Love & belonging
Perth-Andover Winter Carnival Pageant
Mackayla O’Keefe brought the house down at the Winter Carnival Pageant in Perth-Andover with this beautiful, heartfelt and genuinely expressed speech about love and belonging.
Honorable Judges, fellow contestants and members of the audience. My name is Mackayla O’Keefe and my speech is about Love and Belonging.
Everyone needs and wants love. Everyone needs to experience a sense of belonging. To love and to be loved is the greatest feeling and the strongest human need. No matter where you are on the Earth, no matter what your culture, your religion, your politics, no matter what your lifestyle is or your abilities are – we all want the same thing. NO matter how a person looks, speaks, thinks, behaves, or moves, – we are born into the world to spend our lives in search for love and belonging.
What happens along the way???…..well……..everyone’s story is different.
For me, not having friends for some years in my life was awful. According to many people, I behaved badly. It seems everyone thought that I behaved this way because there was something wrong with me. Now I know that there was nothing wrong with me apart from the awful feeling of not having friends – and this hurt so much that I acted out. But the more I acted out, it seemed the more people kept their distance from me and made fun of me.
And then one day about two and a half years ago, a woman came to my house to help me out with one of my so-called problems. After five or ten minutes, she decided that she did not want to do this work with me so she got someone else to do that job. Instead, she invited me to her son’s birthday party so that I could meet him and his friends.
This circle of friends call themselves the Inclusion Ambassadors and they welcomed me. I was so excited to be able to be myself and not be judged or made fun of. And that’s when I started to feel, that -at last – I belonged to something.
This group of friends are on a mission to make people aware about the importance of inclusion. Inclusion means getting to know a person before making up your mind about them. Inclusion is about respecting people’s differences and accepting people for who they are.
Feeling included can save a person’s life. Feeling excluded can end your life – or at least make you really sick or get you into trouble with the law.
Feeling part of this circle of friends took a while to get used to. It took a while for me to feel like they wanted me in the group and to be part of their lives. The feeling of belonging was new and strange to me. It turned out that they really did want me to be part of their circle and I made some really good friends. I always feel welcome with open arms.
Love and belonging for me is having people I can talk to and be myself around them. Feeling I can trust people not to judge me, make fun of me or call me names makes love and belonging possible. Trust involves knowing that even when you disagree, you can work things out in a respectful way. Trust also means that a true friend will keep things private between you when you ask them to.
So here I am, standing before you. Making new friends and acquaintances, experiencing new things and enjoying life as a teenager should.
And always remember – Differences are what makes living in the world interesting. We all have something to learn from each other. Without differences, we wouldn’t learn anything new. THANK YOU.
