thoughts on being a graduating senior in the year 2017
Seventeen. I remember looking at the ‘17’ in front of our school-issued usernames as we logged onto our computers in the lab for the first time, wondering what it meant. Some kid next to me wondered aloud. Our teacher smiled.
“It’s the year you graduate from high school, hon.”
Oh. 2017. Two-o-one-seven. Two thousand seventeen. That was incomprehensible, intangible to my first-grade mind. It seemed so… distant. So far away.
And yet I sit here, four days before I graduate, with my cap and gown in hand. It hits me, not like a ton of bricks because I think that’s overstating it, but more like a slap to the face. I realize that that simile isn’t much better, visually, but my point is, it happens so fast and unexpected that you’re shocked for the first five seconds, and then the feeling kicks in. It feels so real. It feels so final. Four years of overzealous club participation, late night “studying,” friend group switching, friend group drama, spontaneous boba runs, four years of walking into fifth or sixth period late with Chipotle in hand, four years of that one class you can’t stand (it’s different every year), four years of pep rallies (in which you always think your freshman year commissioners were the best until it gets to your senior year, and then of course the seniors who are pep rally commissioners are the Greatest Of All Time), four years of dark circles so dark you’re afraid they might be permanent, four years of slaving away for the College Board, four years of high school, four years — and it all ends like this.
Just a word of warning: I don’t actually know where I’m going with this. All I know is that I’m not trying to spout fake bullshit about how you can achieve your dreams if you try hard enough or how I don’t regret anything because all my mistakes were experiences I needed. Some were, yes, but not all of them. I know so many people say that, high school valedictorians, commencement speakers, but it gets to a point where you’ve heard it so many times that, like a wave of banal platitudes crashing against your tired mind of a shore, you’re used to it. You aren’t inspired by it. I’ll get to that later.
Let’s start with the simple stuff. Do I have regrets? Many actually. And some aren’t from too long ago. I regret letting loose a bit too early in second semester of senior year. I regret causing my parents to spend money on a private counselor. I regret being shit at balancing my internet to real life ratio. I regret not getting the grades I know I could’ve. I regret forcing a toothbrush down my throat whenever I eat something I don’t think I deserve. It’s all too late now, but it’s hard to forget. It’s probably bad that I feel that way about a lot of things. And yet, c’est la vie. I’ll always have that pang of guilt, regret, could’ve-would’ve that stings a little too much when I think about it a little too hard.
Two-thousand-seventeen. This school year has been interesting, to say the least. Never in a million years, would I have imagined that I’d participate in a simulation of a presidential debate in which the two candidates were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Never would I have imagined that I’d have to take an AP Gov final the day after Trump was elected president. Never would I have imagined that I’d get to see Mike Pence give the tie-breaking vote to confirm Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education, live, in class. I’m realizing that I’m going to spend my undergraduate years under a Trump presidency. If this sounds like it’s getting political, I guess you could say that it is. But I don’t see it as political. Or, rather, I see this as something more than political. I see this as everyday life. I see this as decisions that affect me, as a student going to college this fall, as the daughter of immigrants, as an Asian American whose achievements are constantly undermined due to the model minority myth. Pray tell, how do we have a head of Education who has never set foot in a public school before getting the job? Who doesn’t advocate for equality among schools? Who thinks that schools should be allowed to have guns on campus for “potential grizzlies”? Like, what? It’s all quite troubling to me, as it is, I’m sure, to many others.
I recognize that I’m in a position of privilege in which I can afford to actually think about these things. What I mean is, I have the luxury of being able to engage in discourse, present my opinion, and devolve into Mobius-strip-like digressions, because at the end of the day, I am not a part of the people who are hurt most by these changes. I live in the OC, for God’s sake. Our county went blue this past election for the first time in over fifty years. I have never gone hungry (and if I have, it was my own choice. I had a choice.) I have never known suffering. Not in the way that others do. I know many things are relative, but my life, all things considered, has been comfortable. My parents complain about taxes, as most middle class families are won’t to do, but we own property other than the house we live in, which speaks volumes about what we have and what we don’t have. And I’m realizing we have a lot. I take it for granted a lot of the time. I’m realizing I shouldn’t.
Remember when I said I wasn’t going to spew bullshit about how you can achieve your dreams if you work hard? I’m still not going to. The truth is, there are so many factors that contribute to an individual’s success, it’s highly unlikely that they achieved their goal through hard work alone. We don’t like to hear this because it takes away the credit from ourselves and attributes it to intangible things like luck and coincidence and fate and even to others, but it is most definitely true. This is why I find it bizarre when people hold examples of successful CEO’s, TV hosts, entrepreneurs, etcetera, as reasons why another person who isn’t as successful in the same field is just lazy or unmotivated. America is not a meritocracy by any means. We’d like to think that it is, but it isn’t. So much about you is already determined before you even make a conscious decision. Your race, your class, your gender. School is probably the closest we’ll ever get to a meritocracy. Now we know why adults always say “Life’s not fair.” Nothing is fair, really, since not all of us begin at the starting line. Some have been born laps ahead, some miles behind.
But while I say this, I know that your race, class, and gender, does not consume your identity and life. Your collective experiences as an individual are both influenced by what you already are and what you choose to be. This year, my AP English Literature teacher showed our class a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, titled This Is Water, which he gave to a liberal arts college in 2005. The crux of This Is Water is this: the point of this education is not knowledge, but teaching you that you have the ability and the choice to be aware in the way you think.
The issue is not that we need to force society into total equity among our vast, diverse population (that would be nearly impossibly anyway), but that we need to acknowledge the differences between our starting points. It is incredible that some of us are even on our way to graduation today. For others, it’s a given. Those with this luxury, this opportunity would always do well to remember this. (I’m saying this like it’s easy. Let me be clear, it ain’t easy, it’s actually unimaginably hard to do it, day in and day out. Empathy is one of those things that seems like it should be easy, but when you go to make that decision between the comfort of your life that revolves around you and something else… well.)
This all sounds pretty rich coming from an Asian-American middle-class girl who’s lived in one city her whole entire life. But please don’t dismiss this as some emotion-pandering, moral-compass finger-wagging, check-your-privilege guilt-tripping kind of religious or spiritual chastising. None of this is about that. It’s about fighting our natural instinct to succumb to our own self-centeredness that none of us like to talk about. It’s about seeing. Like really seeing.
If we’re all here, at our high school graduation, it means that we’ve done it. We’ve somehow managed to fulfill society’s however many requirements needed to walk across that stage and collect a diploma. We’ve sat through enough classes, listened to enough lectures, done enough homework, panicked over enough exams, struggled through enough group projects to finally end this leg of the journey. Congratulations, class of 2017. Congratulations to us.
