Shane Koyczan

Or so it must surely seem to Shane Koyczan at times, a man whose poetry and prose has been celebrated the world over and whose incredible 2013 piece, ‘To This Day’, has now been watched over 18 million times on YouTube. The incredibly moving anti-bullying video is a vast collaboration of Koyczan’s voice and words and the animated efforts of a score of other artists. It has tuned countless people to his work, and while he may not have all the answers, he at least has some interesting questions.

“I think it’s opened people up to start exploring my work,” he considers. “They look for other videos online, they look for other albums, other books. There are a lot of people in the world out there looking for answers, and I guess some of them think that I might have some. I don’t know, I think I just have more questions. People do get something out of the work, and I write about a lot of different things. I write about politics, I write about death, I write about love – the major themes of the world.

“I think people sort of latched on to that particular piece at that particular time because it was becoming a big problem. I mean, that piece is a lot older than that video. It was written maybe three years prior to that, and had always been in the back of my mind to do something bigger with it. I felt like it deserved it, because every time I performed it at a school or a show, wherever, people really reacted to it. A lot of people went through something like that or are going through something like that. I think that was the most rewarding part for me, because all of a sudden I didn’t feel so alone.

“When I wrote that piece, it came from a very lonely place,” Koyczan continues, chuckling. “I wrote about two other people I went to school with who got teased and bullied pretty mercilessly, so it was pretty amazing to see all these people around the world connect with that piece. To raise their hand and say, ‘Yeah, me too.’”

Before reading any further, if you haven’t already experienced ‘To This Day’ (or its accompanying TED Talk, ‘For The Bullied And The Beautiful’), get thee to YouTube. It’s OK, we’ll wait.

The subject matter and sheer vibrancy of his words aside, what makes the video so compelling is the talent of its animators, and the hair-raising intensity of Koyczan’s own performance. There are countless spoken word artists out there whose sentiment on the page is not quite realised within their delivery (not that they should be dissuaded from trying). Koyczan speaks his words into thrumming life, though the root of this talent is not entirely benign.

“For me, I think the reason I’m able to do it is because I’m able to overcompensate for something that I’m not able to do in my personal life. They say when a person loses a sense, another sense improves. For me, I grew up very uncomfortable with my physical self. Because of that, I think I was able to overcompensate my emotional self. That was one of the trade-offs. But even in having that sort of ability, I still struggle with personal relationships because I’m not able to do it one-on-one. I can talk to a room full of strangers, but in an intimate, close setting? I’ve been in relationships where it’s become a point of turmoil, where they’ll come to a show and say, ‘How can you say all those intensely personal things to a room full of fucking strangers, and you can’t have a conversation with me?’ And I don’t have an answer for that. I didn’t develop that social skill in school because I was constantly being discluded from everything. I was constantly being told to keep quiet, that what I say and think doesn’t matter. You hear that often enough, it becomes a complex. It worms its way inside you.”

If Koyczan has not been able to exorcise his demons, then he’s at least become capable of sharing them and making their weight that much more bearable. As long as people keep finding some shape of solace in his work, he will keep exploring, keep seeking out our common worth.

“I have all those questions too and I’m trying to find answers, and I think the more you expose yourself to that world you can get bits of answers. You might not get the whole answer, but you can get bits from here and there that then make sense to you. Because the answer really only has to make sense to you. There’s no way you’re going to find an answer that makes sense to everyone. Whatever question they have, there’s a particular answer for that, and they’ll find it on their own path depending on how much of a satellite they’re willing to become to pick up on those signals.”

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