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This is it. I am graduating.
I am taking a deep, long breath. I can’t believe it.
This has been a journey that has taken longer than I had ever imagined: four years here in Orono, five and a half altogether.
Most of my tenure here at the University of Maine has existed purely by the drive to survive and to succeed. My work and talents have taken precedence over anything else, for better or for worse, and throughout all that I have worked incessantly, like a machine, yet with much thought and many conflicting emotions. My goals have been for the longest time to become a writer – whether that means a journalist or a novelist – yet none of these goals included becoming a better person.
I am a better journalist than a friend or a roommate or a brother or a son. I am a better person today, though, for understanding this. At least I hope I am.
With this realization I can walk into the world with a clearer head held up high, back straight, determined look.
Graduation is more than passing exams and getting a piece of paper with signatures from people you may have never met. Graduation is the ceremony celebrating your accomplishment of knowledge in the area you have pursued in these college years or throughout your life.
And on graduation day I will sit in my seat, among friends and colleagues and professors and instructors and family, with the sun beating beads of sweat from my nervous head. Time will stand still as a bead drops from my brow and stretches toward my eyeglasses. In this heightened state of clarity, I will see my family frozen in smiles and applause, I will see my fellow graduates rise with ambition and personal glory. I will also see that during the ceremony, for me, will not only mark a stepping stone toward a career, but it will be my moment and mine alone.
In this freeze frame, this moment captured by a camera flash, I will have my heart in my throat. I will catalog my accomplishments and my downfalls. Of course, accomplishments will get more points than downfalls, but questions will be asked.
Did I live up to certain expectations? Will my mother be proud? Would have my father been proud? Do these expectations matter?
I expect my final question to myself, as reality starts to melt slowly into real-time, will be: Did I live up to my expectations?
Days before I graduated from high school, way back in 1995, our last assignment in a computer technology class was to write a small blurb about what we planned to do after that year. I wrote that I would write for the hometown paper, the Bangor Daily News, and – if I remember correctly – the New York Times.
I’m still working on the New York Times. Baby steps, man. Baby steps.
With my freshly budding smart-ass sarcastic attitude, I also wrote in that high school blurb that I would become a fat, balding bastard. Well, I’m not as thin as I use to be, and I wish I could say the same for my hair. As for becoming a bastard, let’s regard that premonition as a symbol of pessimism. Graduating high school was no big deal, but graduating college is a symbol of maturity.
Think positively. Enjoy being. There it is, man; live life.
Stanley Dankoski is a graduating journalism major and new media minor. He loves The Maine Campus newspaper way too much and will miss all his friends made there.
