A Speech I Gave On My 23rd Birthday

One year ago, on my 22nd birthday, I remember waking up and thinking to myself, "I want nothing more than to do the same thing I normally do on Fridays". The idea was, nothing was better to me than what I already got to do every week. I didn't need my birthday to be special, because it was all already good enough. My friends, some of whom are here, got me a cake and celebrated with me anyways, something I'm extremely grateful for.

I thought I had everything I could possibly want last year. I thought I was as happy as I could be, and I was so lucky to be able to look forward to doing it all again for one more year.

My perspective has shifted a lot in the past year, and I perhaps now look back on the version of myself from that quarter more harshly than I did at the time. Happiness is not something you unlock, and it's not something that stays forever. Tonight, I am overjoyed to spend time with my closest friends, before I graduate.

Last year, I wrote something I called "letter to my 18 year old self", which at the time, was the most personal and vulnerable thing I'd ever written. I look back on it fondly, but I was very nervous about posting it on Instagram for my graduation post, because I thought people would think of me differently. Maybe I was being too open.

The thing is, though, and you might contest this point, I don't think anyone remembers that letter, aside from maybe my roommates, who I read it to in person. If anyone does remember the existence of the letter, they certainly don't remember its contents. I thought posting that letter would change my friendships forever, but as it turns out, it didn't do anything at all.

The same, I think, is true for most of my essays. There's a lot of personal revelations in those, which I'm always nervous about sharing, but none of them have had the earth shaking impact on my personal life I was afraid of.

When I first came back from summer, I was initially a little concerned. I had written something so personally impactful, something that reframed my perception of myself, but it didn't really matter to anyone other than me. How can something so important to me be forgotten?

I came to a realization a couple weeks later: I don't really remember any of the most impactful things I've read. I couldn't give you a single quote from The Anthropocene Reviewed, which I commonly reference as one of the books that has shaped who I am today the most. You don't need to remember something to have been impacted by it. This is not to say my writing is particularly impactful, but it does mean that the metric by which we measure importance is not recall.

So why am I telling you all this? What does this have to do with my party? Well, I'm graduating soon. While I don't believe this is the last time I will be seeing all of you, one day, it will be the last time. One day, hopefully far into the future, it will be the last time I see you, and all I will be left with is my memory of our time together.

I used to be so scared of that. You might remember when I would carry around my little camera, recording every moment. I wanted to make sure I had a way to remember our time together perfectly, even if my memory fails me one day.

But that's the exact problem. One day, my memory will fail, and maybe my hard drive will fail too (I hope not, I follow standard data protection guidelines). But that doesn't make the moments we had any less important to me, any less impactful. Those moments are now interwoven into the fabric of my being, and even if I don't remember them, they're with me anyways. I am reminded of this every time I use a certain phrase and remember after the fact that I got it from my roommates from freshman year, or how I got into video games because of a friend in middle school I haven't talked to in years, or how I have my goodreads account because one of my best friends from high school told me to make one, or how I still go to ISCO, years after my first friend in the club graduated, or how I think of my old cross country coach every time I work out, or how I love ramen mostly because it reminds me of my friend Gabe.

My point is, I will miss each of you dearly, but I'm not as scared to graduate anymore. With luck, I will see all of you again, and while I would like to hold on tightly to our time together, even if we are apart, you're still with me, in one way or another. Love you all.