Many amazing people applied to be the school valedictorian, but I was not selected. Thankfully, many of my good friends made it to the following rounds and I am so happy for them! That being said, this is my personal take on the graduation experience, an open letter to the graduating class.
You are corralled into a crowded gymnasium.
If you’re lucky enough to have a last name near the top of the alphabet, you will not have to wait hours until your name echoes over the speaker. There is cheering. You walk across the stage, hoping you don’t trip over your long gown. 10 seconds pass. You see the faces of smiling administration and teachers as you approach the principal. He shakes your hand firmly and whispers a “Congratulations” in your ear. 20 seconds pass. You mouth a “Thank you”, grab your certificate and walk off the stage (careful again not to trip and potentially become the laughingstock of the school). Tick-tock, 30 seconds on the clock. Your 12 years of school have been condensed into 30 seconds.
Congratulations, you have now graduated.
How do you feel?
Perhaps it’s like in the movies: There is a countdown of beeps as a highlight reel of your life starts rolling. The background fades to a blurry white and there is a swell of inspirational music as you see yourself as a chubby baby, babbling and bashing your toys against the ground. You see yourself crawl, then take your tentative first steps, and eventually you start running headlong into childhood. Bursts of prismatic rainbow hues color seep into your life: the golden sunlight, the verdant grass and the sapphire water. Echoes of laughter, exciting adventurous and embarrassing mishaps.
Then comes your first major obstacle.
The world becomes duller, more muted. The music darkens. Your straight path starts being littered with potholes, warping into winding twists and turns. Friends come in and out of contact, like waves on a shore. Everything becomes blurred, with brief snapshots remaining in your memory. Smiling, crying, sighing. Optimistic, lost, tired. It is a tug-of-war and you’re in the middle, being pulled in opposite directions by internal and external forces. Just when you think you’re going to sever and unravel, you keep holding on.
The camera pans to a train, rushing along under a subway tunnel.
As you glance out the window, the darkness is punctuated by lights, like twinkling stars in the night sky. Familiar faces flash by, everyone that has provided you guidance in your life. Family and friends, adults and children. Snippets of their voice float by: words of encouragement, words of understanding and words of hope. You see all of the conscious choices and strokes of luck that it took you to get here. All these images and sounds build layer upon layer until it reaches a deafening crescendo.
Then as it reaches its climax, the light at the end of tunnel grows from a pinprick until it fills your entire vision. The train shoots out of the tunnel with a roaring whoosh, before subsiding into serene silence. You hear your own breathing, in and out.
There is peace and clarity.
Your eyes readjust to the scene around you, no longer lost in a daydream. You hear your parents and supporters calling you over, their eyes brimming with pride. You embrace them – the action speaking what cannot be expressed through words.
The rest of the day flies by.
Filled with speeches, good times with close friends, and pictures that you’ll post later on social media afterwards. Even though graduation is once-in-a-lifetime experience, it is just a formality. Following tradition, you wear funny hats with the stringy stuff called tassels and you get to hold a fancy roll of paper. Maybe you’ll have a extravagant banquet and dance late into the night, lost in a sea of flowing dresses and sharp tuxedos, pulsing music and kaleidoscopic color. When you wake up the next morning, all the pomp and circumstance is over and it is just a normal day.
The real graduation happens after the ceremony and the celebrations.
It hits you. It is when you are alone and you start contemplating life after high school. It is when you have to come to terms that you’ll be leaving adolescence soon and have to face the responsibilities of adulthood. A bittersweet concoction, half anxious excitement about the future, half heavy sadness about the present. You are simultaneously going too fast and too slow in your life – split between wanting to freeze this moment and wanting to keep moving forward.
One day, you won’t be scrambling to class when the bell rings. One day, you won’t be staring at the clock, waiting for class to end. One day, you won’t be chatting with friends while walking down the hallways. One day, you won’t be here anymore. It is not the physical building that you’ll miss, but the people and memories that live and breathe inside its walls.
Despite the challenges you may have experienced in the time period you were here, there is a part of you that doesn’t want to leave. Perhaps when you are forced to leave anyway, there will be a part of you that remains there – your own little mark on the school. You become someone else’s memory and they are the ones sad to see you go, not the other way around.
Eventually, you quiet your thoughts.
The process may take days, weeks, even months. Your childhood as a caterpillar seems distant. You are no longer inching around in life, experiencing things for the first time. You wrapped yourself up in silk, acting as protection and an opportunity for reflection. In the darkness of the cocoon, you decided what you wanted to become. Little by little, you broke from the comfortable cocoon of being a teenager and emerged as a butterfly. Still delicate, but imbued with a new dignity and determination. A metamorphosis, the growth from one stage of life to the next.
Perhaps you choose to ride the flow of the wind, or maybe you set out to carve your own path in the world. Wherever you want to go is your own choice. After all, you have your own wings now. Spread them and fly.
Congratulations, you have now graduated.
