Rereading My Valedictorian Speech

Yesterday I wrote about a campfire on the moon — about fire, identity, and what happens when you stop making yourself smaller to fit into rooms that were never built for you.

After I hit publish, something kept pulling at me. A memory. A stage. A speech I gave about nine years ago at my graduation ceremony at Pforzheim University in southern Germany.

I dug through old folders and found it — the full text, exactly as I delivered it. And reading it now, with everything I've learned since, I'm sitting here a little stunned.

Because the kid on that stage already knew. He just didn't know he knew.

The setting

I graduated top of my class, and the dean offered me the chance to give the valedictorian speech. I was in my early twenties. I titled it Das Beste oder nichts — "The Best or Nothing" — borrowing from Mercedes-Benz's slogan, a maxim that runs deep in Swabian culture.

The entire region where I grew up breathes this philosophy: Schaffe, Schaffe, Häusle baue. Work hard. Build your house. Define yourself by your output. The best or nothing.

And I stood on that stage and told a room full of graduates, professors, and parents that this maxim is — in my eyes — "absolutely relative and essentially meaningless."

In the south of Germany. At a graduation ceremony. In my early twenties.

I didn't know the word for it yet, but that was campfire energy. Saying the thing nobody else will say, and somehow it doesn't land as confrontation. It lands as relief.

Read the full speech →

Other people's paintings

The central image of the speech is one I'd completely forgotten: paintings.

I asked the audience to imagine that everyone paints their version of "the best" — and then you lay all the paintings on top of each other. Would they really be identical?

And then I warned them: Don't hang up other people's paintings of the best. Because one day, they'll stop pleasing you.

I didn't know what masks were yet. I didn't know the word "layers." But "other people's paintings" — that's exactly what they are. Images of who we should be, hung on our walls so long we forgot we didn't choose them.

In the campfire article, I wrote about how the masks started going on at thirteen — one by one, layer by layer, until I couldn't remember what was underneath. Turns out, at twenty-two, I was already telling a room full of people to take the paintings down. I just hadn't started with my own yet.

Questions as the most powerful tool

The speech ends with something that stopped me cold when I reread it:

"Being able to ask questions and to search for their answers is perhaps the greatest privilege and most powerful tool we humans have ever discovered."

Nine years later, haelp's manifesto reads: "We test. We don't preach." And: "The question is bigger than any of us."

I didn't write the manifesto to echo my graduation speech. I didn't even remember the speech. But the same thread runs through both — the belief that questions matter more than answers, that curiosity is the engine, that the moment you stop asking is the moment you start dying.

The twenty-two-year-old said it in a suit behind a podium. The thirty-something says it sitting by a fire at three in the morning. Same truth. Different layers. Or rather: fewer layers.

The thank you I didn't understand

And then there's the ending. The part I almost skipped over, because it reads like a standard graduation thank-you. But it isn't.

I thanked the parents. And I said:

"Thank you for always wanting the best for us — even when it didn't always match your own vision of the best. Thank you for always trying to understand us, even when we were once again chasing the best around the world."

My dad wasn't in that audience.

The graduation was about ninety minutes away from his village. He didn't come. Not because of the distance — an hour and a half is nothing. But for a carpenter from a small village in the south of Germany, with layers thick as oak, walking into a room full of ceremony and feeling what he'd have to feel watching his son on that stage — that was too far.

I was hurt. Quietly, deeply hurt. But I didn't know how to say that yet. I hadn't learned to be in touch with what I was feeling. So I played it cool. One more mask. One more layer.

My mother was there, at least. And I stood on that stage and thanked the parents — all of them, including the one who couldn't make it. "Thank you for always wanting the best for us — even when it didn't always match your own vision of the best."

I didn't know it then, but I was already forgiving him for something I hadn't yet named. Speaking those words into a room he wasn't in. Meaning them for a chair that was empty.

Nine years later, we're flying to Ireland together. He hugs me now. He looks me in the eyes. He picks up the phone for video calls — a man who swore the digital world wasn't his.

The man who couldn't drive ninety minutes to my graduation is flying to another country with me.

What we've lost, we can find.