felt alone. I finally knew someone who understood me. Someone who was/had gone through the same thing I was. And I knew I was not the only one in that stadium that day that could relate to the speaker on such a deep and personal level. There were plenty of us, whether I could see them or not, I knew there were more like me out there in that crowd. But as of RIGHT NOW (1:42am 10/27/17) I vow to no longer cover things up. I will share my experiences with both groups, even if I lose friends. I can’t continue to cover my canvas until there is nothing left except for a small corner of color. I can’t lead myself into a life like that. I wouldn’t wish that kind of life on my greatest enemy. I hope other people will take a vow with me. I hope someone out there gets something out of this post, like I got something out of the original speech. 

I will put the speech video here. Her speech starts at 1:00:00 and ends roughly at 1:27:00. :)