My Valedictorian Speech

This is my high school Valedictorian speech.

Labels. They are constantly put on you by the society around you. By the people you surround yourself with or the people you hardly know. They have a great magnitude of power within them. They can either make or break a reputation. Through high school, there are many labels. The largest label in which people commonly associate you with. The label that showcases your capabilities and achievements. Then, you have the labels that you would prefer not to be known. The ones that show your lack or weakness in a particular area of life. We have labels by who you are associated with in high school. We have the brains, the jocks, the popular kids, the class clowns, the skaters, the misfits, etc. I have felt many labels throughout my life, such as the nerd, the dancer, the artist, the camp counselor, the idealist, and the wallflower. The biggest label of all that I felt in my time through high school was the one of “depression”. That label controlled my life. I let it define, marginalize, trap, break, detach, and minimize me. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in my freshman year of high school. Over the years, it went from situational depression to clinical depression and lastly and currently bipolar depression (also known as bipolar type 2) and generalized anxiety disorder. Navigating through high school while trying to understand my own personal struggle of bipolar depression was the hardest thing of my life, but nonetheless, the thing that taught me the most.  So, what does this all mean for me telling you a large but not defining part of my life? I tell you this to show that life’s not perfect and neither are people, but God places people in your life for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.  God placed my family and close group of friends to help me learn that we all need help sometimes, and sometimes it can be from people you have expected it from or those who you least expected.  I learned much from all of this, but one of the greatest lessons I was taught through this was that you can do one of two things when you fall down. You can stay fallen and on the ground or you can rise, but the choice can only be made by you.

The one word that describes what I discovered is resilience. It lies within the human soul.  Resilience is defined as the ability to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. Resilience is what enabled me to overcome the all encompassing cloud of restraint I let depression hold on me. It is what allowed me to distinguish the voice of God from the crowd of people. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” So, are you going to let the hard times in life define, restrain, and encompass you? Or are you going to exhibit resilience through trials, temptations, and labels placed on you by the constraints of this world? Are you going to be a survivor or an overcomer? Life is going to place a lot of labels on you, whether that means by society as a whole, you yourself, your parents, or friends. It is all up to you if you want the labels to define you or you define the labels. You have the power to eliminate the stigmas that have been placed on society. I have come to a realization that the only label that purely matters is child of God. It doesn’t matter what your past, future, or present you is. What matters is who your God is.  So, we seniors and soon to be graduates are going to onto the next step in our lives. We are going to face a lot of change and may have faced a lot of change already. Through that change, I encourage you to be resilient in the midst of fear. Do not let it bind you, but rather, let it have not a single hold on you. You determine who you are and what you are going to do, and when days seem to have deeper trenches than most, just look to God.  I encourage you with this quote, “And so maybe it isn’t the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating – thrusting your best true, authentic self into the universe with wild abandon. Maybe yielding to our true nature propels us forward into the great unknown, toward targets that we haven’t even dreamed up yet but exist nonetheless.”

I know we wrote a lot of essays through all of the years of English, but I wanted to read one last letter to my fellow classmates.

Dear future us- the class of 2017,  
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole four years of our life for this thing called high school, but we will soon realize (if we haven’t already) that it was a blessing that we were able to be at Round Rock Christian Academy with a class of “interesting” yet remarkable people, whether that be our own flesh and blood or the other family we have formed through the years. We know we’ve had to write essays writing out who we think we are, but you see, the world wants to see us in the simplest and most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is:

An artist

The tall one

The coconut

Strong-willed

Loyal

Passionate

The Leslie Knope of our grade

Supportive

Little Miss Quiet

Bubbly

Curious

An athlete

Ironic

Understanding

Tuesday

Indecisive

The leader

Fun

The strength

A friend

Expressive

The Motivator

The Competitor

The bomb

Kind

Family

Silly

Versatile

Loving

Bright

and a wallflower.
Sincerely yours,
The class of 2017

Thank you.