Hi. You might remember me as the Blue Flame EIC, or one of the Sigma Mu Epsilon girls.
Or at least that’s how I want to remember my high school life: a time of academic work, after-school debates, lots of papers and books…
But –
I wasn’t generally liked in high school, or even grade school. I admit I still have some resentment at being ridiculed, laughed at, not listened to, put on the spot. I called it bullying back then, only because I felt that nobody understood me and accepted me for who I was.
But the thing is: did we all know who we truly were?
Some of us were still discovering ourselves, and were listening to all sorts of voices as we tried out different electives, chose different college courses, maybe settled for others. A lot of us, like it or not, didn’t really know ourselves at all. Some chose to fit in, or really forced themselves to fit in. Others stood at the fringes, proud to be outsiders.
To this day, I don’t really know where I stood.
But maybe I didn’t need to stand anywhere. In a time when I didn’t know how else to function besides bury myself in books and cough up papers or debate speeches, maybe i didn’t need to label where in the world I was.
Maybe, like all of you , I was still searching.
And the reward wasn’t in the finding, but in the process of discovery.
After high school, I became a molecular biologist. Ten years after, I became a social scientist. Today, I am a professor at the Ateneo, and I specialize in science communication.
Some of you might have changed careers, too, or seen your lives take new trajectories, new directions, new meanings. But in these new paths, I hope that you, too, are looking back on everything we’ve learned – and everything that, no matter how mundane, worked to bring us here.
It might have been high school debate and critical thinking. Cooking classes that taught us to appreciate all sorts of cuisines (and cook them, too). Sewing classes, dance classes, electives, readings, protest rallies…
And being on the fringes, and being everywhere, and being nowhere at once?
They taught me that I don’t have to know myself completely. Not in high school. Not in college. Not even today.
I am still discovering, still building, still working, still progressing.
Still reading, still speaking, still protesting, still healing.
And still remembering.
We are all of us our own stories, and like every beginning, we don’t know our end – and the whole thing is an adventure.
We are not who we were, and we will never again be who we are now. But those 25 years since high school also mean that the many people , the many identities we’ve taken on, have also turned the bullies into beacons, the quiet ones into the speakers, the friendless to the happy and frenzied.
Let’s find out what those 25 years have brought. As we move closer to our homecoming, let’s listen to each other’s stories, discover new friendships – and rock on.
