WINCHESTER — Most people probably don’t think of middle schoolers as a prime audience for serious, important conversations.
Professional mental health speaker Donovan Taylor Hall disagrees.
In his presentation to Daniel Morgan Middle School’s seventh graders on Friday, Hall said that the organization he works for, Active Minds, used to only work with college students “because they didn’t think that high school could handle this kind of stuff.”
“And then I came along and said, ‘Let’s talk to middle schoolers about that,’” he said. “And they said, ‘Middle schoolers definitely cannot handle this stuff.’ I don’t believe that’s true.”
On the contrary, Hall told the students that he believed some of them could truly handle and appreciate the conversation he was going to facilitate.
“Some of of you are going to learn something that is literally going to change your lives,” he said.
Hall, a former middle school teacher, is a youth advocate who travels the world speaking about positive youth development and mental health.
He visited Winchester last week and spoke to both Daniel Morgan Intermediate School’s fifth and sixth graders and DMMS seventh and eight graders.
His time with seventh grade on Friday marked the last stop in a five-month tour spreading his message of positive self-image.
“I want you all to feel better, and I want you to do better,” Hall said.
Hall told the students about his experience with bullying, which started in elementary school and followed him to college, where he reached the lowest point in his life.
The bully he faced, however, came from within.
No one ever told him, he said, that he needed to pay attention to how he was treating himself.
“You are promised one relationship that will always be with you,” he told the students. “Not your friends, not your siblings, not your boyfriend or your girlfriend. It is you.”
Hall said he wanted the students to learn that now so that they don’t struggle with it later in life, as so many adults do.
In college, when Hall reached that low point, he sought help. During that time, he wrote a note to himself that he still carries today where he committed to being a good friend to himself.
“And so today, I want to offer that to you,” he said. “To be a good friend to yourself.”
Hall, at one point, went into the crowd to ask students what a good best friend is supposed to do.
Answers included letting you be yourself, being kind to you, showing up for you, noticing if you’re having a bad day and asking if you’re OK.
To be your own best friend, he said, that means treating yourself the same way you’d treat your best friend.
Like anything else you do in life that you want to get better at, like playing sports or a musical instrument, that takes practice, he said.
Hall told the students they must recognize when they’re being mean to themselves and change the narrative.
“You can always come back to this. You can always learn and practice self-talk no matter how old or young you are,” Hall said. “You all have been an excellent audience. I am so grateful for my time with you all.”
Hall said after his presentation that in working to connect with kids, it’s about meeting them where they are.
“The reason I’ve been able to be successful is because I just ask them, like, what do you struggle with? What do you want to learn? What are the problems that you think kids are going through?” he said.
A lot of times, if you ask adults and kids those same questions, the answers will vary, so Hall builds in time to meet with kids so that he can incorporate their concerns into his conversation with them at each school.
“I just think that young people are often just not listened to enough … There’s a weird division, in my mind, between adults and kids. … And I think adults could learn a lot from young people, and young people could be lifted up a lot if we would allow them to teach us and learn from them.”
Asked what he hoped kids would walk away from after hearing him speak, Hall said, “Just to treat themselves with compassion.”
“And that’s really what this work was about,” he said. “… I just want them to know that I see them, and I just want them to be good [to] themselves, because I just want them to feel better.”