Graduates, students, faculty, administrators, school board members, parents, relatives, alumni, and anyone in the half-mile radius that can hear this over the loudspeaker. Good evening, thank you for being here, and congrats to the class of 2025.
In the days after learning I was a salutatorian, a lot of people would ask me, “What are you going to say in your speech” and to some I would respond, “I don’t know I’ll probably tell people to make bad choices.” Even though I was joking, it would be lying to not talk about bad choices and lying… is wrong. So class of 2025 my advice to you is this: “Make the bad choices.”
To clarify, when I say “make bad choices,” I don’t mean you should burn down your local Chipotle because they couldn’t wrap your burrito with five scoops of fajitas and triple protein. What I am referring to is a specific category of bad decisions I like to call: “GOOD Bad Choices.” I know I’m so creative. Webster’s Dictionary defines good bad choices as… WELL… NOTHING because I made it up, so my definition is this: choices that don’t make sense rationally, go against advice from others, but still teach you something important. They’re the little selfish moments when you finally put yourself first, the risks you take for things that matter to you, and the impulsive choices that probably end worse than they started but were worth it anyways.
It’s attending New York University and majoring in ceramics because you love it, going to In & Out at 1 a.m. the night before a final because you want In & Out, dating that toxic person everyone tells you not to date, or throwing a beach ball into the crowd of your peers at graduation because it’s tradition, even if it gets confiscated by Silvy halfway through.
These “Good Bad Choices” matter because they teach us to be comfortable with being imperfect. And here’s the truth, which you’ve definitely heard before but I’m saying it again: everyone is imperfect. I am. You are. Our teachers are. The class of 1975 definitely is. But there are two types of imperfect people in this world: those who are comfortable with it… and those who aren’t.
For a while I fell into that second category. I obsessed over grades, and college applications, and while these things were important they shouldn’t have been the MOST important. I learned my lesson through my friend who made her new years resolution back in January to “be more exciting.”
At first I made fun of her a bit because I thought it was cliche, but it made me look back on my life and that’s when I realized how undeniably boring I was. So like all great people, I copied her new year’s resolution, and did it better (sorry not sorry). I started saying yes to things that scared me a little. I let myself take breaks. I let myself mess up. I made good bad choices, learned lessons from those good bad choices. And not so surprisingly my life became way less stressful and way more rewarding.
If you’ve ever had Mr. Hoang, he has taught you to find meaning in the meaningless, and nothing has less meaning than… 2010s POP Music so here’s my attempt at interpreting it. In Lady Gaga’s song Judas she states that “Judas is the Demon She Clings To.” To me, that line means we all have flaws, impulses, or past decisions that aren’t perfect but they shape us. We don’t have to be ashamed of them. Sometimes, clinging to your inner Judas means knowing it, accepting it, and choosing how you grow from it. It means remembering things you did in the past, having second hand embarrassment that you did them in the first place, and moving on. Because in this big game of life, I think that is the point.
So class of 2025, I’ll leave it at this, “I know we all have the ability to make good bad choices that are objectively stupid, but we also have the ability to learn from those decisions. So I ask you to do that—so that years in the future, we can look back at where we started, and be amazed at how far we’ve come.
Also shout out to Mrs. Hartge, Mrs. Vanasse, and above all my parents for putting up with me and my negative attitude. Thank you.
