Addressing the Class of 2023

Respectfully, sup B——! This is going to be the worst speech that you have ever heard in your life but let’s get into it.

 High school has been some of the hardest years of my life, so far. Probably some of your lives too. If I look back at the beginning of it all (all being high school), I was probably begging my parents to homeschool me and they were telling me, “No aparlin23, you need to experience high school. You need to live your life.” Which I do not agree with. High school is not me living life, me living life is reading a novel by my favorite author or having a picnic with my sister. Maybe it was good to experience high school because it’s out of my comfort zone but it is not the only thing that I am living for. My world has felt like it has revolved around school and talking about school for the past four years of my life and now that it’s over I don’t know what I’m going to do with my time or what I want to do in the future. The only thing that school has taught me about what I want to do with my future is all of the things that I would never consider doing. I am never going to be an English teacher, I am never going to be a doctor or a nurse, and I am never going to be a childcare provider. If you want your posterity to be in good hands then do not ask me to babysit. Seriously, if you want to have a family when you’re older I definitely suggest not ever leaving a child with me for longer than a few minutes at a time. It won’t end well for anyone.

We are told high school is supposed to be the time where we figure out who we are and what we want to do with our lives but all I have gathered from school is more questions. What do I want to be when I grow up? Am I going to keep any of my friends after high school? They say that you drift from the people you used to talk to in high school. Am I going to have anyone after it’s over? Will I be the same person that I am right now? Who am I right now? Will I be a good person when I’m older? God, I hope so. But I don’t have the answer to any of these questions and I am scared. Scared of the future and scared of what will happen when we walk out of these doors. Even though I was pretty scared to walk through these doors in the first place. Everything is so uncertain in the real world. We are no longer in the bubble that high school provided us. What are we going to do when we leave? Being here for so long has made it feel like high school is the only thing we live for and for the most part, it was. After we’re done, so many of us are going to be lost and not know what’s next. Where is life going to take us? Are we going to make it out in the real world? Maybe. Maybe not. Life’s a rollercoaster we never get off. But high school isn’t where everything begins and it isn’t where everything ends. We are all on this ride together. It’s like King Peppy said, “No troll left behind!”

We’ve all been through so much together, we’ve gone through each school year, each bout of drama, so so many mistakes, and even more firsts. And now we are going through our first major graduation (8th grade doesn’t count). We’re leaving with tons of us not knowing what we’re going to do yet but that’s fine because we have our whole lives to figure it out, whether it be together or not we’ll all be doing this at the same time. We’ll all be discovering ourselves and figuring out who we are. High school is not when we learn who we are or start living but it is a major part of our lives and definitely helps us learn some things about who we might become.

So to the class of 2023, I will probably never see any of you again but I hope none of you peaked in high school (I know I haven’t) and I hope you figure out what your role is in this world.

“Megan’s Graduation | 2” by Will Folsom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.