Sunday, June 13, 2010

Graduation; these are our times

It's hard to explain how I've been feeling with all these sudden momentous events passing swiftly by me. I feel like just yesterday I was buying my prom dress, like just yesterday I was excited about being a senior, like just yesterday I was a freshman. It isn't like I turned 18 and I felt this new found wisdom, or even responsibility. If anything I feel just as much of a kid as I did when I was 16. This feeling of growing up, it's not just on my part, it's from the pressure of things around me.

I'm getting to this point where it's getting easier and easier to see my road heading into the horizon of being an adult. It's not fully focused yet, I can only make out blurs at the edge...but I know that what's waiting there is both good and bad. I know that what's waiting there is a life all my own. This road to that destination is tricky though. Possibly the hardest road anyone can travel because it's overwhelming. That's what I've been feeling lately: overwhelmed. Totally and completely. But it's been mellowing out lately what with school ending and graduation happening. (I know it'll go back to being back-breaking overwhelming because life doesn't give us breaks for very long, just enough to adjust the pressure and move on.)


Graduation was...amazing. It was this nervous, exciting, unreal event that I'm so glad I got to experience. People who didn't go because of reasons their own, or people who drop out and get GED's, they have no idea what they are missing. There's something in the boring speeches by school board teachers we have never met before, there's something in the too-practiced & read-off-paper speeches from kids in our class, there's something in the ramblings of an old Principal. There is something that just...sparks in you. You sit there, you listen, and you don't hear the boring. You don't hear the rambling. Well, you do, but it's not what you're thinking about, it's not important. It all jumbles together to form one continuous thought in your head: I did it. I made it. I am embarking on a new part of my life.

My sister and I!

I had family there in the bleachers rooting for me as I walked across stage, and friends in white & black seated all around me...and I felt happy. True blue happiness. Something I haven't felt in pure essence in...well I don't know. This type of happiness is different. I felt like I'd filled a needle with sunshine and injected it into my candy coated veins, that's how happy I was. But with this joyous, amazing, love filled day...I saw and experienced the adult side of life with it.

Every family has their shadows. Every family has their secrets. Every family has a part that they aren't exactly proud of, and if they had a huge metaphorical rug? That stuff would be swept under it constantly. My family is no different, and it just happenes to come creeping out from under the rug on the most inconvenient of times. Times like my graduation night.

No matter how upset I felt that night, no matter how torn down the middle I was, no matter how many tears I shed because of my family's issues...there is nothing, absolutely nothing in this world that can take away the feeling of my graduation. The feeling of being surrounded by my family that were all so proud of me. I will carry graduation day with me until I no longer have the means to think or feel. I will carry around the pure love I felt from my mother, father, sister, immediate family members, friends, friends family and people that were just so damn proud of our class they didn't have to know me to want to smile at me!

And that's adulthood in it's sometimes unflattering, and sometimes amazing, form. It has the best moments coated with the best toppings. It has the most love, the most happiness, the most hope. It has faith, it has light, it has chances, wishes, and laughter. But it also has pain. It has sadness, it has issues, it has people who can't always be their best. It has people who clash, it has fights, screaming, and crying. But with that horrible side, you can't ever lose sight of the great light you saw before, the one you know is waiting just around the corner of those ugly shadows.

Graduation day taught me more about myself than I had planned to know. It taught me how wide my smile can get when I'm at that level of happiness, how much my heart can swell with love for the people in my life, and it taught me how I can preserve and not lose sight of the good things even in the down right bad.

It was such a special day for me, no matter how it ended. I love my family so much it literally hurts and the same goes for my friends. As I walk more and more of this road, as the days end and begin anew, I am learning that it is possible I can do this. I can do this adulthood thing, and I can possibly do it well. And I have someone amazing to thank for that: my mother.

Mom and I. ♥ She is my loudest cheerleader.

Without her I wouldn't have graduated at all. She has been my rock, my light, my hope, and best friend. We have fought, we have cried, we have laughed, we have gotten through so much together as a family and she is my hero. She is the person who I could do anything and she'd still love me regardless. She is the person who I can tell anything.

She (along with the rest of my family) is the reason I have made it this far. What better day to recognize that but on graduation day? So thank you, Mom, for always being my shoulder to lean on when the weight on my own is too heavy to bare.


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Congratulations class of 2010!
We did it!

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