Promise

So, last weekend, I went home, back to my old high school, and watched my nephew graduate. Weird in itself that I've been out of high school long enough for someone to be born and go all the way through high school, but more than that somehow. There are places and events that are so richly filled with memory that the thin membrane that is time becomes even thinner, and you can step back and see your old self.

I found myself sitting next to the me that I was at 17, at the senior awards assembly with a lap full of awards for academic achievements, national writing contests, and scholarships. (I'd had a good year - my brother, the chronic underachiever in high school, came home and told my grandmother she really should have come to the Hollie and a Few Other People Awards Ceremony....) I had (I think everyone does, really) all these ideas about who I was, who I would be, what the adult world was like. And they were, of course, all wrong. Thankfully, in some cases....

Perhaps this is all one of those issues of cosmic timing. I'd been reading Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, an insightful novel regarding both the Ivy League admissions process and the expectations we have for life. Each year, exceptional kids rise through the ranks to apply for college, full of insight and idealism (and, in many cases, bullshit), positive that their feet are on the path to enlightenment and wealth and fame. We're also so convicted at that age in the belief that that path is the one, the only, the one true way, and anything else is destined to be disastrous.

Where, in the end, are all these exceptional people? That's the cruelest lesson for the overachiever - the reality that at the end of the day, even the most promising of students usually ends up married, living in the suburbs, overworked, semi-satisfied with marriage and career, underpaid, void of intellectual curiosity, and crafting in their children the same desire, the same search for exceptionality.

And so we question ourselves. How did we get here? Was it all because we chose one college instead of another? Should we have picked a different major? Should we not have changed our majors in our sophomore year? Could we have tried harder, taken more difficult courses? What was all that for anyway? Do we still contain that promise unrealized or did we just fool everyone around us into believe that we had any promise to begin with?

Graduations, I think, are more poignant than weddings. There's so much hope, so palpable and so many expectations that will morph into other things, if they survive at all. At a wedding, the hope is hope you place in another person - the hope that they will be all they say they will be, that they remain who you think they are. In some ways, it isn't as serious, because realistically, we all know that people will disappoint, will change, will require us to adjust or reshape our vision. At a graduation, that hope is for yourself - that you will be all you say you will be, that you will remain who you think you are, and when the adjustment to that vision comes, it is, by nature, much more personal.

Exceptional is rare, and for most, unsustainable. Some of us "peak early," achieving more noteworthy things in our junior year of high school than in the rest of our lives, while some of us just arc delicately through the rarified air of "exceptional," only to find ourselves at some point wafting down into mediocrity. Some of us achieve exceptional in our professional lives, but barely get off the ground in our personal lives as human beings. Some of us just burn up on reentry. As they sit there in caps and gowns, hot and excited, bored with everything around them but so aware, we wonder who is who. Will we ever know? Will they?