TRANSCRIPT
29 years ago, I was in my final year of high school. During my four years of high school, I realized that a lot of my hope for my future was based on getting really, really good grades. Because then, I believed I was going to have a chance to escape this horrible, horrible high school environment, this town environment where I grew up and my family. I was going to get a chance to go forward into the world, maybe go to a better college than I could have otherwise gone to, and get a chance to meet better people, better professors, learn new things, and break out.
So I worked as hard as I possibly could for four years of high school, and I got pretty good grades. Actually, I got excellent grades. At the end of four years of high school, I graduated number two in my class out of about 350 students. So I wasn’t the valedictorian, but I was the salutatorian of my high school class. And the result of being the salutatorian was that I was given the opportunity to give a speech at my high school graduation, and I found that terrifying.
I was much better at math and science at that point in my life. My verbal skills weren’t that great. I loved to read a lot, but I didn’t really write that much. I wasn’t a very fluent or comfortable writer, and my vocabulary wasn’t that great. And I wasn’t at all comfortable getting up and talking and thinking in a conscious way in front of an audience, being spontaneous. This was very far from who I was.
And really, what that high school graduation speech offered me was an opportunity to practice. But I was so scared. I was afraid I was gonna flub it up. I was afraid I was gonna write terribly, that I couldn’t do it. And I was even allowed, even expected, to read what I wrote. So I started trying, and I had mental blocks, and I was too scared. So I went to my parents and I said, “I’m having a problem writing my graduation speech.” Now, I had a lot of time to do it. I think I had probably a month or two to practice writing it. But I went to them and I said, “What should I do?”
And my dad, who was actually a very good writer and a very good public speaker, he said, “Let me help you.” The problem with my dad is that he didn’t respect me very much. In fact, he often respected me very little, or better said, he really disrespected me. And the other problem with my dad was my dad was someone who really wasn’t loved very much as a kid. In fact, he was loved very, very little, and he was really rejected terribly by his parents as a kid. And he didn’t do very well in high school. He did better later on in his life; he caught up. But in high school, he did actually very poorly.
And what my dad did, he did this many, many times, but it happened with my graduation speech. He didn’t actually help me write my graduation speech. Instead, what my dad did was he wrote my graduation speech for me. And he heard the parameters. He heard that I needed to have about a 5, something like that, 5 or 6 or 7 minute speech, whatever it was. And so he wrote it. And he wrote a beautiful speech, and he handed it to me, and it was all typed out. And I think his secretary even typed it out for him.
I read it, and I had mixed feelings. On one hand, my feelings were, “Oh my god, it’s a gorgeous graduation speech with metaphors and vocabulary that was beyond me, with ideas that were just beautifully written. It was eloquent.” And I was like, “Oh my god, it’s amazing.” And on the other hand, my heart dropped because I knew I could never do anything that good, not at 18 years old. And it made me feel ashamed, and it made me feel small, and it made me feel like I’m kind of a loser, and I’ll never be able to live up to this.
I looked at it, and I realized maybe I changed a word or two, but I adopted it as my own. And I told my dad I was going to do it. And you know what his reaction was? He was proud because secretly he wanted to have given a graduation speech at high school, and he never had that chance. So he took my chance, and he used it.
And I got up in front of a thousand or 1500 people, or whatever it was, a gigantic auditorium, and I looked into the microphone, and I held this speech in front of me, and I read it. And I read his words, and I claimed them as my own. I guess you could say it was plagiarism. There was, in fact, because I claimed it as mine. Though I think if anyone had asked me, I probably would have admitted I didn’t write this; it was way too good for me. But I remember one line from it. I forget almost all of it, but one line was, “Nature speaks in signs and symbols.” And I remember reading that. It was so beautiful, and it was so beyond anything that my 18-year-old brain and heart was ready to come up with. And that one stuck with me for years.
And that graduation speech stuck with me for years. And people afterwards told me it was a really good speech, and they shook my hand and congratulations, etc., etc. But I always felt ashamed, and I felt kind of like I cheated, like I lied. And then probably about ten years later, it dawned on me that, yeah, in a way I had cheated and lied, but actually I was cheated. And it was like I had the basic ways I was cheated out of a father who really nurtured me. Instead, I had a father who, because of his own unmet childhood needs, kind of took over my life whenever he had the chance. And he really did again and again, and this is just one example of it.
But he usurped me. He didn’t give me a chance to develop myself. He didn’t help me. He didn’t say, well, he didn’t ask me questions. He didn’t help me learn that I probably could have written a speech. And when I read what I thought about it ten years later, I realized I could have done it, and I probably could have done a good job. And if I’d really been encouraged, if I’d really had parents who had fought for me, if my mom had stepped in and said, “No, your dad is not gonna write your graduation speech for you,” and she’d torn it up and she said, “You try yourself, Daniel,” I probably would have believed in myself a little bit more. But she didn’t do that. My dad certainly didn’t do it. Nobody did it. And I didn’t have any teachers that I trusted, and for good reason. None of my teachers were trustworthy. They were all people who just made me memorize stuff and regurgitate back what they were telling me. That’s why I got good grades, not because I was super creative, not because I was super original, not in school at least.
The irony was, outside of school, in my own private world, I was very original. I was very creative. But I wasn’t in an environment, not from kindergarten all the way through high school, and incidentally, not through college either, where I was allowed to really be me and not in interactions with my parents either.
So ten years later, I started thinking, “What would I have said?” In ten years after that, I thought again, “What would I have said?” And now it’s almost ten years after that. It’s 29 years after my high school graduation, and I was thinking, as I came to make this video, “Well, what would I have said?” And so what I thought is, you know, I’d like to give my graduation speech again and give a real one. And in a way, this is it. What I’m saying already is my graduation speech. But what I’d really like to say, what I’d really like to talk about in my five to seven minutes of speaking to an audience, and perhaps an audience that’s much bigger than the thousand or 1500 people who would have shown up for my high school speech, is I’d like to talk about what that school system in western New York, where I grew up, this little…
The town school system with a bunch of really backwards, small-minded, largely uneducated teachers. What that really did to me? What did it do to me to sit in these 45-minute classes, hour after hour after hour, 4, 6, 7, 8 hours a day, five days a week, 40 weeks a year, 13 years? What did they do to my soul? What did that do to my creativity? And that’s what I want to talk about—what it did to me.
As I speak to my imaginary graduating class and my families and my teachers, I’d like to speak about how that school experience stifled me, how it didn’t really nurture who I really was. How my parents, who put me in this school system, put me into a den of wolves who ate my soul, who ate my creativity, who gobbled it up and spit back out this regurgitating person who learned to memorize, who learned to fake it, who learned to lie, who learned to give the answers that I was being told to give. Who learned about all these lies about American history that I was being taught. Who learned trigonometry and precalculus and algebra and stupid biology and chemistry and physics and nonsense. Who learned about—who learned to hate Charles Dickens because I was forced to answer stupid questions about who was Pip and who was Miss Havisham. I missed the poetry of what I was reading. I missed the beauty of what I was learning. I missed the value in math.
I did fantastically on my Regents exams because I had a logical mind. It was the most creative, open-minded, sponging time in my life between the ages of five and eighteen. And yet, I probably learned 1% of what I really could have learned. I had to sit in classrooms with resentful, angry, frustrated students who were also being stifled, not only in the schools but in their families. Families who sent them into this public school education with teachers who themselves weren’t creative. Teachers who themselves didn’t write poetry but made us read other people’s poetry and made us memorize it and made us answer stupid state-given questions. Who made us, God, stand up and recite poetry that we hated and we didn’t understand.
I remember I had to memorize a poem in tenth grade. We were given a textbook, and we had to choose a poem and stand up in front of the class of students who I didn’t like, who didn’t like me. And I had to get up there and recite a poem. It was the most humiliating, terrifying experience. And I didn’t relate to any of the poems. No one helped me understand what they really meant. And so what did I do? I chose the shortest possible poem. I chose a poem by the Black American poet from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. I chose the poem called “Harlem.” Many years later, I looked up that poem, and it was called—what happens to a dream? What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it crust over like a syrupy sweet and then run? Does it sag like a heavy load? Or does it explode? Well, I think I dried up like a raisin in the sun in so many ways in those 13 years of being in that horrible public school system.
And you know, randomly, I chose that poem because it was the shortest poem in the whole book because I knew I hated reciting it. I was so resentful of all these people. I was so resentful of those teachers who had smiles on their faces and graded every single thing I did. And they graded my recitation of this poetry. And if they graded that poem that I just recited for you, they probably would have given me a C-minus because the truth is, I think I just screwed it up. I couldn’t remember it exactly properly. Thirty years later, I couldn’t remember it properly at the time, and I probably didn’t get the best grade at all at the time because my mind froze up—all these kids looking at me and smiling and laughing and going like this from the back of the classroom and making fun of me. And afterwards, teasing me about the way I recited it and how I probably teared up and got so nervous and my hands were shaking.
This is an environment where I was supposed to find myself—this high school environment, this middle school environment of torture where the teachers bullied the kids. I remember I had a few teachers who made up nicknames for me—humiliating nicknames for me. And some of the other kids even called me this nickname. Well, I remember this one kid in seventh grade, and he was abused at home because I knew it because I lived in his neighborhood, and I knew his parents, and I knew this family. He was horribly abused at home, but he was humiliated by a teacher. And he was a big, strong kid in the seventh grade. He was much bigger than me. You know what he did? He walked up to that teacher that humiliated me because that same teacher in a different classroom humiliated him. And he walked up and he punched that teacher in the face, and he broke his nose. And you know what? He got kicked out of school for it. And I remember that—everyone was like, “What an awful kid! What an antisocial kid!” And he probably got labeled with psychiatric diagnoses like they tend to label people who act out. But you know what? I remember hearing that, and I wish I could have said this to my high school graduating class and all these people: good for him! He spoke what I felt. I wish I could have done that. And the only reason I didn’t do that was because I knew it would have hurt me. I had consequential thinking. I learned long, long before that that in that environment, in that horrible, repressive, oppressive school environment, that if I spoke my mind, that if I expressed how I really felt, if I put my feelings into my body, that they would crush me like a bug. They’d kick me out. I meant nothing to them.
Oh, they all talked about nurturing children and helping them grow and that kind of like what my dad said—nature speaks in signs and symbols, and they put it in beautiful language. But you know what? They didn’t care about me. I was a number. I was a conglomeration of numbers. And the whole reason that I got to get up and give a high school graduation speech is not because I was connected to my soul, not because I had a great ability to give talks. It’s because I was a good, good monkey. I was very good at being a good little monkey, a good little soldier. I got up and did what I was told. And you know what? It’s really horrible to say, but me being a good student—I’m faking it and lying and shutting myself down and not allowing myself to express my soul, to feel my soul, to know who I was—it was actually smart of me because they would have crushed me. I was a child. I didn’t have rights. I couldn’t have escaped. I couldn’t live outside my family. I couldn’t work. I had no money. And even in college, for the better part of four years, I faked it. I lied. I regurgitated answers. I went to a very fancy, high-end, super smart liberal arts college, but they told us, “We heard and nurture you for who you really are.” And I went to that fancy college, and I believed that it really was going to nurture my soul. Well, guess what? Faked out again. And I realized very, very quickly—same old, same thing as my high school, just with a fancier face on it, more intellectual professors, a higher caliber of intellectual students, but not as honest. Same old, same old, same old.
And you know what? When I finally finished college and got that degree, I escaped and I left. And I’m like, “I will never ever go back to that horrible, horrible academic world ever if I can help it. I will go back to university if I want to get trained, if I want to get the credentials to get a degree or a license that’s going to allow me to do a job that I love.” But what I learned in school, what I learned in university, what I…
Learned from all those years, from ages five until I was in my early 20s, is those people—those people who are supposed to nurture me and guide me and educate me and teach me about the truth of the world—make me into a Renaissance man. No, they wanted to make me into a puppet, and I said screw you. I turned my back on all of them.
When I left college, I went and I’d waited tables. I was a prep cook in a restaurant. I did cleaning. I did all sorts of building and made money on the street being a street musician, playing guitar. I didn’t do fancy work. I did nothing with all my college degrees—not for many, many years. Until my late 20s, for five years, I did nothing with all my education. Nothing that my education prepared me to do.
But instead, what I had is in me, and I was so grateful. So to my parents, to my teachers who are kind of like my parents, to a school system that was like my teachers and like my parents—a repressive, small-minded, unintellectual, unstimulating, disrespectful environment that gave me the chance to get up and be the mouthpiece for my graduating class.
So to all of you who have listened to this, thank you for letting me speak my mind. Thank you for listening to the end and for giving me the chance to honor myself. And you honor me, and hopefully by speaking my mind, maybe in some way I honor you. And hopefully, maybe inspire you to speak your mind too, in a safe way, in a safe environment where it’s not gonna come back to bite you like it would have come back to bite me so many years ago.
[Music]