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Schools

Class Speaker: Jolaina 'JoJo' Jesser

Graduating senior realizes 'Scenes' from her life.

Following is the text of Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School graduating senior Jolaina "JoJo" Jesser's class speech.

“Scenes”

Sometimes, I picture my life as scenes from a movie. For those of you who don’t know me, I am a movie addict. I am planning on studying film production in college, and have always agreed with filmmaker Joseph Mankiewicz’s idea that “the difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.”  Over time, I’ve found that I’m able to make more sense of life when I picture it as a movie, and you can bet that I’ve seen this day a thousand times.

            When I was much younger, graduation was nothing more than a scene from a childhood favorite: The Lizzie McGuire Movie, when Lizzie tripped across the stage. Watching that scene, I envisioned graduation as nothing more than another chance for me to trip and fall in a public setting. Great. Throughout high school, graduation became more like a landscape in the distance: an out of focus image that gradually became clearer as we ran towards it. Today, we no longer have to wonder what graduation will look like. We’re in our own scene now; one that will hopefully be free from any Lizzie-McGuire falls.

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Today, I am not going to talk about scenes from existing movies. Instead, I’m going to talk about three “movie scenes” that come together to illustrate the cinematic event that we know as high school. They take place in a booth in Panera, a forest, and an airport, and for those of you who think that those three places have nothing to do with each other, you’re right… except together, they teach us some very important lessons about self-discovery, repair, and dreaming big.

            The first scene takes place in the third booth to the right at Panera. Over the years, this booth in Panera has become one of my most cherished “scenes” in my movie because it is the place where I have discovered a lot about who I am. For me, a booth in Panera is a comfortable and safe place where I can be calm and reflect on life with friends.

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 Some of the most pivotal conversations have happened in this booth. It’s the one place where big talk is fair game. Talks about life, love, triumphs, failures, fears and dreams are all fair game, and looking back, it has been through these talks where I have been able to discover myself.

Maybe for you, self-discovery has taken place in games on the field, when you have learned what you’re made of, or perhaps it has been backstage of a theater when you have calmed your nerves before a performance. It doesn’t matter where it is, but I’m sure you have that one place where you can step away from stress and take time to think about yourself, your life, and your goals. As we get ready to go to the next “scenes” of our lives, we can all take these lessons of self-discovery with us. Our whole lives are a process of self-realization; of figuring out what works and doesn’t work for us, what school, what guy, what girl, what job… the list goes on and on. Wherever we go in life, whatever we end up facing, we need to allow time to find ourselves, because that will ground us for other big and unexpected things that may come at us later in life.

Now if you will bear with me for a moment, we are going to leave the comfort and stability of Panera, and move along to scene two: the forest. I don’t know about you, but there have been points in my life that have not felt like the comfortable and safe scenes in Panera. There have been times that I have felt trapped with no direction. Times that I have felt discouraged and too-small for life. During these times, I have pictured myself in a forest that has been destroyed by a wild-fire: hopeless, and spent. Nobody can deny that high school can be really hard sometimes. It is a period of trial and error, where there are bound to be bumps in the road. Over the course of high school, most of us have probably experienced a form of loss, heartache, or disappointment; moments when we have felt so low that we can’t possibly get back up again. It has been because of these scenes, the conflicts in the movie plot, that I have learned a valuable lesson about repair.

Now, I’m not a scientific person, but something that I learned in my freshman year science class has stuck with me until now. The effect of a wildfire on a biosphere is incredible. Over time, a forest destroyed by a wildfire develops into one of the most optimal conditions for new life to thrive. This concept fascinates me, because I realize that it is a principle that can extend to humanity just as the soil. Sometimes it takes rock-bottom to put us in a position where we can truly thrive again, where we’re willing to give up our sense of security to make changes that will lead us to better places. For the rest of our lives there will be scenes of loss, heartache, and disappointment, but we can’t let these things stop us from pressing forward. In the inevitable hard times,, we have to think of ourselves as forests destroyed by wildfires: not hopeless, not in despair, but in one of the most hopeful moments, where promise of a new and better life is imminent, and we are in repair.

The final scene that I want to share with you takes place at an airport. To me, high school has always felt most like an airport. It is a comfortable place, with mild air-conditioning, decent food, and even some nice books and magazines to read during the wait. There are moments of extreme sadness in an airport: those inevitable goodbyes, the moments of lingering after waving one last time to a friend. There are moments of extreme joy: like a small boy running to leap into his dad’s arms. And there are many moments of the indifference in between: waiting for just another flight. An airport is a fine transitional place, but it isn’t the destination. Just as the airport isn’t a place you go to anticipating to stay, high school is not a place we stay forever. It’s a place where we reside comfortably and learn about ourselves, but most importantly, dream of the places we’re going. The dreams you have in airport; the tangible excitement to be departing to your next great adventure, is something we should all carry with us as we embark on the next scenes of our lives. We should always be willing to dream as big as we do at an airport, and to live as though every goal we have is just a plane ride away.

So here we are, the class of 2011, packed into a theater, finally living out our own graduation scene. We are celebrating the years of scenes we’ve gone through in order to finally get to this day; the self-discoveries of our favorite places, the wild forest fires we’ve survived, and the long waits at the airport. French writer Anaïs Nin once wrote, “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”As our time at BBHHS has come to an end, our time to blossom has come. The past four years have helped to shape us into who we are, but high school is not our destination, and now, we’re ready to board the plane, and, as William Shakespeare put it, “to unpathed waters, to undreamed shores.”

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