Endings and Goodbyes
I wrote a lot of drafts for this speech, but the one that stuck with me the most was the first. That first draft wasn’t anything exceptional or inspirational, or even unique. It was just me plagiarizing Lord of the Rings, reading out Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday goodbye speech to anyone who hadn’t yet tuned out, before trying to figure out how to vanish from the stage in a puff of smoke. For those of you who may not have been as obsessed with Lord of the Rings as I was (and still somewhat am), Bilbo Baggins gives a speech at his 111th birthday party during which he insults the majority of those in attendance before leaving his comfortable life behind yet again. It was a story I played out in my head for years, years before I even got close to graduating middle school. But by the time I graduated middle school, I forgot my plans that had been years in the making in favor of a short, cliched address where I talked about meeting my friends, and how that tied into the values of the scho...