Graduation.
This one's for the Youth.
On Wednesday, I was invited to speak at Santa Monica High School. SAMOHI is a notable public school here in Los Angeles, with nearly 3,000 enrolled students. It feels more like a college campus than it does a high school. The Vikings are a diverse bunch. I don’t know the stats, but I met a mixture of bright teens across ethnicities, genders, interests, and fashion styles. Prominent alumni include Robert Downey, Jr., Sean Penn, Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller, and one of my favorite animators, Don Bluth.
For years, I’ve taken the podium to address the junior class on Career Day. This year, it was a special class: the Seniors. An interesting group of students, as their freshman experience was marred by the pandemic lockdown. During the Q&A portion of the morning, I sat alongside the Mayor of Santa Monica, an executive from Snapchat, and local businesspeople. They shared powerful stories of leadership and how they overcame the odds to make their way in the world.
Whenever I talk to young people, I do my best to see the stage from where they’re sitting. I know they were bored and distracted. Senioritis is a debilitating plague, but also, teenagers have better things to do. They’d much rather be on their phones, gaming, or hanging out with their friends in the quad. I get it. I was that kid. I’m still that kid.
Although punctuated with happy memories, most of high school was an awkward, if not unpleasant, experience for me. If we were open to mental health awareness and diagnoses back then, it would’ve been obvious that I suffered from paralyzing depression. I was hyperactive and super social, but I felt dreadfully alone and angry. When I wasn’t skating, I was drawing in my room for hours on end or lying motionless in the dark. I’m not sure if my parents ever thought it weird that I’d take 4 hour naps when I got home from school, but after dinner, I’d crawl back into my covers, pulling the sheets way over my head. My cave was still warm. The tundra outside was uninhabitable.
By the time I graduated, I was suicidal, a runaway, and desperate to move away for college. After four years, I had many acquaintances, but no deep friendships. The jocks jeered me for dressing weird. The cool white kids hurled gay slurs at me, made racial remarks, and threw their trash at me during lunchtime. Although I was attracted to girls, I couldn’t figure out how to seal a relationship. I never had one of those cool mentor teachers you see in the movies, that spot the troubled kid in the back of the classroom and takes them under their wing. Most of my teachers were detached and aloof, puttering away at their menial tasks. They were eager to pack up their bags and at the bell, beat the students to the door. Years after I graduated, I heard that the faculty assumed I was stoned the entire time.
Speaking of which, I had been so disruptive, the faculty held a vote to expel me from campus. I won my case, although I’m not sure why I wanted so badly to stay. At home, I wasn’t feeling…home. Meanwhile, at school, any authority figures had given up on me. We never had a Career Day, but as I neared graduation, I met with my guidance counselor on what the future had in store for me. She was a middle-aged woman that smacked her lips and drew long breaths before speaking. She also had dark prickly stubble, and I remember how her long red nails would scratch her sandpaper chin as she looked over my test results. At the end of my consultation, she suggested that I pursue a career in lithography: the process of printing from a stone or metal plate. Lithography pre-dates the 19th century. I couldn’t name one famous lithographer. To date, I can’t name one lithographer1, period.
So, as I stood on stage in the SAMOHI theater and surveyed the 671 Seniors who were obligated to stay put and listen to crusty boomers talk about their accomplishments, I felt profoundly empathetic. As much as it sucked growing up in the late ‘90s, I can’t fathom how challenging it must be today. Your social life splayed open on the Internet. Institutions toppling, rules changing, systems being redrawn. No one’s in charge. In the face of climate change, A.I., global wars, and wealth disparity, the sidewalk vanishes into fog. The concrete is mushy. The world was scary when I graduated high school. But scary like an amusement park ride that’s affixed to a track. Today, we’ve gone off the rails.
To the Senior Class,
In this life, you’re gonna hear a lot of people telling you to become a lithographer. They may not tell you this directly, but they will treat you this way. The way they dismiss you, the way in which they make you feel unseen and unimportant. They may even think you’re such a lost cause, that you should be expelled.
And if it’s not your parents, it’ll be your teachers. If it’s not your peers, maybe it’s your friends. It might even be you. You may be telling yourself that all things considered, with the way the system is set up and the odds are stacked, that maybe that’s all you’re destined for. Maybe, after 17 years of life, this is all you’re built to be: A lithographer.
In 1997, the Internet was coalescing around networks like America Online. What we didn’t foresee was how blogs would grant the unheard a voice. How the web would shift power to the underrepresented. And how someone like me would help build a legitimate streetwear industry out of thin air. Back then, there was no financial promise or job guarantee around counterculture interests like sneakers, skateboarding, and street art. So, of course my guidance counselor couldn’t see it. It makes sense that my parents thought I was wasting my time watching skate videos. In the decades since, youth culture has become an economic engine. Streetwear has employed generations of young people, introduced them to entrepreneurship, and opened doors to houses that we assembled from scratch.
As unpredictable as it is, this is a revolutionary time. One in which you can make the world fit you, instead of trying to fit into the world. People will always get up on stages and sit behind desks to tell you how things are. But they will never be able to tell you how things can be. That part’s on you to determine.
We will follow your lead.
For the record, ain’t nothing with lithography. It just makes for an apt metaphor.