(Grace) Good morning, everyone and thank you so much for coming.
Now that we’re all here together, it’s so nice to see everyone, including all of your (famous) parents. If you’re at all impressed with our stature and our witty repertoire, please, help a sister out.
(Jamie) We are so excited to be here. Grace and I have absolutely no authority to give advice, so we’re just here to talk to our friends.
It is so sad to stand here knowing how everything ends. We walked into freshman orientation, wondering who our friends would be, what classes we would take, and what our first conference project might be, and now we know.
(Grace) How I will miss the romance, the mystery, and the excitement of the college campus. The obscurity of not knowing what my conferences will look like until the week they are due. There are so many books we wish we could read and conversations we wish we could have for the first time. I sit up at night, wishing I had never met any of you horrible people so I can meet you all over again.
(Jamie) It is surreal to know that we will only use the past tense to refer to our experience at SLC from now on. But in graduating, we are joining a unique class of people, and we’re really grateful to be a part of that special club.
(Grace) In many creation stories, curiosity is what causes the downfall of humanity. Eve eats the apple because she was told not to, or Pandora opening her box of sickness and evil.
I know like many of my peers in high school, I was taught to rid myself of any urges to learn things that were not deemed important enough to pursue. Graduating high school, I had a 2.9 GPA and was banned from all assemblies because of an off-color joke I made once about the movie Carrie the day before prom.
Sarah Lawrence was my dream school. It was one of the only ones that saw the potential in me to be a scholar. Here, we have been trusted to let our curiosity lead us. Before I attended school here, I thought maybe I was just stupid for being so adamant to reject what was fed to me. My freshman year I felt a door open to an entire new possibility of learning and community. I had my suspicions, but now I know the truth, that those who quell independent thought are afraid of what happens when we let the mind wander into something more obscure and terrifying.
(Jamie) One of our education’s greatest gifts is an unhealthy relationship with fear. In our seminars and conference work we learned exactly how doomed humanity really is, from a multitude of angles. Ideas of capitalism, climate change, and authoritarianism all hold much more ominous meanings than they did four years ago. Just sitting in seminar, let alone in conference, is terrifying. But it has also taught us how to be fearless.
We learned how to just do it, say yes, and jump in with both feet. Fearlessness started when we committed to SLC and has flourished during our time here. We learned to see the world as the intertextual work of art that it is. Every puppet musical, ballet movie, and research paper is an act of fearlessness. And what we are doing now is an even bigger one. As Taylor Swift once said, I don't know how it gets better than this, you take my hand and drag me head first, fearless.
(Grace) Thank you to our faculty for always supporting our outlandish academic endeavors.
(Jamie) Thank you to the staff for making sure all of our events actually took place.
(Grace) Thank you to our parents for having faith in us always.
(Jamie) Thank you to our friends for your never-ending passion and the courage to be yourselves.
(Grace) Thank you administration for letting us rule over the student body with an iron fist.
(Jamie) And thank you Sadie Lou for everything in between.