About me – Part 1

Reality has a way of hitting everyone sooner or later.

When you’re young, worry and fear feel distant because someone else carries the weight—your parents, or whoever raised you, shield you from the sharp edges of the world. But eventually, that childhood buffer begins to crack, and you realize you alone have to answer for your choices.

For me, that reckoning arrived on my final day of high school in June 1994.

It happened in math class—my absolute worst subject. I was just getting started with my art but I was also faced with having to graduate highschool. I had struggled with numbers my entire life and was consistently placed in remedial classes alongside troublemakers and other kids barely scraping by until graduation. Senior year was no different; I was teetering on the edge, unsure if I’d even pass.

That morning, our class was a two-hour block. We spent the first hour sweating through our final exam, and the second hour waiting while our teacher, Mr. Carroll, graded them. To keep us occupied, he wheeled an old rolling cart to the front of the room and slid an educational tape into the school’s 1980s VCR. Back then, long before anyone could stream video on a phone, the internet was just a sputtering dial-up sound, and our school relied on audio-visual relics from decades past.

I barely finished the test in time. As the vintage video droned on, I sat quietly praying against an F. Unlike classmates who had comfortable cushions in their GPAs, I needed at least a solid D on this final just to earn the credits required to walk across the stage. History, English, and P.E. had never given me trouble, and I had even spent four years in drafting classes because I fancied becoming a landscape architect—an ironic pursuit, given how much math it required. Everything was riding on this one period.

When Mr. Carroll finished marking the tests, he handed the stack to the honor students in the front row to distribute. They walked down the aisles, paper by paper, until one finally reached my desk in the back.

A red “F” glared back at me from the top margin, accompanied by a sticky note: See me after class.

Oh crap. I’m dead. The realization hit like a gut punch: no cap, no gown, no stage. Around me, classmates packed up their backpacks, laughing and comparing good marks, already savoring their victory before returning for the afternoon ceremony. My pulse raced as I scrambled for an angle, an argument—anything to make him reconsider.

When the bell rang, the room emptied out in a flood of chatter. I shuffled up to his desk, my throat tight.

“Ah, Jeremy. Are you here to face the music?” Mr. Carroll asked.

All I heard in my head was a funeral march.

“Mr. Carroll, I tried hard. I studied, and I really did my best,” I pleaded. “Can’t you please let me pass?”

“Jeremy, you failed the final. You’re joining me for summer school.” He turned his back to pack his briefcase, completely unmoved.

I pressed him again, desperate.

He looked back, firm. “If I let you pass, I’d have to pass all the other Jeremys who skate by all year and show up on graduation day with their tails between their legs.”

Anger and humiliation washed over me. He wasn’t budging. I scribbled down the summer school reporting dates and walked out into the bright California sun, numb.

Four years of picturing my family smiling as I received my diploma vanished in a second. I was being held back over a few missing points. Where had the time gone? Just a few years earlier, my biggest concern had been whose house we were hanging out at after school. Some family members expected me to follow in the footsteps of my dad and grandfather—both dedicated, hardworking company men who had provided for their families for decades. At eighteen, I didn’t want the factory life, but I was equally clueless about what else to pursue. Now, while my peers stepped into adulthood, I felt broken and stranded.

“See you later, Jeremy!” “Don’t be late for the ceremony!” “Party tonight?” Friends shouted past me in the parking lot. I kept my eyes fixed on the pavement and didn’t answer.

When I reached my old truck, my best friend Cliff was leaning against it with a grin. Cliff was the kind of guy who effortlessly aced every test he touched. We had become inseparable since the start of our senior year.

He had also been a good friend to me as I discovered that I was an artist and read every art book I could find in the school library. Those days seemed so long ago now as I was faced with my first real life problem.

“Last day of school! Dude, high five!” he cheered.

I couldn’t muster even a fake smile. “I’m not graduating, Cliff.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I failed the math final. I can’t walk.”

For two guys who prided themselves on tough-guy bravado—shrugging off scraped knees, bad falls, and fistfights—the weight broke me, and I started to cry.

“That’s total garbage!” Cliff fumed. “Come on, let’s go slash his tires or TP his yard tonight.” He threw a crooked smile my way, knowing just how to pull a reluctant laugh out of me.

“No, man. I’m in enough trouble already. I need to get home.”

“What about Grad Night?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ll call you later.”

I dropped Cliff off and made the short drive to my house, fighting back tears the entire way. The second I stepped inside, my dad took one look at my face and knew.

Dad was navigating his own storm; he had recently been laid off after decades with the same company, caught in the awful limbo of being too experienced for entry roles and too close to retirement for new employers. Yet he never raised his voice or made me feel small.

I felt like a HUGE failure and didn’t know what my next step would be. My dad was always Mr. Steady even though he was fighting his own inner turmoil with finding a new job when he was past the age of 50. I wouldn’t understand how he felt until years when I would have a family of my own.

“You’re going to be all right, son,” he said gently. “You’ll do summer school, make it up, and get your diploma. Your life isn’t over. It’s a piece of paper, Jeremy. A bump in the road compared to everything else ahead of you.”

Throughout my childhood, Dad had always been the voice of calm. Countless evenings had been spent in the garage talking through school, friends, and girls while he worked with his woodcrafts over a cup of coffee. He always made the horizon seem less threatening.

When Mom called from work to check in, Dad broke the news to her. Still restless, I grabbed my keys.

“Where are you going?” Dad asked. “You’re in no state to drive. Just stay here—the family is coming over tonight to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what? My failure?”

They had planned an entire graduation get-together: cake, decorations, and a gathering of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

“They love you for who you are, Jeremy. No strings attached. We’re celebrating you.”

“I just need some air, Dad.”

I spent the next few hours drifting aimlessly through San Diego in my truck, feeling like a ghost behind the wheel. Everywhere I looked, front yards were decorated with congratulatory banners for graduating seniors. I eventually pulled into Taco Bell—our regular late-night haunt for burritos and arcade runs. Sitting over an order of nachos, the sharp sting began to dull into quiet acceptance: it was awful, but it wasn’t fatal.

Later that afternoon, when the official ceremony had ended, I finally headed back home.

Mom was in the kitchen frosting a cake when I walked in. She didn’t lecture me; she simply pulled me into a hug and whispered that everything would be fine. When my cousin Brian arrived early, he read my expression and didn’t pry—we were close enough to know when to leave things unsaid. We slipped downstairs to play video games until Dad called us up.

“Jeremy, everyone’s here. Come on up.”

Bracing for embarrassment, I walked up the stairs, only to be met with hugs, smiles, and plates piled high with food. No one cared about the missing diploma. My cousin Tim laughed, admitting he hadn’t seen his own high school diploma since the 1970s. My aunts insisted I put on my cap and gown anyway, ushering me out to the front lawn for the traditional photos. Even though I felt like an imposter—a high-school Milli Vanilli pretending to have earned the title—the warmth of my family carried me through. They weren’t celebrating a test score; they were celebrating my passage into the next chapter of life.

By late evening, the house had cleared out. The high school’s all-night Grad Night party was just getting underway in the gym, a safe, locked-in event running until dawn to keep us out of trouble. Seeing me pacing the living room, my parents nudged me out the door.

“Go have fun with your friends,” Dad said.

I drove back, having mentally rehearsed a handful of casual deflections for anyone who asked why they hadn’t seen me in the processional (“Must’ve missed me in the crowd”). The gym had been transformed with party lights, loud rap tracks, and makeshift casino tables, feeling like an exaggerated set from an eighties teen movie. Despite the planned festivities, the room naturally fractured into familiar cliques: jocks, nerds, and artists passing around yearbooks, promising to stay in touch—unaware that life, college, jobs, and families would soon pull most of them apart forever.

I found Cliff at a mock-blackjack table, playfully giving the faculty dealer a hard time.

“You sure you don’t need me to deal, Mr. Davis?” Cliff teased.

“Stick to your cards, Cliff,” the teacher smiled back.

We drifted through the games, snacks, and music, soaking in the odd weight of the evening. The air felt thick with finality. Just as the eastern sky softened into dawn over the mountains, the music cut, the gym doors swung open, and the campus gates were unlocked one last time.

Stepping outside into the cool morning air, the reality landed: no more morning bells, no shared lockers, no daily routines.

Before heading home, Cliff insisted on one last stop at 7-Eleven for a round of nachos and video games. We stood side by side over Street Fighter, mashing buttons and dragging out the minutes, neither of us ready for the night to officially end.

When we finally pulled up to my driveway, exhausted, Cliff leaned back against the seat.

“Jer, it was an awesome night,” he said quietly. “Do you realize that from here on out, nothing will ever be the same?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Let’s just not grow up too fast, all right?”

“Good luck with that. Before you know it, we’ll be married with kids, wondering where our youth went.”

I wondered what was going to come next. I was still trying to figure out what my art was all about, I knew that high school wasn’t over for me, there would summer school for me and fter that I faced a wide open world that would offer many challenges and opportunities that my parents would never know.

We collapsed onto my bedroom floor, exhausted as the sun was slowly coming up, and fell asleep within minutes. I had spent the day facing down what felt like the end of the world, only to find myself still standing on the other side. It was my first real taste of failure, but looking forward, I knew I was going to be okay…