Magdalene Maciag, Class of 2025 Valedictorian and Eagles Media Center staffer, shares her graduation speech…

Welcome parents, teachers, family, friends, and the Class of 2025.

My name is Magdalene Maciag, and I am honored to stand before you today as Galway’s Valedictorian of the Class of 2025.

If my fifth grade self could see me now… she would be disappointed. She was a stubborn ball of nerves who was new to Galway and did not want to be here. She vowed that if she HAD to graduate from this place, any last words would be admonishing, vengeful. Her disdain would land upon the bullies, and those who stood idly by as a tiny perfectionist employed endless exertion that she saw not as excess but satisfactory. My younger self was full of rage because she was so obviously imperfect and it seemed like this place brought it out in her. But reflecting on that now, I don’t view it in the same light.

See, I’ve certainly felt as though I were better off somewhere else and I know many of my peers have echoed that sentiment time and again. Whether in explicit grievances or through running jokes about Galway’s water quality and small campus, we’ve all attributed dismay to the very building in which we now stand. Yet the closer we’ve gotten to graduation, the less — I think — we’ve meant it. Galway is not a perfect place, and yet, no “perfect” place can ever exist. Only in our minds do we conjure such a setting of utopia, and my younger self failed to realize it is through that visualization, that we neglect what’s actually perfect around us.

My fellow Calculus classmates can attest, as Mr. J so eloquently taught us, that when an equation’s graph stretches to infinity, forever approaching a value it will never reach, we denote the untouchable number as a limit. And in reference to that function, we don’t discuss its failure to meet that perceived goal— that fact is irrelevant when it veers so close that it might as well reach. Perfection as it pertains to success, completion, attainment… often replaces that elusive number in our lives. The x axis on which our lifetimes sit follows a constant path toward infinity and yet, as the loss of one of our classmates reminded us, our lives are piecewise, destined to end at a point we can’t predict. And that makes the attainment of ultimate success, perfection, that imaginary threshold we look up to, ever the more urgent. 

While our lives are confined between birth and an unknown future date, our potential isn’t predetermined by any set of variables. If the future plans of everyone on this stage are any indication, we all understand that. I’m proud to look at the aspirations of so many of the class of 2025, unsurprised about each person’s future prospects. It seems to me, we are all pursuing our interests, and so long as we keep focused on what we value, we retain control of our trajectory. WE are becoming the determinants of our destiny, and yet we may still never reach our conceived epitome of success. We can’t overextend our potential to construct our perfect life; it is not to be taken for granted. Because an endless stride to perfection will only leave us absent in the present. We will sit, scapegoating our past mistakes– and this serves only to demean our present.

I’m sad to say I’ve already spent much of my life sinking in that regret and comparing myself to who I thought I should be, and I know my peers can relate. Our top 10 contains some of the most ambitious, intelligent, and hard-working people I have ever met. Our “success” is owed to the pressure we have endured and the resilience we have embodied, pushing through when motivation lacks. And sitting far off in our minds was this moment, the chance to stand on this stage having achieved perfection. My younger self would be sad to know that we haven’t. Each of us is just as smart and dedicated as the others, but we’ve each been rejected from colleges, done poorly on tests, forgotten to turn something in… and we’ve each held ourselves to the standard of perfection that everyone expects of us, even though we know we can never achieve it. Like a function to its limit we can forever approach the peak, and in so doing, get infinitesimally closer – but only by trading who we are in devotion to that mirage. 

So many of us become stuck in the endless drive for success, and it becomes a hostile state of comfort. The second one starts cheating motivation; stealing momentum from the future they envision, the present becomes further demonized. We slave and slave toward our future just to evade what we are in the present– because right now doesn’t matter if tomorrow will be so much better. And I think we realize that perfection isn’t possible, but simply rely on being disappointed by the endless struggle because we would hate for our full and total effort to yield failure. When your life is contrived of only that which you hope to build, the decline of the present goes unnoticed to the intention you work toward. But if falling short to attain the unattainable is failure, you’ll fail regardless. 

My recovering perfectionism struggles to reconcile with that; to my younger self, it dictates that nothing is ever good enough. I’ve since found that the perfection in life lies in the imperfections. Our vision of the perfect future will leave us forever disappointed if we let it distract us from the present. All the ups and downs, failure and success, happy and sad parts of life only exist in the context of each other. And if we dream of our perfect life to avoid experiencing the inadequacy of our actual one, we lose out on the bad, but also the good. We refuse the ups and downs, the mundanity, and reduce the entirety to a negative, because compared to “perfect,” that’s all it will ever be.  

Life can feel so unbearable that escaping to a perfect future seems preferable to standing one more minute of the chaos, but if we live in that fantasy, we neglect to appreciate how lucky we are. Right now, let’s contextualize where we are, and recognize that gender apartheid, genocide, and consequences of western intervention bar millions around the world from achieving this very moment– and I’m sure we all realize that one of our peers should be on this stage right now, but never got the chance. Galway might make us angry sometimes, it might let us down, but it’s gotten us to this moment, and right now, it is part of who we are. I said Galway isn’t perfect, but if perfect isn’t ever possible, why don’t we just say that this — right here —  is perfect. Because each of us is exactly where we need to be, and we shouldn’t rush our lives to reach a greater satisfaction, because that is one way we’ll make sure it eludes us. This is your life, and, as Mr. J said on June 5th at 1:48 PM, “don’t change it, it’s who you are” and “you can throw Trevor out the window.” Don’t search for perfect, let perfect find you.