Imagine spending your days surrounded by the same 27 people. I’m not even talking about 27 people offering diversity and different opinions, I’m talking about 27, cookie-cutter cliché white teenagers all residing in a town with ten ton snow banks, bucolic beauty and very little else. It was only natural for us kids to soon become a unit; bonding over our identical lives and becoming a family. As a family my classmates and I fought a continuous war against the judgmental, overtly critical eyes of a tiny town, filled with tiny minded people. During the end of my senior year all I wanted was to be in New York City, surrounded by the different rather than the same, but I can’t deny it, I was petrified for the end. Then time sort of just happened, and without even blinking, I was on a stage in a potato sack with a piece of cardboard on my head getting repeatedly hit in the face with a bouncing tassel surrounded by the most important people in my world.
I was so proud on that day, not only because I was done with a major chapter of life, but because that was the day I realized the good I had found within the walls of Sunapee Middle High School. When I looked at all my gorgeous classmates, I was lucky enough to look into the eyes of 27 of my best friends, friends who had been with me through good, bad, ugly and everything in between. 27 kids who were once marked as “the bad class”, but who I knew would go on to change the world. We grew up in town that told us we could do anything, whilst constantly shutting down any change we tried to make, in favor of the most “appropriate” path. But we had won. In my moment of reflection time rushed past and before I knew it, it was time for my speech. As I approached that microphone I saw the faces of the class of 2012 before me and all I wanted to do was look every single one of them square in the eye and let them know, Do NOT stand for it. Fight for who you are, stick together with your peers, have each others back because, you are stronger together. Never stop thinking; the power of the mind is stronger than any weapon of corruption they might use against you. The path is long and it is tough but once you have reached the end, if you still have yourself and you have one another, you’ve made it out alive. Just be you guys. You can make it, just like we did. But that’s not what did happen, because as I looked into the eyes of the younger class my peripherals focused in on the deputy principle of the tiny academic home in which I was about to depart, her hand fixed tightly on the microphone switch, glaring at me from the shadows. We locked eyes and our earlier conversation flashed to mind,
“I swear to god if anybody even tiptoes off of the speech we have approved, I will cut your mic and you will ruin graduation for everyone. This day is not about you guys, it is about our school. Don’t make your graduation, about you.”So I did what they demanded, one last time, and spieled off a speech of cliches filled with praise and every form of flattery I knew my community was dying to drink down.
The Jordan who stood on that stage, a blur of emotion seems like a completely different individual to the one who is before you now. I am so much different than whoever that was, I am finally a member of adulthood, living on my own in a city so foreign to the Australian oceans and New Hampshire woods in which I was raised, surrounded by strangers, diverse and different. Free of everything Sunapee is, and all it stands for, free to be the change I wish to see in the world. Free to meet people who are not clones of myself, free to be surrounded by culture and change, free to be everything that I was always told not to be. Yet one thing still remains, I am still a part of an entity bigger than myself. I’m living 27 disconnected lives because a piece of me is everywhere they are.I owe my world to those people and in a weird way to Sunapee as well, Because of them I have no fear. None at all, failure isn’t even in my vocabulary do you want to know why? Because I’m never alone, I’m part of a family who has been through hell and high waters, judged together, laughed together, arrested together, and who still managed to make it out on top.
