Malcolm Hollett

nterview by Shaina Zaccagnino | Submitted by Malcolm Hollett
Photography by Joanne E Coady &
​Chris Crockwell, Crockwell Photography 
St. John's, NL Canada  

I was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Growing up, I played a lot of sports and even more instruments (some of which I still play), but everything flew out the window when, on a family ski trip in 2015, I broke my back, paralyzing me from the waist down. To say the local hospitals didn't have much relevant experience, would be a gross understatement; I was told I was the fourth pediatric spinal cord injury in over 15 years... I was also told I would likely never walk again. 

Soon, I found myself, and my parents, on a plane to the Shriners Hospitals for children - Philadelphia, where I would stay for an unknown amount of time. Here I worked and worked and worked, and despite this being a world hotspot for pediatric spinal cord injuries, I quickly distinguished myself as the hardest worker they had ever seen. 

The medical team at Shriners were unsure what, if any, recovery I’d make but were willing to do as much as possible.

I pushed my recovery constantly, always asking for more therapy, always doing more than asked and always working.

I returned to Newfoundland late August 2015 (6 months later) with my parents and a vow never to touch a wheelchair again. Walking was tough - I could barely go 100 feet without a break - but the prospect of not walking was even tougher.

I went to the United Nations for a youth assembly in the summer of 2016, the first ever delegate from my province. There, I received a standing ovation after telling of my recovery to date.

In June 2018, just before I graduated from high school, I gave a TEDx talk, which also received a standing ovation.

I have had a few other speaking engagements at Husky Energy Canada, The Newfoundland and Labrador Construction Association, Shriners NL and more.

This year, I am taking a year to focus on my recovery and rehab.  In addition to spending around 30+ hours a week training, both on my own and with my physiotherapist, I am a part of the paradigm hyperloop engineering team at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

 How did you recover from this injury so far? 

Well, here I was, a 14 year old kid, and I just woke up without a semblance of sensation or movement below my waist. Take this catastrophic situation and add the fact that the hospital back home had next to no experience with my type of injury and as you'd expect, you have a lot of guesswork to do.

I tried moving my legs one day: While nothing moved even the tiniest bit, I got this barely noticeable sensation as though some phantom limb, somewhere inside my legs, moved. Within all this Chaos, I suddenly had a glimmer of hope, something tangible to work with. Order.

I spent all my time trying to move my legs... When you really focus on a part of your body and let it take up every fragment of consciousness for long enough, you'd be surprised what you notice. I noticed so much I could have sworn I was going crazy, but then something worked. I got one of the muscles in my leg to move... And then came the battle of building muscle.

Within a month of unuse, my muscles degraded so much they were barely strong enough to twitch, let alone walk on. And strengthening a muscle too weak to even move, is no picnic.

At one point, I was rehospitalized for hypercalcemia. Spoiler alert: not fun. I could barely walk 50 feet, if you’d call it walking, and still used a wheelchair. Upon discharge though, I asked one of the nurses how never to get hypercalcemia again, half jokingly she said ‘walk more’... That was the last day I ever used a wheelchair… The best, and hardest undertaking of my life.

What was your time like at Shriners?

Shriners was incredible. From the moment we arrived, two weeks post-injury, we had a fully planned therapy program, several vital information packets nobody had even mentioned before, and seriously amazing food, via their world-class cafeteria (yeah, I'm not joking). They gave me 23 hours of therapy a week for the first two months at no cost, and pushed me almost as hard as I pushed myself; something no other hospital came close to. The resources, opportunities and home Shriners gave me was genuinely life changing, and without them, my recovery would have certainly looked a lot different.


What are you doing now?

I graduated high school in June, and am taking a year for rehab before university. I gave a Tedx talk just before graduation, which received a better reception than I ever dreamt, and have since been exploring the public speaking scene. I also work on the Paradigm Hyperloop engineering team at the university I’ll be attending.

My current physiotherapist is just as crazy as I am (albeit much more knowledgeable). With him I’ve been more driven and inspired than ever before. Recovery continues and nothing makes life meaningful like a challenge.

How did it get setup?
TEDx (as opposed to TED) is independently hosted, so the speakers for the event I was a part of were all chosen via application. The production itself was the fruit of many many volunteers’ hard work, as well as the financial support from sponsors and grants.


Where exactly is it?
A video of my talk can be found here: https://youtu.be/a_Qa9yGvxAM
In terms of where I had to go to give the talk, it was actually held at a local BMW dealership (since BMW was a sponsor). The place closed down that day and was reskinned specifically for TEDx. We (and by we I mean me) hinted that giving us a few BMWs would be totally acceptable, if they felt so inclined… I don't think they felt so inclined.

How did you prepare for it?
In preparation for the talk, I essentially had three tasks: Write, Memorize and Practice.
Writing my talk was by far the hardest... TEDx had provided a speaking coach to help me prepare, and we brainstormed my talk for weeks, never really producing something we were happy with. Then, two weeks before the talk, my grandfather passed away and, not to be cliche, it sort of made me take things more seriously. I stopped nitpicking over every little detail and forced myself to just sit down and write until I had a finished talk. After several long days and late nights I had something I wasn't just satisfied with, but that I was proud of, and since I had just spent so much time in a short period working on it, the memorization was a breeze.
Then came practicing. This was a completely foreign process to me, and I had very little time to do it. I presented it a few times in front of people or in front of a mirror, like everyone and their grandma says to do, but what really did the most for me was walking around my room and speaking it, or more accurately, whispering it to myself on repeat… The biggest thing I was told to work on was speaking louder, so in hindsight, the whispering probably played a role in that...
Finally though, the night before the talk, my speaking coach picked me up and took me somewhere with the same layout as where the talk would be, and made me nail my presentation at least once before I was allowed to leave. That was so important, because it was then that we noticed several presentation flaws which could have thrown my whole talk, and promptly corrected then.

What was it like that day?
A sort of nervous calm came over me for most of the day which I wasn't expecting. I was taken aback by seeing how hard everyone involved in the production had worked, and a sort of confidence came over me that only grew as we got closer and closer to the talk.
I remember just minutes before I was supposed to be on stage, being in a small room practicing my talk and tuning it to such a degree, that in my final practice run, I brought myself to tears no less than three times. I was slightly afraid of breaking into tears on stage (and on two occasions during my talk I had to pause because I almost did), but the old anecdote about public speaking, “make them laugh, then make them cry, then make them laugh again”, made me feel good about having all that emotion, not bad.
Your heart always takes a leap when you see hundreds of people in a crowd all expectantly looking to you. I've spoken publicly about a dozen times now and that initial terror never fades from what I can tell. What does change is

What advice do you have for other teens aspiring to be public speakers?
My main piece of advice is to write - as a prerequisite. Everyone has innumerable interesting ideas, experiences and observations that they've picked up over the course of their life and that would be seriously beneficial to others. It's absurd though, how difficult it can be to articulate them properly if you've put no express effort into doing exactly that. Ideas are valuable, but fully formed ideas change the world. When you sit down with an idea and you write about it, you give it form, and when you have a couple of those fully formed ideas in your back pocket - with all the major angles considered, the reasoning sound and the contradictions nailed out - standing on a stage in front of a few hundred people is a picnic.

Okay, so now you've figured this much out, you have something to talk about so now what? Well, this part is less difficult than it seems. Sure, huge companies aren't going to pay you $50,000 right off the bat to speak for them, but there's all sorts of speakers conventions and organizations and groups just about everywhere that would love to have you speak. It usually takes no more than a few Google searches or talking to 4 or 5 people who have a friend of a friend who knew a speaker to find opportunities like you wouldn't believe. Sometimes you need to just put yourself out there, apply to those things you think you have no shot at, reach out to those people you think may not even see your message, photo bomb the people doing a professional photoshoot at Peddler's Village (which how I got into this magazine) and you won't succeed every time, but the times you will are astonishingly more frequent than you'd think.

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