Graduation Speech: "Lost Threads"

Tovi Vega with his violin.

I have been writing this speech for five weeks. I’ve far surpassed the time I’ve been allotted to write it and have written 3 drafts overall. Three revisions later and I’m still without a thread. When someone’s chosen to speak for commencement, they usually have some idea of what they’re writing⁠—what they’re going to say to the hundreds of people that are stepping out of the first 18 years of their lives and moving on to greener pastures. These speakers had to have a thread⁠—some intangible topic or driving idea that ties their speech together.  As of May 28th 2021, I don’t. And that’s okay.

It’s nerve wracking, not knowing what I’m going to say to my contemporaries and teachers and parents. It’s anxiety in the flesh. Then I thought about something. This entire speech writing process is analogous to the culmination of the past four years. Writing, revision, scrapping, rewriting⁠…trying to find a lost thread. 

Lakewood High School was a thread for all of us⁠— some had it neatly braided and tied in the nicest bows, some of us not so much. Highschool hasn’t been the kindest as you all know. We’ve had to deal with last minute essays, hours of concert rehearsal, daily football or track practices, half baked AP tests, and delayed commencements. But then, 2020 happened. Little did we know how much this year would change everything. 

Absolutely no one wants to hear or talk about it anymore, we’re surrounded by it, but this whole pandemic knocked us off our feet. It was absolutely unexpected. Half of the year at home, a quarter in hybrid, and only two and a half months in actual class with masks and plastic screens and the ever present threat of a deadly viral contagion. For a lot of us, grades started slipping and classes suddenly got a whole lot harder than they already were. The thread we were following these past 4 years was severed. The meaning was lost completely. 

But… we’re still here. We’re still alive. We made it through. Made it past highschool, past those essays and tests, past senior year and now we’re graduating in this auditorium. 

We still have the remainder of our lives before us. Where do we go from here? 

The image of the singular path and fate in life is so deeply rooted in our culture that the expectations of success and happiness have been more like chains than a celebratory finish line 20, 30, 40 years in our future. Instead of being ensured success through affordable college or the security of a stable job, we’re guaranteed nothing by a volatile job and housing market, a more divided political landscape, and all the other ailments of our modern world. We get too quickly caught up in these world-changing events-- we get tunnel vision⁠—there’s only success and anything else is failure.

That’s just not true. 

You don't have to have everything figured out right now, it’s okay to go at your own pace. This is something I’ve faced during the closing months of this year and something that I’m sure most of you have also been burdened with. 

At this point in writing, I realized something: the thread doesn’t exist.

There is no one path to life and no set way to succeed and prosper. You don’t have to follow the roads that others have taken. Paving your own path is far more important. There will be hardships and struggles, but if you make your own way, you will never be lost.  

If the past 4 years have taught us anything, it’s that there's not one destined and predetermined thread in life. The burden of expectation, placed upon us by family, friends and teachers weighs us down from the actual ideal life that we can live. The thread doesn’t exist, because of the uncountable things that are beyond our control.

Instead of worrying about those uncontrollable things, we should focus on the factors that we can control: how hard we work, how we handle failure, how we treat others in our lives, and how far we’re willing to go to achieve what we want. 

From the moment we step out from those doors, the world is ours. Now you can do with that what you will. Do you want to be a politician and bring change to a system you see as unjust? Become that; campaign for a candidate. Want to write, or paint, or compose the next big novel or painting or symphony? Or become the next great athlete? Then make your own way.

It’s our time to pave our paths, break the thread of expectation, and face the challenges that lie ahead.

Thank you and congratulations to the class of 2021.



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Volume 17, Issue 12, Posted 1:55 PM, 06.16.2021