Forward
This is my valedictorian speech delivered on June 13, the day of graduation. I treated it as a sort of literary work—something meant to be reviewed and reread in the future. Hence, I freely employed references to poetry, music, and novels, as well as personal references to my high school experience.
I hope any reader of this article will find it amusing, perhaps even inspiring.
“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to succeed.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I learned through a Google search last night that the Valedictorian is meant to represent their entire class, I realized that I might have started a bit too late. But then I also realized that this exact strategy of thriving under a deadline is what got me the title of valedictorian in the first place, I became much more assured.
You have many questions. Like, what’s going to happen to me? Am I just another brick in the wall? There’s a deadline to confirm college offers? And, am I seriously going to graduate single? Still have until tonight…
Being here is an honor. Seriously. It feels great to have the complete attention of teenagers that have an average attention span of about half an Instagram reel. That’s power you can’t buy. In all honesty, I give my sincerest gratitude to those who have supported me over the years—my parents, the Pomona Math Department, the cross country team, the rock climbing club, the EZLN Claremont division, Grauze, and so much more.
I know I cannot represent the class of 2024. The valedictorian title drives you into an academic isolation, not into the shared experiences of our class. But I can at least attest personally to how I felt, and what I experienced that connects us.
We all had a rough start due to COVID. For me, this was especially acute coming from a completely different culture with absolutely no friends nor family connections. I was struggling with meaning. I was unable to feel the shades, tones, and variations of life due to my social anxiety. I was driving on towards death through the cooling twilight, when I realized a truth: complacency is perhaps the greatest vice to exist.
As Steve Jobs once said in his commencement speech at Stanford, death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. What I want to add is this: always doubt the source of your happiness. Happiness can be deceptive. Not critically thinking about what makes you happy can lead you into an insidious complacency, a sort of contentment that broods mediocrity and pollutes the change agent of life.
Losing your complacency, on the other hand, is like fighting your best friend in a pit: you are worried about a brusque disruption, afraid that you’ll see him in a different light. It’s an overcoming—of fear, of the funkiness of nature, of the status quo that seeks to suck you into inactivity.
While writing this speech I had a tremendous breakdown. All four years of laughter, frustration, friendship, homework, more homework, silliness, and love flowed across my mind like an endless torrent. But it does end. Everything does. At some point, nostalgia will replace this period of our lives. And then, the abstraction of nostalgia, stripped of its emotional connections. Finally, oblivion.
I felt helpless. I can never stop the drought. Fear was shown to me in a handful of dust.
I rose. I thought about the present. How wide it was, how deep it was, and how much was mine to keep. Even if eternity is denied to me in all its possible shapes and forms, I can at least get up, re-hash my motivations, and go about in my struggle towards the heights at the still point of the turning world. I felt better. I felt the procreant urge of the world.
Graduating class of 2024, I hope that you will find solace from eternal oblivion in your fight against the present, against the deafening complacency, against the silent world. We are all accidents waiting to happen.
Keep yourself safe, glory to Yazzy Nation, read Bordiga, Shantih.
References & notes
- Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”
- Conan O’Brien’s 2002 Harvard commencement speech.
- Sylvia Plath’s journals and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
- Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech and Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
- Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
- T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “Burnt Norton.”
- Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, and Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
- Radiohead’s “There, There.”
- Amadeo Bordiga and the repeated “Shantih” closing of The Waste Land.