Watch Jennifer Lopez’s Emotional MTV Movie & TV Awards Speech

Jennifer Lopez, who continues to impress as a best-selling singer and prolific actor, delivered a great speech while accepting the Generation Award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards in Santa Monica, California.

“You’re only as good as the people that you work with, and if you’re lucky, they make you better. And I have been very lucky in that regard,” Lopez began her speech during Sunday night’s award ceremony, which was hosted by Vanessa Hudgens.

Lopez then went into what she called, “a different list of thank-yous,” instead of the usual laundry list of names that sometimes gets trotted out during your average awards speech.

The singer said, “I want to thank the people who gave me joy, and the ones who broke my heart. The ones who were true and the ones who lied to me. I want to thank true love, and I want to thank the way that I lied to myself because that’s how I knew that I had to grow,” she said, her voice occasionally quavering.

“I want to thank disappointment and failure for teaching me to be strong, and my children, for teaching me to love,” Lopez continued, prompting a cheer from the crowd. “I want to thank all the people who told me to my face, or when I wasn’t in the room, that I couldn’t do this. I really don’t think I could’ve done it without you,” she said defiantly.

Lopez also thanked her fans for supporting her films, and her longtime manager, Benny Medina, while joking, “I don’t usually do this,” and also said he was “one person who believed in me from the beginning. And [from] the first time when I played him a raggedy little demo of a song that I wrote that day, he never let me stop believing in myself.”

The last bit of her speech was a very humorous cap to a touching reflection on her career. “And Ben and everybody at home, wait for me to have dinner I’ll be home by seven!” Lopez was likely referring to her fiancé, the actor Ben Affleck who she reconciled with almost 20 years after their highly-publicized relationship in the early 2000s.