A few months after graduating high school, I am walking out of South Hall, past Tisch Library at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts. It’s the first full week of my freshman year of college, and I am on my way to English 1000, a class I haven’t been to yet. It’s early, we all had a pretty good time last night, so I’m a bit, hazy. Everything is fast then slow, as everything is when you move through it for the first time. People are passing me. Things are being spoken of. Random words echo: “City” and “phone call” and “parents”. I keep moving, up the hill, to East Hall, an old brick building that overlooks a lawn known as “The Green,” an expanse that makes me long for everything, makes me despair of everything. I am anxious. Will I be able to find the classroom easily? Did I miss a homework announcement? Will we have to do a corny ice-breaker game? Is my hair as frizzy as I think it is?
The professor comes in. I can’t remember if he is the one who brings it up first. Or if a student does. I just remember it was Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
Let me back up a bit.
Before there was this fifteen years ago almost to the day, there was senior year of high school. And I spent my senior year of high school, as I had the previous three years, at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, NY. Poly, if you’re unfamiliar, is an independent college prep school, a cousin of NA, known primarily for its sprawling campus – 25 acres is quite hard to come by in the city – and its sports – a stellar football team (and unfortunately in recent years scandals associated with the football team) and a stellar basketball team – if you like basketball you might recognize the name Joakim Noah who’s about to play for the Knicks. Oh and big actress Meryl Streep famously gave the commencement address there back in 2004 as her daughters, who are now big actresses themselves, went there as well.
So, senior year began for me, in this environment, in the new millennium. A ball had dropped and we were suddenly future people. Like the concept of time had been rediscovered. Like we were all on the cusp of realizing what it meant to be human or something. I was also fresh off an exchange program to Argentina. A group of us had stayed with host families in Cordoba and had had the time of our lives with our host brothers and sisters, existing for that short period in a sort of dreamscape, of course not taking as much advantage as we should’ve of some of the more substantive parts of the new culture.
And, back at school, I once again retreated into my little life – negotiating being an introvert, getting into college, being captain of the girl’s Varsity tennis team, getting a date for the prom, staying motivated in class, trying to keep that date for prom, you feel me? I don’t even really remember the 2000 Presidential Election, to be honest with you, I was so absorbed in the basic politics of me. And for the most part that’s what senior year was. And the year went by as years do. And then it was graduation and prom and summer again.
I went off to Royal Palm Beach, Florida to stay with friends and alternated between sitting by the pool all day, waiting for the new Jay-Z album, and sneaking inside to log into AOL Instant Messenger (a dinosaur compared to Insta or Snap), to see if my ex-boyfriend, whom I still loved pathetically, had messaged me. 
At the end of the summer, I came back home to NY to get ready for the big move only to wake up one morning to the news that one of my favorite singers, Aaliyah, had died in a plane crash. She was only 22. I obvs didn’t know her, but I was leaving for college in only a few days, it was a new millennium, and, people were disappearing. That made me feel all the more alive, and that was somehow terrifying.
In Brooklyn, at my fairly insular private school, things had seemed pretty chill, pretty ok. Yeah, we had our drama but the majority of our class led pretty comfortable lives, we were privileged, relatively, materially. Now I know that what that had really meant was that I had been walking through my life a bit oblivious to the invisibilities that one day became so visible and visceral, I felt ashamed for not realizing that they had been there all along. For me, the world doesn’t change on one unforgettable day. It only becomes unmasked. But, how did we miss it in the first place? How did we get there, so that we don’t end up there again?
I didn’t know anyone personally who was at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon though the larger Poly community was directly affected, as I’m sure the NA one was. Color had gone out and all you could hear was dark. Again, words echoed: “democracy” and “foreign policy” and “belief.” I watched the lurid footage and read the news for months and felt upset at times and sometimes, I forgot to feel that way at all; I essentially went back to my business, which is what we do when things seem too big, too daunting, and no longer eternal. But I knew that the world as I knew it was not the world. I felt like the actual world was finally revealed. Buildings became lights. People became cries for why they were no longer people. And in the actual world, we millennials had to actually do more than exist. We had to begin to ask ‘why’. Though spontaneity can be the first form of consciousness, coming to consciousness can also be a process. And I only wish I had started that process a little sooner, not only when there was dust.
This summer…I can think of three things in particular that WEREN’T completely terrible this summer.
These two shows. And hanging with Mr. Beckman and Maisie.
Seriously though, this summer in particular has been one of those summers that years from now people might study and think, my god, look at how they lived. One of those summers that some people around the world unfortunately experience within a single day. This is your last year at NA and, ironically, the first year in a long while, when things seem particularly disquieting and on the verge, and so you are being asked to participate in ways I, frankly, was never asked to while in high school. Many of you are already participating in these ways. And perhaps that’s unfair, but that is also opportunity.
I would be doing you a disservice if I stood up here in front of you, the class of 2017 – a class I’ve learned with and thrown up random Illuminati signs with – and didn’t, in this singular moment in time, in this sure to be intense and rewarding year, ask you to continue to locate yourselves in a bigger picture, to place yourselves in context, in order to better understand yourselves and the world around you. Everything is working against this, by the way, everything is forcing you to stay at an individualistic level. Maybe it’s the English teacher in me but I imagine many sentences, from now to the end of the year, beginning with the subject “I”. And I get it. This year is all about you, as it should be. We celebrate your getting here. You’ve sweated getting here. You have pressures on you I wouldn’t presume to know the first thing about. I’m not saying don’t exercise the act of saying “I”. I’m saying think too about what you will learn in the classroom this year, what you have learned in previous years, and how that stuff might have something to do with the causal factors that make you, you, that force your family to deal with what it’s dealing with, that force your country, and your planet. You are a product of many personal and political systems. I hope you will be reminded of this when you wonder why your life might be your life. What are the origins of your happiness, your stress? And what is the origin of those things? And the origin of those things?
Let’s be real – sure, you’re excited it’s your last year and all but if you are anything like I was, you just want it to be May. You just want to be at graduation already, or at prom, or at the beach. I don’t have to ask you to think about everything you will have to do to get there, all the work you’ll put in. You’re well aware because it’s work and you know what that feels like.
Now think about the world around you.
It, too, is so antsy to become what it wants to become. Your quiet tragedies and joys are connected to its deafening ones. You are the same. The absurd, beautiful world is right here. You are a symptom of it. And you have the chance to ask questions about it, so you can get to some answers, some air. So you can get to that beach.
Let’s get to that beach.