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After a fun & grueling four years you’re ready to celebrate your scholarly successes, well earned and well deserved. This means for so many that mom, dad, siblings and an extended relative or two are going to come to your University to see you walk. You’ll gather around the iconic spots on campus, taking pictures after the ceremony with your glowing smile, cap and gown, boasting to the world that you’ve done it.
Graduating college is no simple task. You have meltdowns during midterms, parties that just have to be the day before your anatomy practical, you’re not good in front of an audience, but you need that public speaking class to graduate. You pull through and make up for that C or three that your breakdowns left you, tell your friends to have fun while you begrudgingly study into the night and, face your public speaking fears, time and again. Everyone has their horror stories that are graduating this spring, and they need to be celebrated. We worked damn hard.
But that graduation ceremony is pretty straightforward, your family comes, you all hangout together for your last precious moments at your alma mater. Which is good, except; your parents got divorced a few years back and your dad can’t bear to see, let alone spend a day with, your mother. You think you can swing it so that you’ll see someone before and someone after, except your aunt that was supposed to accompany your mom bails. Do you want to have only one of your parents there for such a special moment? Of course not, so now, after selfishly making a big deal about it in the first place, it seems like a good time to call the whole “ceremony” thing off. It’s just an arbitrary tradition anyways… A day or two goes by, and you decide that this isn’t fair, it’s your time. Your siblings are a safe zone, no finicky mom and dad to ruin your day, so maybe that’s what you decide. A sister and an old friend can be the mommy and daddy stand in for this one.
So here’s to you graduate. Though your family can’t fit into the privileged status quo of your graduation ceremony, you are just as deserving to be celebrated. Whether you go, or choose not to, let all us misfits unite in saying WE &%$@ING ROCK, here’s to us.
