Holly+G’s+Final+AmEx+2013+Speech



= = =Do it for Yourself=

=Text of Speech= Like the rest of you, I’ve had the hardest time coming up with a topic to speak on that related to myself, my experiences, and that would speak powerfully enough to my audience. I wanted to be a “first timer”, a person to find a topic that hadn’t been used yet, so the surprise factor would set in the beginning and the wow factor would follow in my voices’ wake. At no point during my thinking process did I muster up enough creative energy to fit my own expectations, or the expectations I thought you may have had. I’m not an immigrant, I don’t have divorced parents. I have not lived through an experience that had surpassed any teenage story before mine, and on the other hand I just don’t know all of you well enough to share anything too personal. Yet, that’s not the real problem.

The problem isn’t that I had stressed myself out, or that I don’t work well under pressure. The problem isn’t that I’m not creative, or that my life’s boring, or that in comparison to certain people I find myself inadequate. The problem is how perceive the assignment and my response to it. My need to knock Mr. Geib’s socks off. My need to show all of you my personality, personal values, and what makes me who I am in a simple sequence of 1,500 words. My need to feel accomplished with a sense of social pride.

I get this strange notion that you all aren’t dosing off, that you hang on my every word, and like the videos we’ve watched from previous years, you expect me to drop you a line like, “I’m a lesbian”. My mind taunts me with this idea that you will go home tonight and repeat my words in your head, and sometime in your future you’ll remember that one girl named Holly who had a really good speech in Geib’s history class. But, let’s be honest here people, we barely remember what we did last week. How will you remember this, later on? Instead of you remembering every detail, perhaps the best I’ll do is burrow my way in enough to your memory for you to think back on “that one girl with that one speech in history my junior year”. That’s it. No name, no details, no lasting impression, just a short, flicker of an ancient memory. So why should I care so much about this assignment? Why should I spend so much time on 5 minutes of work? Why should I stress myself out on picking something relatable and intriguing? Why should I care? Why do I care? Well, I don’t know. I just do. I care too much, and so do you.

You see, the aggravating and suffocating portion of teenage life isn’t necessarily always external, we are just as off balance, and unstable as our surroundings, and crazy experiences we can come across. With this uncertainty that resides in the shadows, we strive for the feeling of acceptance, so much so that we settle for the empty and fake. We change, morph, and distort ourselves to try to fit every mold: we color inside the lines, we take these standardized tests, we get home on time, we clean up after ourselves, follow the rubric, keep up with the fashion trends, buy that new phone. The catch here, is that jumping through all the hoops isn’t always beneficial. You do all these things for someone else, and their attention, and depending on their reaction is how you perceive your choice. The more positive, the better you feel about yourself. Doesn’t that suck though? Living your life the way you think someone else wants you to live?

We fall submissive to these ideas of the cookie cutter, and the most popular. We pay money to take tests that devour our weekends, social life, and free time. We wait until a certain time to post a picture or status or tweet so we can have the visual gratification of those around us to “like” whatever we decided to share, without truly enjoying it ourselves. The things we do are not for us. We perform a task, or work a job, that pays us money, so that we can buy things that we don’t want, to impress the people we don’t care about.

Think about it. Take our lives now for example. We have taken a lethal amount of tests, endured infinite hours of studying, went through an anxiety attack or emotional breakdown at least a few times, and sacrificed many things we wished we could have been a part of. None of us had wanted this. None of us wanted to surrender to the pressure of growing up, we’d much rather slow down every once in a while. We care about acceptance. We want to get accepted into college, so we take these crazy courses, enroll ourselves in the extracurricular, and play sports to make ourselves look appealing. They aren’t things we want to do. Unfortunately, the only reason most of us do community service work is because we want the hours to graduate, we only take AP classes because of the GPA bump, and we only enter certain sports teams and clubs for the chance at a scholarship. We want to look appealing to the college board, to be accepted by a college, because that’s the way things are done, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s the only outcome that seems certain.

Mrs. Kindred said we’re uptight, probably the most stressed class in many years, and once she asked us what we did or what we’d like to do in our free time to make us happy, many people couldn’t think of anything. Me? I’d like to learn to play guitar, maybe take a dance or yoga class, and be able to have the time to paint or doodle like I used to.

But, instead my days consist of mounds of homework and studying, hours of practice, loads of stress, and not much sleep. I do this because it’s the social norm. I endure the pressures of college, high school, teachers, counselors, parents, siblings, and society, so I can be an accepted individual. We’re trained this way. Performing this speech that I spent so long on that has lasted a whopping few minutes. A speech I spent so long writing and worrying about: what to put me over the top, what to make it memorable. Practically, what would make mine acceptable, to make me appealing, to make the entirety of it good enough for you, to get a reaction out of you, so then I could respond with my reaction.

So, when I grow old, I hope to see my children living in an America more accepting of the individual, where people’s American dreams don’t die in the seat of a cubicle or a non-acceptance letter. Where the life of a person isn’t bound in shackles locked by the fear of diversity and narrow-mindedness, I wish to eventually see an America where social norms begin to dissolve, and people can begin to live for themselves.

=Cite Your Sources=