To Any and All Fellow Graduating Seniors

You can also read this on Medium here: https://medium.com/@emilystepp12/to-any-and-all-fellow-graduating-seniors-352ee39c8b9f

This goes for high school and university students:

Uncertainty is not the enemy — apathy is.

If you’re graduating from high school, you’re about 17 or 18; you’ve already lived through so much.

Born after 9/11, I imagine your life was a bit like mine (as a graduating university senior that never took a gap year, I’m only four years ahead of you). You probably wondered what The War was about in The Middle East. Maybe you started your first lockdown drills in middle school (as opposed to mine in high school). You’re probably too young to remember anything about the Great Recession in ’08, but you’re not too young to have been affected by it.

You’ve probably been made aware of the Climate Change problem, and you weren’t old enough to vote in the 2016 election.

I’m sorry that you’ve had to watch these things happen, and been able to do little about it to help fix them.

It’s been inspiring to see you all still rally for change on these issues, even if you’re not old enough to vote for better representatives.

I’m sure you’re worried about the cost of college, and how that will all work now that we’re in quarantine (not to mention student loans).

Anxiety is not the enemy — cynicism is.

Now for the university seniors (at least, the ones that are in your 20s like me).

I know it seems like nothing ever gets better. That people who deserve consequences for their actions don’t get any. That the rich hold a lot of power in the world, and some of them are using that power in ways that don’t exactly make the world better in the long run.

I know you’re waiting with baited breath to see if your loans will be cancelled, or wondering how you’re supposed to get a job in quarantine. I know a lot of you have been laid off.

I know a lot of you are worried about Climate Change; maybe you’re wondering just how bad it will be.

I know you’re waiting (just like a lot of others older than us) to see if you’ll get some monthly assistance in this cursed year that is 2020.

I know it seems like nothing is getting better, that nothing ever will get better.

Uncertainty is not the enemy — apathy is.

Anxiety is not the enemy — cynicism is.

You’ve all done well to get this far to be graduating. I hope that you can still find joy in it, despite celebrating from a distance.

Now, as cheesy as it may be, I mean this sincerely when I say that the conversation between Frodo and Gandalf in the Mines of Moria, in The Fellowship of the Ring comes to mind a lot these days, and it gives me genuine hope.

Frodo, like many young people, inherited the burden of an evil in the world, an evil which he is tasked with trying to fix. There are many times when I feel like him when he says,

“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

(Or if you prefer, the movie quote, “I wish the Ring had never come to me, I wish none of this had happened.”

“[S]o do all who live to see such times,” says Gandalf, “But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”