Last year, I delivered my 5th TEDx talk live at the TEDxUIUC live event on April 22nd, 2024, at the Lincoln Hall of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
The event was themed “Odyssey” and featured six other speakers: Christine Lewington, Hema Reddy, Jack Fusco, Nathaniel Provencio, femdot., and Joe Simonetta, each sharing their empowering journeys that led them to the wonderful work they do today.
It was a meaningful experience and so rewarding, after I realized the personal impact it had on many members of the audience.
You can watch my TEDx talk about Parts Poetry on YouTube, but I decided to also share my TEDx script with you below – just as I wrote it before I delivered it live to the audience.
TEDx Talk Transcript – Wounded to Whole: Love Suicidal Thoughts Through Parts Poetry | Elayna Fernández | TEDxUIUC Salon
Nota Luctuosa: Ha fallecido en Ocoa, la niña Elayna Fernández, sus restos están siendo velados en la Funeraria local.
This was the daily verse that started the most important quest of my life.
Little Elayna Fernández has died in the city of San José de Ocoa, her remains are being laid to rest at the local Funeral Home.
I was only five years old and my deepest desire was to die.
I heard so many times: You deserve to suffer… you shouldn’t even be alive! A part of me believed it. The voices of the people around me became the voices in my head.
So I fantasized about dying… Every. Single. Day.
And, at night, I would make sure everyone was asleep so I could write about my death until I collapsed…. I wrote it in the blank spaces of my Bible… as if to cry out to God in prayer that it would come true.
Death seemed like the only escape from the horrors I experienced.
But my heart sank when I’d open my eyes early in the morning, and I was still alive …and in trouble again, because I was too
Dramática
Trágica y
Emocional
Dramatic. Tragic. Emotional.
I was accused of seeking attention…
And guess what?
It was true.
Like everyone in this world… Like YOU
I wanted to be … SIGNIFICANT.
But soon I learned that showing my pain didn’t work… No one wanted to talk about pain or poverty.
One day, sitting in front of our 12” black and white TV set, crushing on El Príncipe de la Colina, the dreamy love interest in my favorite anime, when I heard him say:
“Eres mucho más linda cuando te ríes que cuando lloras”
“You are much prettier when you smile than when you cry.”
And I’d always hear las señoras respetables – you know…the most well-regarded ladies in town say – “calladita te ves más bonita.” “When you’re quiet, you look more beautiful.”
Smile in Silence.
I wasn’t considered pretty to begin with, and the odds were not in my favor.
But one day, after walking several kilómetros to the library, I came across self-help books that taught me the secret to “make friends and influence people:”
Smiling …and Suppressing…
I learned that if I dismissed, downplayed, and denied my pain, I would be … acceptable.
And if you’re honest with yourself right now… you learned that too.
And so I realized there were two ways to feel significant even though I was not pretty enough.
Being smart… and being successful.
I see some of you can relate…
And so I did what we’ve been told is the sane thing…
To attach our identity and worth to possessions, position, and performance.
And that’s where I was at age 13… pushing myself, proving myself, and people-pleasing…
When the thoughts of suicide turned into suicidal behavior.
Because… I had notebooks filled with positive thinking, roses, and butterflies … Yes, literal butterflies.
So I didn’t have any outlet for the darkness that often overcame me.
Scratch that…
The darkness that often overcomes me.
Yes, over 3 decades later, I still struggle with these thoughts…
Only now, I give myself permission to write about them, like I did as a little girl, and to give my suicidal parts a voice…
I have notebooks filled with suicidal thoughts, thorns, and bats… Don’t worry … Just figuratively this time…
Because suicidal thoughts are a cry for help
And thorns are a protective mechanism
And bats… their role in nature is essential to many ecosystems – and they’re cute if you look a little closer…
And what I discovered is our quest to fix, numb, and mask our pain is keeping us stuck in it.
You are not too emotional
You are not too dramatic
You are not too tragic
You just have some parts that need a little attention, recognition, and validation.
Parts that you’ve been burying for years in your quest to be acceptable, and hopefully even significant …
These parts carry rage, fear, shame, hurt, and extreme sadness they need your help to release.
And you can give them a voice through poetry. I call it Parts Poetry.
I didn’t know it as a little girl…at least not consciously.
But writing my death announcement, obituary, and eulogy and writing about my desire to rest in peace through death were all ways in which I told the story of the most wounded parts of myself and gave them attention, recognition, and validation.
My poetry didn’t just help me survive… It gave me a place in the world where all of me was acceptable…so I could finally feel significant.
When we validate our disowned parts, we can turn our wounds into wholeness.
When I wrote my first poetry book, it didn’t start as a “bestseller project.” I wasn’t even sure if I was going to share my poems with anyone other than my daughters.
I got up every morning at 5 a.m. when everyone else was asleep, sat on my couch, with a cup of warm herbal tea, ready for my date with pain.
I started an inner conversation with different younger versions of myself,
1- I apologized for neglecting them for so long…
2- I let them know I was:
excited to know them,
willing to understand their role in helping me cope, and
ready to help them tell their stories.
As I listened with compassionate curiosity, I wrote poems about those stories.
Stories like being in a coma, being kidnapped, raped, and almost beaten up to death, and so many more stories of violence and invalidation I hadn’t fully processed yet.
I learned how to converse with those parts from the countless crisis counselors I have chatted with over the years, whose attention, recognition, and validation helped me stay alive.
With each poem I wrote, I shed a sea of salty tears… and the sense of relief and self-acceptance was like nothing I experienced before.
And I want that experience for you.
Expressive writing is one of the easiest ways to process your pain. And maybe one of the cheapest, too!
As you write poetry, you can give a voice to the thoughts, feelings, and memories that might feel too scary to share with anyone else.
The pain might feel too raw or speaking about it might seem too taboo or too heavy, because of the stigma, shame, and harmful stereotypes in society.
As a word nerd, I loved discovering that, in Chinese, the word poem is a combination of two characters: word and temple.
A poem is a sacred healing ritual through words.
It’s a safe space where every part is welcome to show up as-is.
You can be tragic, dramatic, and over-the-top emotional – whether it’s a pleasant or painful emotion and just bask in it.
My personal experiences with poetry have helped me live through severe depression and complex post-traumatic stress disorder because it gives me the courage to become an empathetic witness to myself.
And I’m not alone in this experience.
“Research shows the positive effects of poetry therapy for Veterans, including [those] experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder.”
I’ve read so many inspiring stories of veterans who found meaning and purpose in their pain through poetry.
And because I’m a musical theater geek, let me tell you about Bandstand, a Tony award-winning show set in 1945, which explores this beautifully – as one of the characters writes poetry to cope with the aftermath of war. I promise I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s one of my favorite lines:
“They’re just little poems, but writing them helps me get through it all.”
Through it all refers to grief, guilt, shame, depression, addiction, and suicide. There’s nothing little about that!
Can you already see how poetry can be good for our mental health?
But wait… there’s more!
I’m a partner and contributor to the work my dear friends at the American Academy of Pediatrics do to prevent and buffer Adverse Childhood Experiences – ACEs. In 2021, they published a study showing the therapeutic power of poetry.
A few dozen hospitalized children received a poetry-writing kit, with paper, pens, markers, and writing prompts, as well as some poems to read. The findings indicate that poetry helped them navigate challenging emotions, reducing fear, sadness, anger, worry, and even fatigue. It also helped them cultivate self-reflection.
There’s evidence that the simple and plain language of poetry “speaks to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness,”
Proverbs and verses have been helping people get through it all since the beginning of time.
I want to emphasize an important lesson we can learn here. Poetry is accessible to everyone.
Even though I started writing autobiographical poetry as a little girl, writing poetry in English as an adult felt daunting. A part of me was worried that I wouldn’t do it right…and another part of me felt a valid fear that bringing back past trauma would intensify the hopelessness, powerlessness, and emptiness that came with it…
But I remembered how in writing about my death as a child, I got to imagine that I mattered. I wrote about how loved I had been, what a difference I had made in the world, and how many people mourned my loss and showed up to my funeral.
Because poetry is a place where reality and imagination collide, hope and despair can coexist, painful and pleasant emotions can have a voice… without judgment … or room for misunderstanding.
And what’s liberating is that… there are no rules for art…
You can give yourself permission to write what comes to your heart, using any form or style, in the first or the third person, present tense or past tense… sharing your truth in your unique way.
Oh… and I better say this. You don’t have to get up at 5 am to do it… unless you want to, of course.
We write, not to fix or ease our pain, but to feel it.
And we’ve all experienced emotional pain – I always say that “pain is the common thread of humanity.” And I believe the reason we all experience pain is because…
Pain demands presence. And in presence, we find love.
And isn’t that the ultimate significance?
It goes beyond anything we can achieve or acquire.
That’s why, for over a decade, I have been helping others process their pain through words, creating safe spaces for people all over the world where smiling is optional and there’s no room for suppression. I’ve witnessed them as they courageously give a voice to versions of themselves that couldn’t make sense of what happened, failed to find the words, or just didn’t feel acceptable… and I’ve witnessed them as they emerge with a new sense of inner peace, freedom, and worth.
In sharing our lived experiences on our own terms, we find that wisdom that El Príncipe de la Colina didn’t know:
There’s enough room for smiling AND crying – and there’s beauty in both. It’s not about smiling through the pain, but about being present with it so we can genuinely smile again.
And that there’s beauty in being calladita, only when we choose to be.
The paradox of the epic adventure we call life is that we spend much of it adapting in the search for acceptance outside of ourselves, and the only way to feel significant is to return to our truest and most divine nature.
My invitation to you today is to start your own parts poetry practice, setting aside just a few minutes each day to be present with the sensitive parts within you that want to be felt, heard, and known – and to voice their sacred stories through words.
And if you choose to share some of your poetry, your vulnerability will liberate others, because dramatic, tragic, and emotional words are not only transformative and life-saving… They bring people together. I see this in my private community every day.
So, I will leave you with this mantra that I share with the younger versions of myself, and that I hope is in my eulogy… don’t make yourself wrong for seeking recognition, attention, and validation. Make yourself whole by finding them within.
What is your main take away from my Parts Poetry talk?
Let me know if you have any questions about how to start your own Parts Poetry practice. It is my prayer that this talk inspires you to love all your parts through poetry.
Founder of the Positive MOM® and creator of the S.T.O.R.Y. System: a blueprint to craft and share powerful stories that will transform your results and help others do the same. Dr. Elayna Fernández is a single mom of 4, an award-winning Storyteller, Story Strategist, and Student of Pain. She’s a bestselling author, internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, and 5x TEDx speaker. She has spoken at the United Nations, received the President’s Volunteer Lifetime Achievement Award, and was selected as one of the Top Impactful Leaders and a Woman of Influence by SUCCESS Magazine. Connect with Elayna at thepositivemom.com/ef and follow @thepositivemom. To receive a gift from Elayna, click HERE.
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