After graduation in April, each of you will enter a different world. As you will discover, there will be a lot of excitement, happiness, rewards, frustrations and challenges along the way.

Just before my son’s graduation, he attended a retreat where he was asked to give an inspirational talk to his classmates. Here’s what he wanted to say which I saw in his blog. I’m posting it here with his permission.

Over the moon
Feb 22, 2007

I didn’t want to go to the retreat, I told Mrs Saulog, my clinical instructor. My reason mainly was that my classmates are going through a totally different phase right now, much different from what I am. How could they understand what I’m going through, I reasoned.

I remember when I was driving on my way to my French class one rainy afternoon. I was 25 years old and suddenly, without warning, quarterlife crisis hit me. It hit me with such a great impact that I stopped attending my classes at Alliance Francaise because I felt that everything that I was doing should be for the attainment of a greater goal. Should be, because it seems that although I had accomplished a lot by that age, I didn’t have focus. Instead of moving up vertically career-wise, I was full speed horizontally. And so she said that maybe I do need to go to that retreat because I had a lot to share to my classmates who really haven’t seen the real world, who all were idealistic, who all believed they were all ending up in the United States in the future, who all think that the struggle in school is the biggest struggle in life, who all believed that the only way to get what they want was to be independent but at the same time too afraid to live away from their parents and finally those who experienced “taking chances” only in their love life. But I failed. Half of the group went back to their rooms by the time it was my chance to share something and even I was half asleep already, tired from walking up and down a rugged terrain just to see a cemetery for nuns and priests.

A few days ago, I heard from my mom that my aunt in the States was criticizing my cousin’s delay in passing the NCLEX as well as other decisions she made in life. It reminded me of what I wanted to say back then at the retreat. I remember just saying believe in yourself and never got to explain.

I told my mom that my cousin shouldn’t let things like that affect her. Whatever other people tell you about you should not define you. You should not let other people set your limits. Do not believe others if they tell you about your capabilities. You should listen to yourself–discover your own limits, improve yourself and do not let other people fight your battles for you.

When I was in my early teens, I knew I was better off than most people financially back in the province because I didn’t come from a family whose parents bred like rabbits. Both my parents worked and on my fourth grade, we got rid of our maid and started living like an efficient nuclear American family. I knew a lot of people were envious but I had the common teen need of being accepted by my peers. Since I had everything, I had to compensate by doing poorly academically. And I remember being ugly–close to the point of feeling like having a genetic aberration especially because I was tall, fat, with big puffy cheeks, with clothes that didn’t fit, pimples all over the place, weird voice… I remember people being nasty to me telling me I was going to be fat forever, etcetera. The A group in my class didn’t want to include me in their get-togethers. When I was much younger, they didn’t want me joining their teams in whatever childhood games they used to play because I couldn’t run fast enough and some didn’t even want to talk to me and ignored me when I tried to talk to them. There was this classmate of mine who even had this need to whisper to me, “You’re so fat, you’ll never lose weight, you’re just a hopeless case.”

Now, if I believed in those people, maybe I’d still be where I was 10 years ago. So when people talk behind my back, that’s okay with me. Opinions are opinions. People talk shit about other people all the time. Even my close friend will not find me perfect so when they talk about my imperfections, I think that’s pretty understandable. I keep on telling this to my friends who get angry whenever they hear someone saying things about them. “It only matters if you believe it’s true.”