LISBON

Mikella Kipri Steele, a class speaker at the Lisbon High School School Class of 2017 graduation, didn’t mince her words: “I’m not even going to tell you how much you’ll miss high school or how it’s so sad that we’re moving on. I’m not going to tell you that mostly because it’s not true.”

“For most of us, we’re ready to move on,” she said.

She also told classmates their parents are some of the only people who see their potential, and without their parents pushing, they’d never have made it to graduation.

She then soon-to-be graduates stand up and show their appreciation to parents and guardians by presenting them with a rose.

The second class speaker, Haley Wheeler, said, “I’d love to stand here and imitate those speeches I found online and say, ‘Congratulations! We did it!’ That would be the easy thing to do, but it would not be sincere. I don’t think we are done yet.”

The time spent at Lisbon High School was a stepping stone, she said, and graduates still have more to learn.

“Now is our time to live for ourselves,” Wheeler said. “We will have to make our own decisions and take responsibility for the consequences.”

Wheeler shared the words of Ellen Degeneres: “Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path — then by all means you should follow that.”

The highlight of the ceremony, which saw 91 now-former students receive diplomas, was the commencement speech by art teacher and drama coach Jennifer Fox.

“When I was growing up, the adults in my life, they weren’t in a place in their own lives where they were able to care for me or protect me in the ways that I needed them to,” Fox said. “Throughout my childhood I experienced a lot of things children never should and sadly, many of us do.”

Those experiences became a part of how she defined herself as a person, and as far back as she can remember, she had a critical inner voice that said, “You are not good enough.”

That critical, inner voice influenced her early decisions. It also resulted in a high school battle with anorexia as a means to exert some type of control over her life. While her weight became dangerously low, that critical inner voice remained, however.

Fox joined the Marines after high school, and became competitive and was successful there. But she still heard that voice telling her she isn’t good enough.

Years later she was a divorced single mom, struggling, and thought there was nothing she could do to silence that inner voice.

Everyone has that inner critic, which represents fear, Fox said. It limits choices and affects decisions as we try to live our lives trying to be what other people think we should be, “and I don’t want that for you.” It’s not something we’re born with.

“We’re just born beautifully and wonderfully made just as we should be,” she said.

Fox learned a kind of self-reflection that allows her to live a life of joy, pursue what makes her happy, and not let her fear decide her future.

“And that’s my hope for you,” Fox said, before students broke into a flash mob to OneRepublic’s “I Lived.” The main chorus line is, “I … I did it all.”