Note: This was originally written as a graduation speech, but since a fantastic speaker who wasn’t me was picked instead, here it is as a blog post.
Today, we have so much to celebrate. The friends we’ve made, the grades we received, the sheer amount of words written or calculations done that got us here to shake AKB’s hand and take our diploma case on Alumni Park. Celebrate that time you had the perfect day in Paris or Hong Kong or Santa Monica and you never wanted it to end. Celebrate the simple fact that we made it here at all. Celebrate that sometimes these seemed like the best four years of our lives.
But, I have great news for you–these weren’t the best four years of your life. How awful would that be? To peak at twenty two? Your best years are still ahead of you. And thank goodness. Because these years might’ve been great, but wow, they were hard.
We get asked “how’s college?” and on autopilot we say ‘It’s great.“ And sometimes it was. Sometimes it was 2 AM donut runs or lazy days on the beach or spending way too much time at Disneyland, but sometimes it wasn’t great. Sometimes it was crying over your laptop at 2 AM or feeling like every single one of your friends has plans except you. Sometimes it’s laying in bed sick and not having anyone to call.
My sophomore year here I studied abroad in Shanghai, China, and on our first weekend there we decided to go on a day trip to a little town on a lake two hours outside the city. We visited their famous temple, ate lunch, walked the path around the lake. We took a break and I turned around to look at an umbrella for sale. When I turned back around, my group was gone.
"Maybe they’re just a little bit up ahead.” I thought, and I walked on. But they weren’t there. I walked and walked for hours, panic growing in my chest and closing my throat with every step, and never found them. Then, of course, it started to rain. I didn’t know where I was, or where my group was, I spoke horrible Chinese, I had no phone, and now I was both cold and soaking wet.
That was the last straw. I sat down on a bench in the rain and cried, and cried and decided that I was done with China and if I ever got out of this lake town I would be on the next plane home.
But then, something amazing happened. A random stranger saw me there realized I was lost, and then walked me to the metro, paid for my ticket, and took me through the metro to the train station so I could meet up with the rest of my group.
I didn’t hop on the next plane home, and the next time I got lost, I didn’t cry. I’d learned. I’d learned that there were good people out there if I’d just ask for help, I’d learned that I could get through being lost no matter where I was. I’d learned a little better how to pick myself up and brush myself off and continue on.
Every one of you has a story like this. We have so many obvious achievements to celebrate today, but today I hope we also remember to celebrate these more unusual stories; the times when you fell down and pushed through in spite of everything.
Honor the day when you got sick in rural China or missed the train to London by six seconds. Remember the time you side-swiped a car in Rho or missed the shuttle or slept through an exam. Celebrate all the times you forgot a slide in a presentation or stuttered in your COM 180 speech or in your graduation speech in front of your entire class.
Toast to your A’s but also your B’s and C’s and even F’s. You might’ve learned more in the classes you failed. Today, celebrate everything that went wrong because those are the moments when we learned, and when we started to grow into the people we are today.
Pepperdine’s real value isn’t from a textbook, it’s in how much we’ve grown. It’s in the learning that happens from failure. So today, celebrate the not-best four years of your life, because you are so much smarter, stronger, and filled with purpose, service, and leadership than you were when you first arrived on campus. Today is the start of another part of your life, and you head into it stronger than you’ve ever been before, and armed with the knowledge that when you end up in a rough patch, you’ll come out on the other side even stronger, just like you did here at Pepperdine.
For my Graphic Design class, I created a series of Pepperdine-themed coloring sheets to help people de-stress. You can download and print your own here:
The year is 2011. April Fool’s day actually, (I remember because my mom thought I was joking). I’m a Sophomore in high school, absolutely miserable. I’m holding myself together with the tenuous thread of Disney, Kingdom Keepers (and the fourth book just came out) and SparkLife - the SparkNotes blog. I have no idea what I want to do with my life, I have no career prospects, the only thing I’m good at is fangirling, and outside of my diary I’ve never written something voluntarily in my life. And then SparkLife starts their series of Confidence Pants Stories, and 15 year old Brooke, terrified to order at restaurants, or talk on the phone, or even go anywhere without her jacket, starts to find her voice.
I wrote this blog post and sent it in to SparkLife, and to my surprise they published it. And, now that I remembered it and dredged it up from the depths of the internet, I wanted to repost it to my own blog, not because it’s necessarily good (I certainly hope I’ve improved since this!) but because it’s an important reminder of how much I’ve changed in the past six years, and how much I have left to grow.
I have pasted it below, but the original can also be found here.
For most people, a coat, jacket, or sweater is simply a fashion statement, or something to wear when it gets cool. As a native Californian, I never had a high threshold for cold. Add that to the fact that I was a very skinny child; I was constantly cold. Thus, from a young age I wore a jacket everywhere I went. But as I got older I took it off less, and less, and less. I wore it even in the summer, in the park, in Arizona. No matter how hot I was I refused to take off my jacket. It became a part of me.
I became contained in the small bubble my jacket provided. I kept everything in its pockets, my phone, my iPod, my money… everything you would normally keep in a purse. As I went through puberty I became even more afraid of taking it off—my body was changing but as long as I kept my jacket on nobody would know. Whenever my dad took it away, saying it was too hot to be wearing it, I would cry and plead and beg until he gave it back to me. It really was more like a mental disorder. I truly felt cold without it on, no matter how hot I was before I took it off, because that was my body’s way of dealing with losing my comfort item. Young kids have special blankets, and I had a jacket.
I entered high school still wearing my jacket. I went through freshman year wearing the jacket.
It was just recently, finally, ≤ of the way through my sophomore year, that I donned a gigantic pair of confidence pants, and I took off my jacket. I wasn’t sweating, I wasn’t even hot, but I had felt the sun on my face for the first time in 7 months and I wanted to feel it on my arms, too. And you know what, it wasn’t that bad. I was really cold at first but then I started to feel better. And for the first time in about 8 months, I felt sun on my arms. And I felt my hair brushing against my arms. I realized my arms had forgotten the feeling of not being in a cloth cave.
Another thing, no one laughed at me, no one gave me weird looks, in fact people even complimented me on my outfit. I did put my jacket back on eventually, but I managed without the jacket for 7 whole hours. I probably won’t stop wearing it completely, but I won’t sweat to death from living in it. And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll be awesomeboss enough to go without it everywhere. :)
There was supposed to be a crown in this photo. A Miss America local crown, to be exact. It was supposed to sit next to my bullet journal spread and be a beautiful example of how my bullet journal helped me achieve my goals.
Because that’s how it’s supposed to work, right? That’s why we devote hours to our planners and bullet journals, because if you dot enough t’s and cross enough i’s, if you complete enough tasks in your habit tracker or your to-do list or your level ten life, your prayers and dreams will come true.
Deep down, I’ve come to realize, that’s how I thought it worked. I thought enough hours sitting in the splits plus enough swimsuit walks in front of the mirror plus enough sit ups equals a crown and a happy life. I thought that if I just skated until my toes bled, if I did practice interviews until I broke down crying, if I wore only heels all day, every. single. day. for over a month and I colored all my boxes on my Pageant Bootcamp spread pink then I would win the crown. You do the work, you get the reward.
But a little over a month ago I stood on that stage, confident in my checked boxes and hours and hours of work I’d devoted, and waited for them to announce the winners. I knew I’d worked harder than anyone else on that stage (nothing against them, I’d just been competing in the system twice as long), and I had faith that my hard work would pay off. But then,
“First runner up, contestant number two, Brooke!"
And my heart shattered and I pulled a smile onto my face and walked forward and accepted my flowers and left without the crown.
I left knowing that I had done absolutely everything I could and it didn’t work. I planned perfectly. I trained perfectly. I filled in my beautiful pageant habit tracker and it didn’t pay off. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. But it did.
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this story is. That’s another thing my bullet journal can’t tell me. But if you take one thing away from this, let it be a reminder. Your planner is a tool, but it isn’t a ticket. You can make all the plans in the world, but it isn’t guaranteed to work. I don’t say this to discourage you from planning, but to ask you to be mindful of it. Remember that there’s a bigger plan out there than what you have written down (whose plan it is depends on your worldview, that’s up to you to figure out). And when it doesn’t work out, it might not be the little pink boxes’ fault. It might not even be your fault. It might just be a bigger plan. We just have to keep stumbling forward with our little plans, trusting it will all work out.
Too bad we can’t track the bigger plan in our bullet journals.
First, I want to start with a disclaimer: I do have a lot of sewing experience. I started sewing my Halloween costume when I was in middle school and I’ve been sewing them every year since. However, sewing is definitely not as complicated as much as you might think, especially with all the YouTube tutorials that are available online these days. So if you’ve been wanting a costume that you can’t find anywhere else, give it a shot.
For my costume this year I decided to be Belle from Beauty and the Beast, but the blue dress version from Once Upon a Time. (It looks like this):
So I collected reference photos (Pinterest is GREAT for this) and read through people’s blog posts of how they made their version of the dress, for inspiration. Odds are, no matter what costume you are trying to make, someone’s already done it and blogged about it, so check out someone else’s post and learn from their successes and mistakes. Next, it was time to get fabric. I was able to get the lining from Jo-ann Fabric, but couldn’t find a main fabric I liked. I knew I needed blue linen, and Jo-ann had nothing. So, I turned to Fabric.com. I was extremely hesitant to buy online, but they had great reviews, so I went for it, and I’m actually super happy with what I got. Thank goodness, since I didn’t have time to return and re-order.
Now, for the actual crafting part. First up, pattern drafting. For those of you with no sewing experience: the pattern is like the instruction manual/guide on what shapes to cut the fabric into. I personally hate sewing off of store-bought patterns. They never fit right, I always have to alter them, and they’re expensive. Thankfully, the internet is full of free tutorials. So, I used this tutorial for the bodice pattern, and this one for the puff sleeves. The rest of it, I pretty much eyeballed. It’s simple geometry, and if you’re stuck, just look at the shapes in the clothes you already have at home.
The skirt was simple: I cut out two half circles, and then two half circles in the middle, and then sewed them together. Repeat with the lining, gather by zig-zag stitching across a piece of thread, sew to the waistband (leaving a gap at the back to get in and out, I attached two ribbons as a fastener) hem the whole thing, and ta-da!
The bodice was a little more complicated. I used the pattern I’d drafted on a sheet of the Graphic and cut it out of cheap muslin at first, so that I could totally destroy it on my way to figuring out what worked. It’s a good thing I did: the first pattern was way too long, had the back straps I’d just guessed on in the completely wrong place, and needed another five inches in the back. After enough finagling, the pattern was finally ready to go (and my muslin version looked like a corset Dr. Frankenstein would make). I cut it out of blue linen and the lining, and then sewed each of them into their own bodices, with the seams on the lining facing out and those on the linen facing in.
For boning, I bought some Rigaline boning online, the only type you can sew directly to the fabric. (Conveniently, it’s also great for picking locks). I basically guessed on where to sew it, sewed it to the lining, and then sewed the lining and linen together like a sandwich. Not perfect, but worked better than expected.
I spent all of my Monday night class hand-stitching the brown edging to the edge of the bodice. Tip: professors might tell you to put away your phone during class, but they don’t really know what to do about students sewing. Or knitting, for that matter.
With the bodice mostly done, I ended up heading back to Jo-ann (again) for the undershirt material. Psst… I actually cheated on this. I wasn’t about to sew an entire shirt to go under the bodice I just made, nor was I going to hand embroider detailing on it. Come on, I’m a college kid. No one’s got time for that. Luckily, I found a seven-inch wide lace, so I bought that and, with some patching scraps together for where it wasn’t wide enough, I was able to sew it onto the neckline and then cut it into sleeves according to the pattern I’d drafted. Because it was lace, I didn’t even need to hem it. I just wove white ribbon through the holes at the ends of each sleeve, so that I could pull them tight and make the sleeves poofy.
I bought a pack of eyelets at the store (those metal circle things), cut holes in the fabric, and used my friend’s hammer to hammer them flat into the bodice. Life hack: do this when your downstairs neighbors aren’t home. I threaded a black suede string through the eyelets, and cinched it tight.
Then, I took my costume to Disneyland’s Halloween party, and had so many guests think I was official Belle that it became a problem. All in all, I think it was a success.
The Miss America Pageant was a few weeks ago, and as I happily gathered with my pageant friends around the TV to watch it, I never considered people might have anything beyond the utmost admiration for these women brave enough, poised enough, dedicated enough to represent their state in front of the entire nation.
And then the next morning I saw the posts. Bitter person after bitter person commenting on how pageantry is an insult to professional women, how no man should ever want a girl so vapid, etc. etc. etc. The lack of knowledge about pageantry is so painful in these comments.
Yes, there’s a swimsuit competition. Yes, the Miss America Organization has its origins in a beauty pageant. But now, the pageant system stands for so much more than that.
I challenge anyone turning up their noses at the pageants to try one. They wouldn’t even make it past the paperwork. To even enter a local is an exercise in perfectionism. You need a platform, a cause you care passionately enough about to promote it for your entire year as a titleholder. I volunteer with my platform for at least ten hours a month, and I’m massively an under-achiever. Other girls have started their own foundations, or raised absurd amounts of money, or lead massive fundraisers. In 2016, Miss contestants alone raised more than a million dollars for the Children’s Miracle Network, on top of volunteering, and donating to their individual platforms. Pageant girls are changing the world around you, you just have to look.
If you can make it past the paperwork, it’s time to start studying. Who’s your favorite Miss America, Miss State, Miss Local? What is the solution to world hunger? What should we do about the refugee crisis? Given the thousands of years of history of the Middle East, how should America be helping the situation? Why should Donald Trump be our president? Why should Hillary Clinton be our president? (And you better have a good answer for both, regardless of your views). Pageant girls need to know history, politics, sports, current events, and every scandal that got 15 minutes of fame in the last twenty years. The girls up on the Miss America stage can answer these questions better than either presidential candidate can.
Don’t spend all your time studying; you also need a talent. I’m an artistic roller skater: it takes faith to believe I won’t skate straight off the edge of the stage. My friend is a pianist, and a piano major. She practices hours every week, has ever since she was little. We have dancers and instruments and even jugglers and jump ropers. All of it live, all of it in front of everyone you know. Don’t drop your baton. To be a pageant girl, you need confidence. You need to believe in yourself enough that when you get on that stage in five inch heels and what feels like underwear, you own that stage. The skinniest girl doesn’t win the pageant, the most confident girl does. And that brand of confidence? That isn’t a confidence you can get anywhere else, that is a confidence you learn from putting yourself on that stage and failing and getting back up again, as many times as it takes.
If none of those reasons are enough justification for you, remember that the prize is scholarship money. For many pageant girls, the scholarships they earn are the way they are able to pay for college, to get their education and go on to become doctors, lawyers, novelists, engineers. Pageantry isn’t encouraging beauty over brains, it’s allowing some of the brightest and most poised girls in the country to get the education they need to change the world.
And as a final note, to any of you young women looking to gain confidence, friendships, and scholarship money to help pay off those student loans, the local pageant season’s just starting.
Right now, you’re sixteen years old. You’re slowly picking your way through high school, just trying to keep junior year from being quite so bad as sophomore year, just trying to hold it together and make it through. You’re halfway there.
Right now, you’re so young. You don’t think you are, but you are. You’re scared of your own shadow, you’re too shy to order at restaurants easily, you have a few close friends and fill your time with skating and 4H. You’ve never had a real job, you don’t even have a license: your mom dropped you off here and it’s the first time you’ve been alone in public in months. You love Disney and you love this little book series called Kingdom Keepers and all four of its books.
Today’s September 26th; 2011 for you and 2016 for me. This date means nothing to you right now. In fact, today’s been a pretty awful day. You’re still exhausted from church camp last weekend, you got a migraine during first period and then came in late to third period to a physics test you forgot about. Skating practice was exhausting, your head’s still pounding, and now you’re sitting alone in the front row at Kepler’s, clutching onto your copies of Kingdom Keepers for dear life.
It’s been such a bad day that you almost didn’t come, but when you got out of the car this morning the little dream you’ve been nursing for the past six months started tugging at you. It’s a dream so absurd you haven’t even told anyone of its existence, but it wouldn’t stop tugging so you asked mom to grab your books from their spot of honor on the nightstand next to your bed, the ones with all the post-it notes sticking out every which way, and drive you to the bookstore after skating, so you can go to the Kingdom Keepers author’s book signing.
I don’t want to spoil it for you, but tonight is going to prove that dreams really do come true, that there’s no such thing as wasting time on something you love.
You’re sitting in Kepler’s now and wondering if this was a mistake, wondering what you’re really doing here.
It isn’t a mistake. Tonight, your life is going to change. It’s like you’ve been driving along this dreary road for the past sixteen years, painfully normal, dreaming of something, anything special happening, and then tonight your life is not just going to change paths, it’s going to go soaring off into space like a rocket. There are a few moments in life that alter it entirely, twenty minutes that change more than the two years before it. The next twenty minutes are one of those moments.
By the time mom picks you up after her PTA meeting, the trajectory of your life will have changed completely. You will have been plucked from high school monotony and thrown into the whirlwind of the publishing world, and the Kingdom Keepers team. Your future school, study abroad, major, career… they all are branches off of that moment. You’ll spend the next few years scrambling, because you’re sixteen and there’s so so so much you don’t know. You don’t even know enough to know what you don’t know. But that’s okay. You’ll learn.
You’ll learn how to balance: how to be childish and mature, a student and a professional, a fan and a team member. You’ll tell your senior year physics teacher you have to miss class for a business trip to Disneyland and feel like the coolest person in the world. Sometimes you’ll feel like a tightrope walker, and you’ll struggle to stay upright, but it’s worth it. Sometimes you’ll fall. Sometimes you’ll fail spectacularly. But you’ll learn.
You’ll learn to fail. You’ll learn to fail again and again and again. Not the cliche brand of failure where you didn’t dot your t’s correctly so you fixed it really quick and learned how to do it right- the real failure. You’ll learn cry-yourself-to-sleep-because-everything-is-wrong-and-it’s-your-fault failure. It’ll feel like the world is ending, because all you know about failure is how to avoid it at all costs, but then you’ll see other people fail too, and you’ll see them brush it off and eventually you’ll realize it’s okay. And then you’ll fall down and it won’t hurt quite as much as it did the time before, and when you get back up you’ll be sore but you’re sore from getting stronger.
Sometimes it will be hard. Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Sometimes you’ll have bad days, and sometimes you’ll have a lot of bad days in a row, but you’ll get through it and you’ll learn to trust that. You’ll learn that no matter how many bad days there are, you’ll eventually get through to the good days.
You’ll learn to talk, and you’ll learn when to keep quiet. You’ll learn when to bite your tongue but also when to let people in because you don’t have to go through life alone. You’ll go from a girl who doesn’t talk to strangers to a girl speaking to thousands individually over the span of a few hours. It sounds unbelievable now, but you’ll gain a brand of confidence you’ve never had before.
You’ll learn that everything happens for a reason. Right now you’re still asking yourself why last year had to happen, but if you hadn’t struggled through that class, you wouldn’t’ve read these books so many times. You wouldn’t’ve found all these inconsistencies, and you wouldn’t be here tonight. Looking back on it, it’s crystal clear. Remember how you almost didn’t come tonight? Life’s like that, full of little choices that make a big impact. Keep that in the back of your mind for every decision you make. Magic is always just around the corner of a not-so-good day.
(If you aren’t familiar with this meme, google it. It’s great)
You’re climbing up the stairs to your 8 AM. You’re climbing up the stairs to your 10 AM. You’re climbing up the stairs to your 2 PM. You’re climbing up the stairs to your dorm. You don’t know how it’s possibly you only ever climb up stairs but you do.
You sit next to the fireplace in the caf until you can’t stand the sound of it. Can’t anyone else hear the high-pitched sound? They say they can’t, so maybe it’s just you. You sit on the other side of the caf, shivering because it is below 70, to get away from the sound.
No one goes through the small door. No one talks about the small door except the freshman. They haven’t learned yet. They’ll learn when they go abroad. But everyone knows about the small door. You know the small door.
The one weird girl always walks through the small door. She’s the only one. Maybe she’s right and there’s something we don’t know. If you ask her about it, she’ll tell you the small door doesn’t exist.
Classes are full, housing is full, the parking lot’s full and yet you never see anyone. Lower dorm road is empty when you walk to class. Where did they go? What are they doing now? Are you the only person left?
Google maps says there is no traffic on PCH. Google is wrong. There is always traffic on PCH. There will always be traffic on PCH. When you sit in the traffic, you swear it is always the same cars sitting with you.
A noise echos off in the hills at night. Everyone says it’s an animal. It doesn’t sound like an animal. They tell you to stop asking questions. You wonder if that noise is what happens to people who keep asking questions.
There are people yelling in Lovernich. Loud music. It almost sounds like the parties you’ve seen on TV, but Pepperdine doesn’t have parties. The noises stop all of the sudden. A DPS car is outside. You wonder if you know anyone who was making the noises. You wonder if you’ll ever see them again.
The HAWC is out of ham. The HAWC is also out of pizza and cheese and pasta. You ask what they do have and they offer you a carrot. “We’re sold out” they tell you. “Check back tomorrow.” You’ll check back tomorrow, but there won’t be any more food.
You order a hamburger from the grill at the caf, and they give you a quesadilla. You try to explain to them they got your order wrong, but when they remake it you end up with an omelette. They tell you that this is a hamburger, until eventually you give up.
Each class is never on campus with another class for more than a year. They say it’s a consequence of study abroad. You wonder if there’s a reason they never let all four classes get together.
It’s the end of the year. Your friends are getting ready to go abroad. “See you later” they say. “I’ll write to you.” You nod and smile. They’re so excited. You know you’ll never see them again.
“Nothing remains as it was. If you know this you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting” -Judith Minty
I was so excited to get back to Pepperdine. I loved freshman year, I loved the beach, I loved Disneyland, I loved my little dorm room and the late nights up talking and grabbing dinner with my friends. I loved the idea that I could have everyone when I got back to the US; my freshman group, my BA group and my Shanghai group all in the same place. I was so excited to stop answering invites with ‘sorry, wrong continent.’ I was so excited to get back everything I left behind.
The problem is, the Pepperdine I left behind doesn’t exist anymore. Someone else is living in my old dorm. The caf has been remodeled. The HAWC doesn’t have buzzers anymore. Even worse, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know anyone. I, and most of my class, are third year freshmen. We don’t know the seniors, the sophomores, the freshmen. We don’t even know the juniors, even those we were friends with freshman year; they’ve changed. We’ve changed. The people we were abroad with aren’t the same people either; now that we’re back home they’re different too. They hang out with different people and do different things. So, as a class, we get to embark on a third year of starting alone. It’s getting old, but it’s a fact of life here.
The worst part of it is seeing this fact of life dawn on the little innocent freshmen.
