In the Meantime: Deerfield's Graduation Speech

“I think,” she said simply, wringing her student-driver hands around the ten-and-two of the steering wheel, “I think that I am going to have road rage.”

I sat in the backseat of this newly proclaimed hell ride and prayed that the driving instructor might have something to say to counter this unfortunate decision. He took a breath—wait for it, I thought to myself, just watch what he’ll say—

“Keep right, then merge onto the highway.”

I’ve got to say, I had hoped for something different. Somehow the threat of an aggressive fifteen-year-old driver promising to cuss out other drivers didn’t really strike him as important. Thus we continued along Illinois highway 2-94—or, if you’re me up until several months ago, Illinois highway two hundred and ninety four.

It was here, plastered nauseously to the backseat of a lurching compact car, that I realized I was in the midst of a moment that defined the paradox of being a teenager. On the one hand, my peers and I clung to the idea that we were driving, we were in the throes of high school, we had older friends, we were mere years from college—basically, we were adults. On the other hand, we still tried to pass for 12 for the sake of cheaper movie tickets. We soaked up our youth in some moments, only to shun it during others. That was the beautiful thing about being a teenager—that is the beautiful thing, I should say. Logically, all of us have at least a year left of teenage ambiguity at our disposal. Ambiguity enough to dodge the binding commitment to who exactly we define ourselves as.

This was the question I feared most in college interviews. They are considered difficult for a number of reasons, but the list is topped by a nightmarish thing to consider:

“Who are you?”

I knew I would be asked the question, and yet, each time I was asked it, I drooled a little. So I would answer by regurgitating what my extracurricular commitments were, and if you asked me that question today, I might do the same thing. Which, I guess, makes me a hopeless case because, in about an hour, I will no longer attend Deerfield High School, and thereby will be, in one hour, currently uninvolved in any extracurricular activities. Welcome to my identity crisis.

I should be able to answer a question like that, because my entire life I’ve been told who I am. Please, we all have.  “You are a writer.” “You are an athlete.” “You should really go into politics.” “You are meant to be a musician.” We’ve all heard something of the like. Some of us have even convinced ourselves that it’s true, because high school was the opportunity to find out for ourselves. And so we have searched deep within to try and sort out what makes us individual and, if you’re anything like me, the search has yielded little that is substantial. In our four-year struggle to unearth precisely who and what are, we are faced still with that ever-present ambiguity. We are emerging from high school into a world obsessed with labels, and so we clamber to find the one that fits. But we realize, too, that the titles might end up a little bit like this: “You are meant to be a musician. You are also meant to be an athlete, a literary aficionado, a leader of some sort, and perhaps, at some point, involved in school politics. While you do all of this, try to be young, too.” You take all the millions, billions of conflicting teenage values bubbling within, at once juvenile and mature, and you get an abstract portrait. At this point, the big-ticket items that we’d like to proudly hand out as self-decided labels are all jammed together so that the words are hard to read.

So my friend says that she is going to have road rage. Here she is, self-proclaiming (for some reason) this unusual fate, clawing for an adult behavior in a way that seems, to me, teenage (and thereby, insane). And yet she drives on, confident, smiling, speeding a little, a permit-clad, road-rage filled, somewhat resolved individual. If there is a first step to the self-realization process, well, this might be it.

I attempted to start my own self-search two weeks before freshman year began. “You were always such a great swimmer,” said my mom. And so when August rolled around, I was off to my first four-hour practice to prove that title true.

I hadn’t been in the water more than thirty minutes before I scrambled out of the pool to call my mom—the “great swimmer” needed her inhaler.

When my mom arrived poolside, I literally began to sob with relief and disappointment. I was not a great swimmer; I was not even a good swimmer. As I fumbled to take my medicine, she comforted me, trying to relieve my panic. “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to come back tomorrow. And if you can’t get back in the water now, no one will blame you.” I had the opportunity to seize upon the ambiguity of my age; here was a question of whether I would revel in my adulthood and bear down on my commitments, or slide into the glimmer of childhood, where I was not expected to tough it out.

Probably because I had too much pride, I indignantly shook my head no and mentally prepared myself to return to what became my team. I learned that I wasn’t a “great swimmer” like I had been told. So, that label didn’t stick. But what took its place was the knowledge that I valued commitment. I had replaced a title with an idea—that seemed okay to me. And mature, too.

“Who are you?”

Well, I’m not the girl who broke a pool record at the most cutthroat meet of the year. I am, though, the girl who got back in the pool during practice, and that changed me. So the answerable question, perhaps, should be not “Who are you?” but instead, “what has defined you during your high school experience?”

Before you answer, though, I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the fourth down with seconds to go against Highland Park; it wasn’t the high note you sang on opening night; not check mate, not prom in April, not that paper you turned in late or that test you aced. Your high school experience likely was not defined by that perfect pirouette at halftime, or the spike that won you the game, or the way you were asked to homecoming. The shining moments were not the thirty seconds onscreen you shared with Endiskize, or the time you were interviewed on WDHS. Though those moments are immediately memorable in any individual’s mind, though they are the times that seem, according to any cliché, to be the climactic moments of your high school existence, it rings true that the most profound discoveries of self were made under what seemed to be trivial circumstances.

             Here’s what I mean. I was in the hall last year during second period, making last minute preparations for an English presentation. As I leaned against a few lockers, speaking anxiously with my group mates, a teacher I had come to know emerged from his classroom; unintentionally, we had been standing directly outside his door, and talking louder than might have been appropriate while classes were in session. He snaked his head out from behind the door, and—I’m not kidding—hissed at us. He scrunched his nose and bared his teeth, opening his eyes wide as he went hssssss. He smiled slyly before disappearing back into his classroom.

            My cheeks burned bright red as I realized that every senior in his class had their eyes fixed on us. My friends and I giggled with embarrassment, lowering our voices to avoid another encounter. But as the door clicked shut, I realized a few things about myself. For one, I was a loud talker. But the other, more important, was that I had the capacity to laugh at myself, to feel the hilarity in the most peculiar of situations. I valued that bizarre hissing experience—it exemplified the importance of academics, but also the fun spiritedness with which teachers and students interacted. It occurred to me then that Deerfield was a place that embodied the teenage ambiguity—there was the collision of sophistication and youth that dictated my search for self.

            And so we bask in these ambiguities. At once, we are children and adults. We are nearly graduated, straddling the line between high school and whatever the coming years bring for us: college, or travel, or work, or the military. We carry with us random vignettes of peculiar life lessons and solid ideas that we value as individuals. Some of us are prepared to venture headlong into the uncertain future, determined to reach whatever destination because they are bone-certain about who they are and what they want. Others of us are more tentative. But no matter how we peer into the unknown, we bear the beautiful, confusing scramble of ideals and dreams that were unearthed as we explored the highway of self. Each of us will merge off in different directions, but what we share collectively is the obligation to bring whatever we have learned about ourselves into the world beyond Deerfield. The challenge is to embrace both the youthful dreams and the realistic, sophisticated goals as we journey forth into an atmosphere where our youth will be tested; the challenge is to drag a little bit of this adolescent glow with us into adult life. The hungry, juvenile mentality with which we undertook that initial self-discovery is what we must now take with us.

A daunting task, for sure. But when I read this piece by Anne Frank, it seemed I knew what I had to do—what each of us must do—as we attempt this feat.

            She says, “That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered. It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart…I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too…and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right...In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.”

            Class of 2012, we venture now into a world that will seem, to many of us, like a wilderness. But we do not go unprepared—we voyage out with the knowledge, with the ideals, with the dreams and cherished hopes that have risen within us, and also with the drive to carry them out. And perhaps the time will come when we can finally coast along the highway of life—without road rage—because we have made that discovery of whom we are, and can answer that question without batting an eye. But in the meantime?

            “Who are you?” Well, I’m standing directly between my youth and adulthood and embracing every minute.  Beyond that, I don’t really know—and I can’t wait to find out.