I’d like to think that by the time you’re reading this, I am in the process of waking up. There have been very few instances – possibly less than three – in the entire existence of The Memory Tourist where this has happened. I’m not a morning person and on average I’m waking up past 9 AM most days. However, there is one special reason that I have chosen to write this today and why my feet are touching down on the carpet below my bed. After three years of meticulous work, I am proud to announce that today is the moment I graduate from university. I’ll admit there’s some deflation to be had with my last minute need for summer school, but the sentiment still stands.
On the one hand, it marks the end of a very long journey as a student. Ever since I was single digits, I have been in and out of school with varying levels of success. It’s a miracle to think that I could ever have made it up to the level of Bachelor’s Degree. Even a decade ago an Associate’s Degree seemed out of vision, but alas here I am with a focused mind and a sense of accomplishment to back it up. Sure, there’s a lot of finality that makes today special, but there’s one other thing that maybe surpasses everything that this finish line ethos would symbolize.
This is the first graduation in my entire life that feels like it’s for me. It isn’t because we’re going to be holding the event at Angel’s Stadium and somehow this “Los Angeles” team from Anaheim feels like a giant high-five. It’s more because of my obligation to be there. Whereas I could look at the others and feel like I was coerced into them for various reasons, the one attached to CSULB has and always been about what I wanted to do. Am I wanting to get a cap and gown and spend hours listening to encouragement from faculty and some random speaker? Even going back to January, I wasn’t sure if I was even going to go. Unlike other ceremonies, I’d argue there wasn’t guilt attached to saying “No,” and that was freeing. I think it’s because ultimately my time at CSULB has been for ME. It has never been to appease family and supporters. It has been about seeing where I can go and holding myself accountable for wherever that was. Nobody was going to tell me that I was a failure because this was voluntary.
Please don’t take these words as being overly defensive. I ultimately have decided to walk for a myriad of reasons. Among them is the fact that we’re not walking across the stage to get diplomas. I know for younger graduates it’s a big deal, but having been through this a few times, I’m burned out on the nature a ceremony usually goes like. You love the moment when eyes are on you, and then… you wait. You stare at the diploma for upwards of an hour and end up pondering your entire life. Maybe it’s just where you’ll go when you leave the event. Maybe it is actually realizing that this is the end of a proverbial road. Something overwhelms as you listen to strangers cheer for strangers, not really caring. Sure, it’s amazing to know how many people attended the same school that you never crossed paths with, but otherwise… I’m fine just walking to the mailbox one day and having my papers in a manila envelope.
As I finish getting ready for my graduation, I thought that I’d reflect on the three major ones that I’ve had in my life. Outside of attending other people’s these are the ones that I have molded my experience of ceremonies around. They have been significant markers in where my life has taken me. While there’s obviously more to the story, these are the moments when each of them came to an end, presenting something profound but also bittersweet in the process.
The first graduation came during middle school at St. Cornelius in 2004. I had only been there since 2001 and felt connected to all of the students. This could be because I think our graduating grade had less than 40 children. Because of this metric, it was easy to comingle. A guy named Laddy did our graduation video. I once saw him doing extra filming by the freeway by campus, which always made me think he was a bit kooky. Anyway, it was one of those moments that probably felt meaningful depending on which day you caught me. Of course, there was the sense of graduating from middle school to high school, itself a sense of finally entering the dangerous world you’d seen on so many teen soaps. It was also that by 14, I was ready to leave Catholic School behind me and just give public school a chance to play its devilish tricks on me. Let’s just say the gradual loss of devotion was inevitable.
As a group, the boys decided to have one last sleepover where we tried to pull an all-nighter right before the rehearsal ceremony. It was fine for the most part. There was one kid who was trying to persuade another to rent porn while salivating at the idea that we might’ve had access to HBO-level cable that could’ve gotten us there. We would end up watching half of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996) and having a great time before most everyone slowly dozed off. I would spend the rest of the night by myself just surfing and at one point watching Dora the Explorer. I can’t say this was a common experience as I didn’t go to a lot of get-togethers outside of the Long Beach Town Center. We also had a graduation dance which was special for no other reason than it was the only one that a Catholic middle school would allow students to bring in edgy music. At one point we were even dancing to Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz’ then new “Get Low.” I only tag it on because it was a dance and nothing was eventful from it save that I randomly ran across several chairs during Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” to impress some girls.
Because it was a small school and because it was a Catholic school, we had the ceremony at the accompanying church. We had spent nearly every Friday there for mass along with different events we often held. In this case, we walked down the center aisle towards the altar, genuflected, and sat down. We had speakers who read homily and the gospel was followed by that familiar special speech where the priest grabbed the microphone and did crowd work with the graduates. He’d read our names aloud and try to emphasize how special the moment was. We were spread out to maybe 3-4 people per row in alphabetical order. As a Willett, I was last in line so I had a mostly empty pew until near the end when the music teacher sat next to me. It was coincidental, sure, but it was also special because she was one of the few teachers there that I had really enjoyed and was going to miss.
The ceremony concluded and we went outside to take pictures. One of the final things we did was throw our caps into the air and hope we found them afterward. I chose to just fling mine as far away from the crowd as possible. I think deep down I was hoping someone found it funny, but it also made the search and rescue a whole lot more manageable.
Had it not been for the advent of Myspace, I think that I would’ve lost contact with everyone almost immediately. Save for this one girl we drove to campus, I didn’t see them outside of the annual fiestas, and even then they had died down by the second year. There really was a shared sense that middle school was a childish period and being there outside of Sunday mass (if they were doing confirmation, which I wasn’t) didn’t add up. As sad as it is, I wasn’t really invited to any graduation party after that. Maybe it’s because I was rambunctious and liked to act out at the time in ways that, looking back, were unpleasant by nature. I wasn’t the best at social skills and despite the exhausting amount of time together, I’m sure a quarter of those kids were tired of me.
Before I jump to the next ceremony, I thought that I’d mention one funny moment. Because I acted out, I had a habit of hanging out with younger grades after school while waiting to be picked up. At one point we got the idea to just toss my backpack through the basketball hoop over and over. I think it broke because at some point some staff member suggested that I needed to replace it or else I wouldn’t graduate. Joke was on her as I not only graduated, I never paid a cent for it.
Part of me would like to think that high school graduation from Millikan in 2008 was better. However, it was possibly worse for dozens of reasons. While I wouldn’t say that I was as much the troublemaker this time around, there was some sense of pointlessness to the whole thing. I hadn’t gone to any prom, choosing to just stay home and watch Flash Gordon (1980) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) in my room. I had a lot of friends and accomplishments I was proud of. However, it was one of those moments where you can’t help but feel inferior. I was a C-Student, someone whose work couldn’t be as easily commodified into a feel good speech. I’m not sure that I felt burnt out by graduation, but I didn’t really want to be there.
I think it’s important to point out that we had it at Veteran's Stadium, which was the football field at Long Beach City College. There was no emotional attachment to this place for me. Outside of rehearsal, I can’t say that I had spent too much time there. The only advantage was that it was big and, because of that, the most chaotic zoo imaginable for the post-ceremony. You would walk a few yards and be surrounded by a whole new ecosystem. I couldn’t share in the joy of the students around me, in part because I only knew 10% of them. Also, I never felt like it was worth getting worked up about. I know some people held parties that night and were planning to meet up, but once my thing was over it was back to the house I had just moved into a month before. Alas, there was some exhaustion baked into me. That, and I realize based on previous diary entries that there was a large contingent that I was looking forward to ghosting in college but wouldn’t because I worked at the nearby Stater Bros. for five years.
But the ceremony had certain regulations. As you can guess, I didn’t actually read the document outside of the where’s and when’s of the piece. When I walked up to the gate for access, they initially refused me access. The reasoning was simple. I was wearing shorts and people presenting as male weren’t allowed to wear shorts. Women could wear dresses that exposed their knees but forbid I wanted to wear something a little more expressive. It took me running into the stands to find my party and borrowing my grandpa’s pants to have them let me in.
There is a part of me that ponders whether they would still do this in 2023. It’s been 15 years now since I’ve been in high school so I don’t know the protocol. Still, gender expression has gotten so much more complex since then and I can only hope non-binary kids especially are treated fairly. For me, it was maybe rebellion, but the pants-to-shorts crossover left a taste so sour in my mouth for the entire ceremony that I ended up freaking out and bending every part of my mortar board. Symbolically, the tassel wouldn’t be too far behind as I left it as decoration on my doorknob in my room but the cat destroyed it slowly over a few months.
I think to finish things off, I wasn’t even sitting with my division when I walked in. Somehow I had gotten lost and would sit next to this kid I had known from Freshman year named Mel Brooks (not that one). The ceremony would go on and on. Everyone celebrated the smart kids and I just remember feeling a bit inadequate and alone. Sure, I had everyone in the stands who would throw me support later on, but I just remember wanting to feel as excited as everyone else and not being there. Maybe it’s because deep down, my “graduation” where I said goodbye to the students I cared about had been a few weeks prior at the literary arts’ magazine launch, a culmination of a school year, where we hired bands and poets to perform. Among those I saw were Mike the Poet and Gerald Locklin. I actually got to talk briefly to the former and he gave me some good advice (and a signed book) before I went up and read a poem about cross-dressing. I received some award that night. It was bittersweet and beautiful.
But back to graduation proper. I was sitting there still mad that I couldn’t wear shorts. I decided to protest by rolling my pant legs up and hoping that they would stay. My grandmother says that she laughed for years about one leg slowly falling down as I’m standing there getting my diploma. I wish that I could say looking out into the crowd at that moment meant something, but it just looked like a mass of people. I couldn’t even really process the grandeur or significance.
Before we left Vet Stadium, I remember the literary arts teacher walking up to me and, for the first time since we met on my first day at the school in 2004, giving me a hug. He said “You did it!” and it was a great moment. He was one of those I wanted to see because my time with him symbolized the best of high school. We had created a small community that has recently been revived called Visions (they do good work, though on a much smaller scale). Maybe it was just that things were overwhelming, but it was hard to really feel much of anything for the rest of the night until we were driving away through a nice layer of traffic from people who had no idea where they were going.
The last thing, and maybe the most redeeming, was a random occurrence in the parking lot as I looked for my party. Crystal, whom I had met that year in art class, gave me a gift. She had a mix tape full of songs she thought would mean something to me. There was a Juno (2007) quote lining the casing and a track list on the back. I still have it in storage somewhere. For me, it was the greatest graduation gift I ever got less because it was a flawless mix, but because of how unexpected it was and how it felt genuine. She had done it specially for me. It is why I have a soft spot for Death Cab For Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” She’s since moved to Hawaii, but I hope to one day find where she is and know she’s okay.
I’m sure by the end of the evening, I was back home and on Myspace. I wanted to believe that it was a good way to piece things together. There would be pictures emerging and maybe they’d catch something I’d miss. Meanwhile, I’d just bicker about how they didn’t let me wear shorts. I waited for that summer in all of its eventfulness where I, among other things, got my driver’s license, got into a car wreck, and prepared for my first fall semester at Cypress College which dovetailed with me getting my first job and voting in the Obama/Prop 8 election. Whatever you’d call it, I’d say it was a crucial time in my life.
However, this is where the timeline gets a little less straight. On paper, one would assume that going to a community college, a two year, would mean that my next graduation was in 2010. This was far from true for a whole host of reasons. I just wasn’t motivated to achieve a two year degree because I saw math and science as obstacles and refused to run toward them. I was bad at attendance and the burden of work and my high school group’s disappearance, I was feeling alone and aimless. I won’t get into it from here, but everything in-between 2008 and my next graduation was part of my messiest, sometimes regrettable period of my 20s.
I only say this because with this comes the burden of what ended up happened. I returned to school in 2016 and had a vision of how I wanted things to go. In that case, I finished school in 2.5 years, though adding on to every start and stop, I saw it as closer to a decade. The final semester brought with it certain unexpected challenges. For starters, I became overwhelmingly sick and suffered from being unable to concentrate in most classes despite stellar grades. From there, I had the unwelcomed report that my grandmother had died. The only reprieve was that my last conversation with her was about how I was passing my classes. Meanwhile, my nana would die a month later.
To quickly break it down, the reason that these two deaths especially felt poorly timed was because of what they symbolized. In an educational career where I had failed so many times, they were two of the only people who continually supported me and shared the idea that I could make it if I kept trying. Nana in particular was a former librarian and we had been discussing PBS’ Great American Read in the months leading up to that moment. She also told me that she hadn’t graduated from college until her Mid-30s. Something about that comment was enough to light the fire back inside of me. It’s the type of encouragement that was bittersweet because they were the two people I wanted at the ceremony to say “Look, I did it!” and just have them be aware. Without them there, it felt a bit empty. With respect to the rest of my family, some of them feel more passive in their vision of my future. As a result, there is a part of me that finds my Associate’s Degree, now graduating from Cerritos College, was too little too late. I had waited too long to impress the people I wanted and thus it was some failure on my part.
Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t proud of what I achieved. I think an issue with how I approached community college between 2008 and 2019 was that it slowly stopped being about getting ahead and became a “for them” compromise. The people who had supported me following my G.E.D. probably didn’t have much to put on the resume. I was approaching my 30s and there wasn’t anything to my name. What was my greater legacy? If you’re not from it, I don’t know if the next part makes sense. A lot of my family has some focus in academia, so there’s intimidation to at least succeed, even in fractions, in college. Given that I was doing this during a period where there was strong pushback to academic excellence, it was hard to really feel substantial privately. For those reasons, Associate’s Degree felt like a “for them” promise. I needed to prove to others that I wasn’t a screwup.
The ceremony itself was fine. We had somebody covering “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman (2017) and our key speaker was the photographer for George W. Bush. The stories were fun and I actually felt more engaged with the ceremony. However, there was some sense once it was done that I was stuck with the underwhelming sense of “Is that all there is?” That’s a fair question, honestly. People were happy for me, but it wasn’t like I was going to hear the voices I wanted nor were many sincere remarks likely to penetrate the anticipation of having some hole be filled with a sense of satisfaction. I was too consumed with the fact that I had finally done it, but at a rate far behind my peers. Most of my pivotal friend group from Cypress College had been married with families by that point. Even if they don’t, there’s still a part of me that thinks they look down on me for not “keeping up” with their achievements.
Which is why I think the night of graduation was one of the most surreal evenings I have ever had. Once everyone had gone to bed and I was alone, my defenses disappeared and the experience became all about repressed emotions. Even as I looked at the graduation gifts I had, including some smiling plushy with a cap and gown on, there was something unsatisfying about it all. Did I really deserve it? I grew up aware of those who looked down on the “gold star” nature of education, where every participant got a trophy. What was I doing that was exceptional? I had waited too long. This mortal coil was telling me through the death of my grandmother and nana that I had failed.
And so I cried. I cried and cried, trying to push through this disappointment and convince myself that this was meaningful. The night had gone well. It was free of controversy, and yet I still struggled to feel happy. Maybe I was wanting to believe that I immediately knew where everything was going from here, but I didn’t. It would be another year and a half until I was accepted into CSULB. Nothing was really sure except I was going to start helping my dad move in the waning days of a Pre-COVID-19 world. Any effort to establish routine and independence was immediately shattered. I had to sit in that bedroom and just keep telling myself “You are worthy” until it clicked. “You are worthy,” I would repeat as I clung to a blanket. I needed some solace in all of this. Something needed to make me realize this was a happy day.
And that feeling has been what’s probably the most conflicting undertone of today’s graduation. Given that this is the furthest I’ve ever gotten in education, how am I going to feel when everyone disappears and suddenly I’m once again alone wrapped in a blanket staring at a smiling plushy. It seems more difficult this time to believe that things will roll away and I will be all smiles because I know what the past two years have been like. They’ve been full of depression and mental health struggles. So far 2023 has been a difficult year, and I wonder if the imposter syndrome is truly going to kick in worse than it did around Midterms. What is going to be there when I leave Angel’s Stadium and return to a quiet celebration?
My one hope is that I will recognize this end of my academic adventure for what it is. It’s a culmination of 25+ years of effort. I’ve evolved and changed over that time. I couldn’t stand to believe that I’d ever get a Bachelor’s Degree in my Mid-20s. My life seemed a bit more aimless then. However, I think CSULB being a “for me” deal is going to shape things differently. Whatever faults I have, they’re mine. Whatever successes I have, they’re mine. Everything that I’ve achieved since 2021 hasn’t been to impress a single person but myself. I’ve felt less pressure to get top of the line grades. I’m not as timid about limiting what I can and can’t sign up for. Sure, one can argue that I should’ve done more on a social level, but at the same time, I did what I wanted. Maybe I was intimidated because everyone felt like they were 7+ years younger than me, but even then I met so many great teachers and students who I hope have great careers. Still, I’m probably going to get to tomorrow and hear about mothers who went back to school and did phenomenal work. I’m proud of them. There’s moments of elation that actually put into context what education means. It’s a source of pride for those who are able to access it. I have been on the more fortunate side these past few years. Not only that, but I lifted my dirt-poor G.P.A. from every year of college almost all the way up to a 3.0. That’s crazy to think.
So as I walk out the door, I guess I’m trying to convince myself that it was all worth it. Even with each graduation bringing a certain melancholy, I do wonder if this time will be different. Will I be able to go to sleep that night with a smile and some relief? I want to believe that it’s possible. Maybe I don’t have the friends I wish I had in the stands. Maybe I could’ve done it years and years ago, but I still did it. One can hope this is a sign of where my life can go now that I recognize my potential to apply myself and make a difference. I don’t know if I’ll be as happy as some other people yelling from the stands, but I hope to be quietly nodding along, appreciating the hard work nonetheless.
Comments
Post a Comment