The Gift of What's Missing | Ilyas Al Hashedi | TEDxTheArdeeSchoolNFC
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvLg4gL_7o8 Video ID: mvLg4gL_7o8 ============================================================ Transcriber: Bettina Gramalla Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka My name is Ilyas, and I’m in year six. Today I’m going to talk to you about what we gain from what we lose. When I look back on my 11 years of life, it never feels like 11 years. It feels like five different lives. I’ve lived in five countries across borders and carried my story in a suitcase heavier than my age. Although adventure can be exciting, joining new schools, discovering new cultures, and making new friends, in reality, this means that I’ve said goodbye more times than I can count. People often ask me, “Where’s your dad’s name on your ID card? Why does it say ‘NA’?” I always answer differently, but for me, “NA” doesn’t stand for “not applicable;” it stands for “not available.” Not available at my first football game, not available when I won gold at sports day, and not available to help me with this speech. People often ask me, “Don’t you miss what you’ve lost?” And my answer is, “Yes, every single day.” I miss having a dad, and I miss sharing my life with my sister. But here’s the strange thing about absence. It leaves an empty chair. Yes, but it also leaves space. Space to learn resilience, space to grow independent, and space to redefine family, not just by blood, but by love. Space can feel frightening at first, like something is missing. But sometimes it’s in that space where we discover our true strength. Space is not just a gap. It can be a gift, if we choose to fill it with growth. And then there's hardship. Hardship is heavy, but for me, it looks like war in Yemen, which forced us to leave home. And now it’s like watching my mom work every single day to provide me with all of this. I sit in classrooms where many around me have never had to lose, never had to flee, or never had to start over. But I don’t sit in envy; I sit in gratitude because my story may have been hard, but it’s mine, and it’s taught me that my hardships have given me strength. Because what we lose doesn’t only take; it gives. Gratitude doesn’t erase the pain, but it changes how I carry it. Instead of asking, “Why me?” I’ve learned to ask, “What can this teach me? Can this loss in some way become a gain?” We often measure our lives by what we have, but what if the most powerful forces shaping us aren’t what we possess, but what we lack? Now, many of you here will have faced challenges, maybe not war or separation, but maybe it was failing a test; maybe it was losing a friend, or maybe it was not getting picked for that team. In fact, the question isn't whether hardship will come. The question is: What will you do with it when it does? Will you let it break you? Or will you let it build you? Once in a while, we all need a storm to clear the sky, and the hardest lessons are the most valuable. So maybe the gift of what’s missing is that it shows us who we really are when everything else is stripped away. And sometimes what’s missing can become the very thing that makes us whole. Thank you, everyone, for listening to my speech, and I’d like to thank Mr. Nitin for mentoring me throughout this process.