Good afternoon, teachers, families, and fellow graduates.

It's an honor to stand here today.

Today is not a simple day.

Not a day when we are crowding to borrow calculators or swap notes before exams.

Not a day when the class group chat is filled with a dozen questions about deadlines, or where to submit project.

Not a day when someone casually plays a tune on the piano in the hall, and a small crowd gathers, just for a moment of shared pause.

Today -- we are here for one purpose: to celebrate the end of this shared chapter.

I don't stand here today as someone who always had clarity.

I stand here as someone who once lost direction completely, who struggled, who questioned everything -- and who is still becoming.

Three years ago, I entered HFI not just with a transcript, but with a fractured sense of self.

I had been through burnout, through paranoia, through the kind of fear that silences curiosity.

Three years.

A journey none of us could have fully imagined when we first walked through those gates.

Three years of projects that stretched past midnight.

Of long afternoons spent in heated debates -- in Model UN rooms, in classrooms after the bell, in late-night phone calls with friends.

Three years of discovering that high school was about more than scores.

That friendship can be built over philosophy arguments, badminton matches, or simply walking together after school under the same sky.

And if we look around today -- at each other -- we know:

We've all made it here, through very different paths.

But the questions we've asked along the way have often been the same.

What does it mean to succeed?

What does it mean to fail?

What matters when effort does not always bring results?

And where do we find meaning in the middle of it all?

Some of us may have turned to music.

Some to sports.

Some to conversations with friends, teachers, or even to long solitary walks through the campus.

Some of us -- perhaps reluctantly -- turned to books not assigned by the syllabus, searching for something more.

In middle school, I had loved learning for its own sake.

I loved history, philosophy, the clean precision of geometry.

But during the years of high-stakes exams, I lost that love.

Study became strategy. Passion turned to pressure.

We've all had moments of doubt, moments when the pressure felt overwhelming, moments when we questioned where meaning could be found.

Each of us has found -- or is still finding -- our own ways of seeking answers.

For me, that search led me toward philosophy. For you, it may have been through relationships, creativity, faith, or quiet reflection.

And that's what makes our journeys unique -- and yet deeply connected.

So, how has philosophy enlightened me? Well, it led me.

To Sartre, who taught me that being thrown into existence is not a choice, but creating meaning is.

To Nietzsche, who taught me that in the absence of inherent truth, we can become our own creators.

To Hegel, who taught me that the synthesis of contradictions is not confusion, but growth.

In some way, HFI became my dialectic.

I began with fear.

I negated it with rebellion.

And somehow — through the guidance of friends, teachers, and long nights of self-questioning — I arrived at something more complex: acceptance.

Not the kind of passive surrender.

But the kind that says:

I am both free and bound.

I am both in control and not.

I am a self that is forming, dissolving, and reforming every day.

And that is enough.

And I believe -- for many of us here -- learning that this is enough may be one of the hardest and most valuable lessons we take from here.

As we move forward, I'd like to share this with all of us:

Let’s not be afraid to be wrong.

Let’s not be afraid to be weird, or behind, or misunderstood.

Some of us may feel ahead. Some of us may feel behind.

But let's remember:

Being human is not a race. It is a spiral.

Growth is rarely linear.

And the most important learning we'll do here won't be on paper --

It will be in the moments we almost gave up -- but didn't.

I am not the smartest person in this room.

I am not the most disciplined.

But I am someone who has loved knowledge so deeply it broke me.

Who tried to rebuild his life through words, chords, equations, and silent prayers.

Someone who has hurt, healed, and now dares to speak.

And I know that each of us -- through our own ways -- have had to dare, too.

Our paths may have looked nothing alike.

But we are here. And that matters.

In this society, we are often taught to be cautious.

To fear mistakes.

To carry burdens in silence.

But I want to say this clearly -- not only to my peers, but to all of us here today:

We have carried enough.

We are not fragile.

We are luminous.

We are worthy.

We are the generation that dares to feel, to fall, to rise -- and still believe in knowledge as a form of love.

So to my friends: Thank you.

For showing up, again and again, in your own ways.

For being ambitious, strange, intense, hilarious, vulnerable.

For helping me survive.

To my teachers: Thank you.

For letting me exist as more than a grade.

To myself: Thank you.

For holding on.

And to the world that awaits us:

I want to say this in the end:

We may not always succeed.

But we -- this generation -- will never again live asleep.

Congratulations, Class of 2025.

May we always remember who we are -- when we are still becoming.