I’m kind of devastated

When I received my acceptance email from UC Berkeley a little more than four years ago, I was devastated. I had spent my entire life encouraged to attend this school, and like the rebellious, authority-hating teenager I was, I wanted nothing more than the opposite. I was annoyed at my parents and extremely anxious about what my future held when I begrudgingly accepted the offer.

Then, I went to UC Berkeley. From the moment I first stepped on the campus to the moment I wrote this, my life has been a blur of beautiful experiences, amazing opportunities and tremendous growth. It’s almost comical that even with everything that’s changed, I found myself staring with a similar feeling at Chancellor Carol Christ’s email announcing the cancellation of commencement. I was devastated.

My earliest memories are littered with stories about my brilliant, engineering-minded grandfather and how it had always been his dream to go to UC Berkeley. But being born and raised in Iran in the 1940s, he had little chance of working his way over to the United States. By the time my mother and her siblings were born, he recognized that he didn’t have the standing or privilege to realistically achieve those dreams for himself, so he shifted his focus to providing that opportunity for his children.

My grandfather’s hard work was enough to get my mother here, but the challenges she faced as a recent Iranian immigrant led her to attend a small school near her aunt’s home. By the time my mom’s younger siblings were applying to college, they had the benefit of being assimilated in an American high school and eventually received admissions to their dream universities. In their first years of college — two years before my mom gave birth to me — their family was shaken by the devastating news that my grandfather had died in a plane crash in Iran, an infuriatingly common occurrence in my theocratically dictated home country.

My aunt and uncle decided to transfer to more obscure institutions that were closer to their mother to finish their degrees. My mother’s and her siblings’ dreams of receiving top-tier American education, as well as my grandfather’s dream of seeing his children accomplish such a feat, died with him. And just as my grandfather’s objectives had shifted, my mother shifted hers toward creating that opportunity for me so that I might finally bring our family together to celebrate someone walking across UC Berkeley’s commencement stage.

I worked extremely hard to get here, and I was devastated by the cancellation of my commencement. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this column, with those four glowing years of growth under my belt, that I was able to truly recognize the significance of losing my graduation ceremony and why I felt deep sadness over this.

I had been envisioning that day for as long as I can remember. The day that I would sit among my peers who have fought equally as hard, if not harder, to also be there and get the degree that we had been working toward. The day that I would surely have finally blossomed into a beautiful, dynamic, successful and accomplished young woman, walking confidently across the stage to receive my diploma and cross the finish line into adulthood with my family — the people who worked so hard to get me here — beaming proudly from the audience. Up until I was admitted, everything I did was to ensure my spot in a UC Berkeley commencement ceremony; once I was admitted, everything I did was to maintain it.

But in sitting down to analyze this sadness and its roots, I was able to recognize it as so much more. It was supposed to be a familial celebration of triumph, seeing one of us walk across that UC Berkeley stage to receive that diploma. My success in that moment would have been the result of generations of tireless effort and struggle against oppression and life in general. When I called to share the news, my mother stuck to comforting me and assuring me that we would have a makeshift graduation in the living room when I got home.

Nonetheless, it felt for a while like all had been lost and that I was doomed to never have a graduation in the first place, as if it were a cosmic joke on how many times I had pictured that day. But once I worked through the initial depression that had me bedridden for the first three weeks of the lockdown, I got back to the things in which I had been investing myself over these past four years — finishing my classes, wrapping up projects for my job at the local homeless shelter, sitting down to write this makeshift farewell for the newspaper I have loved so much during my time at UC Berkeley.

The 2016 version of myself that broke down opening her acceptance email would not have been able to recognize the complex history and circumstances that mark the significance of this moment. She would not have been able to see the inherent benefit and unfair privilege in being able to attain a higher education at an institution like UC Berkeley and would not have been mature enough to look past the surface emotions associated with a canceled commencement.

So here lies the culmination of all my work and that of many before me. The cancellation of our graduation ceremony is as much of a loss to my entire family as my completion of this degree is their great victory.

Thank you to my parents, who let me celebrate all these victories as if they are my own and who remind me that victories are still victories even if they do not come as we expect them.

And thank you to every amazing person and organization that made these past four years so magical and colorful. Thank you to Khalid Kadir, Richard Koci Hernandez and Ami Zins, the professors who showed me how wonderfully meaningful my education could be when approached with a little humanity. Thank you to The Daily Californian, Bowles Hall and the lifelong friends within my campus communities that have grown and blossomed with me from the start.