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16 HACKLEY REVIEW COMMENCEMENT SUPPLEMENT 2017 The Valedictory Address Watch the video here. Isabella Cacdac Ampil '17 Friends, family, faculty and staff, fellow graduates: thank you for being here today. And thank you to those who helped us get here. We are better, fuller people for all the ways you’ve touched our lives—as parents, teachers, and friends, as members of B&G, Flik, and the custodial staff, as siblings, relatives, and neighbors. Looking out across the crowd, I am struck by the enormity of what we are leaving. Whatever the taste left in your mouth on this morning—joy or pride, regret or nostalgia, anxiety, loyalty, or love—this day is a testament to your resilience. Class of 2017, it is my honor to address you in the last few moments of our existence as a collective us, a single unit, one body breathing a final sigh of relief. I’m proud to have been a part of it with you. We are mere minutes away from an era of unprecedented control over our own happiness. We are about to start managing for ourselves our roommates, our classes, our newly discovered free time; we alone will be painting in the first and broadest strokes of our new lives. But let’s put that on pause for a moment and consider when we first arrived. Many of us came to Hackley before we were old enough to decide what we wanted, far before we had any say in the matter. And those of us who did decide to come here maybe shouldn’t have had any say in the first place. As Mr. McLay reminded us on Monday, we all have our humble roots as idiot freshmen. And so in the years since our staggered arrivals, we’ve been fueled mostly by hope for a future happiness, for a picturesque high school life. We had these idealized notions of adolescence, constructed when we were young enough to believe that 18 year olds were giants—near-perfect creatures settled into lives they wanted and loved. We hoped each year that this would be our year; that we could at last carry ourselves with the imagined self-assurance of those 18 year olds, to live uninhibited but still grounded, explosive in our ambition and our talent. It didn’t quite work out like that. There was always this drama with friends or that test gone wrong or the dark cloud of college apps hanging overhead. Our hopes bumped up against the walls of reality more often than not. As we rose through the Hackley ranks like those before us, it didn’t feel the way we thought it would. We struggled to find the certainty that they seemed to exude. We kept looking over our shoulders to see if those around us knew as little about what they were doing with their lives as we did.
COMMENCEMENT 17 And no, we didn’t really think we’d be perfectly happy by now, but can we be blamed if, secretly, subconsciously, we did? We were aspiring to something larger, a superhuman future in a pictureperfect life. But in doing so we forced ourselves to never settle. It made us humbler, more aware of how far we had to go, but that made us demand more from ourselves and elicit more from each other. And if we look back now, we see how much further we’ve come just by striving for that life so far beyond our reach. Maybe we’ve moved in a different direction than we’d hoped, and likely with more detours along the way, and surely not quite as far as we’d dreamed, but nevertheless we’ve grown by leaps and bounds. We aren’t those superhumans we used to think that 18 year olds were, but of course we know now that neither were they. So my wish for us, my relentless, spirited, talented, ever-evolving class of 2017, is that wherever we have fallen short of our old hopes, we find no bitterness. Rather, I hope we feel a greater drive to become who we want to be, to forge more fulfilled selves. Whatever that means to you—reaching higher, pushing harder, or pursuing that dream you never thought could be more than a hobby. I hope we recognize the impossibility of that old picture-perfection, and I hope that we channel whatever energy might have been wasted on regret into self-betterment. We are, after all, more responsible for our happiness now, more in control. Use that; savor that. And where our lives have diverged from our old hopes, let us be grateful for the turns in our lives we couldn’t control, those that emerged later as opportunities. Coming to Hackley was, for many of us, a choice beyond our control that we made the best of and came to love. Once here, we endured disillusioning troubles, times spent wrestling with relationships gone sour, or grappling with sudden failure where we used to excel, or mourning private losses that we could not share. We endured. So even as we gain control over our lives, may we be open to the inevitable lapses in certainty. In high school, in situations we couldn’t control, guided only by this hope for happiness, we stumbled into such joy. May we recognize how much better we are for the unplanned incidents that have altered our course. Now here we are, worlds away from our old visions for ourselves. In some ways, we’ve fallen short of those hopes. Perhaps because our hopes shifted with us, and we ended up chasing different dreams. But in many ways we have outpaced those old visions, becoming better than we ever thought we’d be. For that, may we be filled with unapologetic pride. In years to come, we’ll continue rising. But for now, in these last few moments where we remain Hackley seniors, not yet Hackley alums, let’s just say, without condition, we’ve made it. So wherever you stand compared to that old vision of yourself, the one you conjured up standing at the threshold of the freshman hallway, or your fifth-grade homeroom, or the door of the little octagon where the Lower School used to be—wherever you stand in relation to that vision, know that today’s freshmen and fifth-graders and Kindergarteners admire you. They see in you those same giant, near-perfect creatures. They see every point of pride in the lives you’ve earned through hard work and unflinching self-reflection. If you don’t see it, they do. Your teachers do; your parents do. The people sitting next to you—they absolutely do. We spent so long comparing ourselves to this superhuman standard that when we finally knocked it down, we realized we didn’t have to lower it all that far. We found ourselves in the company of incredibly impressive people. You know that reverent tone you use, admiring the project, the race, the song of some classmate who isn’t around? It’s the same tone we use on you. And it makes you, however briefly, a little bit superhuman. And now, we are just breaths away from this new era. So before we take off into the greater world, let me say thank you once again. On behalf of every member of the class of 2017, thank you to those who helped us stumble into ourselves, who made for us the best choices we couldn’t make ourselves. Thank you to those who helped fulfill our hope for happiness, who brought us to this point where we can now design happiness for ourselves. Rest assured that your efforts, and our twists and turns, have come to beautiful fruition. Because in this moment, as we step out into the world, we are ready.
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