Always Believe

ebourgoin25@rsu4.net, in elementary school we all would type different variations of this email address all with 25 at the end. That 25 represented something that seemed so far away. Now we are here, in 2025, about to graduate high school. Before we throw our caps in the air I would like to share my story with you all, and hopefully you are able to take something from it. 

Elementary and middle school was a struggle for me, I’m sure a lot of you had similar experiences. Whether those hardships were with making friends, playing sports, or understanding history or science. For me it was math and especially reading. Being selected to read in front of the class would absolutely terrify me, because of how much I would struggle to read the words on the page. I’m sure many of you resonate with that feeling. It’s hard knowing that you struggle with something that you see other kids do with such ease. Having this struggle with reading and math made me believe that I wasn’t smart. The motivation to do good in school started to dissipate more and more as I started to believe that to be true. I still remember looking at jump rope in 7th grade and seeing over 20 missing assignments and not caring at all about making them up. Then covid hit, and I cared even less. 

Then something happened, which may have happened with some of you, all of that alone time to think about ourselves and how we wanted to improve. Some of us deciding to leave or join a new sport or pick up new hobbies. I wanted to read a book. Which is odd because the only books I had read myself before that moment were picture books meant for 5 year olds. I read my first book series the summer before 8th grade. I know, who cares you read a book. What’s the big deal? Well it was a big deal to me, because for as long as I could remember I couldn’t read. And then all of a sudden I could. It was an unbelievable milestone in my life. It reconnected me with that little girl that had her heart set on graduating high school, but had her hopes crushed over and over by her own mind failing her. Once I read that book I stopped thinking that I wasn’t smart and that I couldn’t read or do a simple multiplication problem, and I started to excel in school like I never had before. 

My point to this story is to show the importance of believing in yourself. I didn’t believe in my academic abilities for a long time, it made me forget my dreams of graduating and going to college.  When I started believing in me, I proved to myself that I was capable of accomplishing my dreams, and so are all of you.  If you never believe in yourself then you will never have the motivation to accomplish what you want in life, whether that be playing your favorite sport in college or being the CEO of your own company.  Being insecure with your own abilities will get you nowhere. No dream is too small for anyone in this room, as long as you believe that you are capable of achieving them. 

Believing in yourself is so important. The way you speak about yourself is the determination of what your life is going to look like. If you are always talking bad about yourself, always saying things like “I can’t do it” or “I’m so stupid”, then nothing positive is going to come into your life. But if you just change the way that you talk about yourself, change the “I can’t do it” to “I can do it”, because it’s true, everyone in this room is capable of accomplishing their dreams. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what other people think of your abilities,  the only thing that will determine your success is the measure of belief that you have in yourself. 

So please if you take anything from my speech today, remember that little version of yourself that had all of the belief in the world about what they could accomplish. Remember them when you say that you can’t do something, remember them when you think you’re stupid. Bring that belief back, take it with you when you’re deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life. You don’t need to be a child to think you can be whatever you want to be, all you need to have is belief in yourself and you can do anything that you set your mind to. 

Thank you.

“happy grads” by atomicshark is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.