My AtoZ inspirations: L - Ellen Lee Degeners, my go-to woman for compassion and fun.

Ellen Lee Degeneres

If I had one show to choose and one person to listen to who’d make me laugh my ass out, I’d go with this woman. She has taught me that you can be funny by being compassionate and not by teasing or bullying someone. She has taught me that you don’t need to be ashamed of who you are. She has taught me that putting others' needs above your own can change a person's day or even life.

She just makes life a lot better for those she hosts and those who watch her shows through compassion and laughter. She makes a personal effort to help those struggling financially, emotionally, and physically. I admire her love for herself, humanity and food.

She quotes, “The world is full of a lot of fear and a lot of negativity, and a lot of judgment. I just think people need to start shifting into joy and happiness. As corny as it sounds, we need to make a shift.”

Despite being criticized and discriminated for being gay, Ellen is one of the most loving and kindest persons the world has ever known. She understands what it means to be hated at and strives to live a life of compassion rather than hate towards others.

"It feels good to be chosen but there was a time in my life that I was not chosen... I think I wanna make sure that everyone knows that what makes you different right now, makes you stand out later in life. So you should be proud of being different, proud of who you are.", says Ellen. "For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity, and not to give into peer pressure. To try to be something that you're not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person. To contribute in some way."

After DeGeneres, 59, announced she was gay in April 1997, her sitcomEllen was canceled and she left Hollywood. “The bullying I endured [in Hollywood] after I came out made up for the lack of it during my childhood. I moved out of L.A., went into a severe depression, started seeing a therapist and had to go on antidepressants for the first time in my life. It was scary and lonely. All I'd known for 30 years was work, and all of a sudden I had nothing. Plus, I was mad. It didn't feel fair — I was the same person everyone had always known."

“It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far, where now marriage is equal under the law—just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago. Just how important it was not just to the LGBT community, but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister challenge our own assumptions, remind us that we have more in common than we realize, push our country in the direction of justice,” President Obama said while honouring her.

Ellen has gone through so much, yet her beliefs on compassion in the form of helping people, making people laugh and following veganism strikes a chord with me. She will be my go-to-woman to seek inspiration when it comes to compassion and fun.

And yet, today, every day, in every way, Ellen counters what too often divides us with the countless things that bind us together—inspires us to be better, one joke, one dance at a time.