Yesterday when Mrs. Young was talking about being nervous about speaking in Chapel I was totally on her side. I’m also totally on her side about getting more voices up on this stage—not necessarily mine—but I do think it’s a great chance for you guys to share your thoughts. I, personally, am a big wus about getting up in Chapel and talking to you guys, and I’m not quite sure why. I’m not scared to stand up in front of you and teach you or talk to you in the classroom, but something about this stage freaks me out. When I taught summer school a couple of summers ago, Mr. Rupley made all the teachers talk in Chapel. Summer school chapel is about 10 minutes long, and you’re only talking to a few rows of the senior section, so there’s really no reason to get nervous or stressed or anything, but I managed to. I planned what I was going to say for about a week, spoke for about 5 minutes and then took Melissa Michaels to starbucks because I just couldn’t teach that morning. Don’t get excited—I’m not taking any of you to Starbucks today. I have D free, so if I lose it up here, I’ve got some recovery time. But anyway, that’s just the background story for why I’m so nervous and probably shaking, but the really weird thing is that although I’m terrified to stand here, I write Chapel Talks all the time in my head. It’s one of the things I do when I run—I work through bad moods, I have arguments with people, I talk German to myself, and I come up with all sorts of brilliant things to say to you guys. It’s really quite amazing how eloquent I think I am when I run. Of course that stuff never gets written down or said out loud to actual people, so you’ll be getting the non-brilliant but as-good-as-I-can-do version.

Officially, today’s chapel is a „Care team Chapel“. Mr. Quinn had somebody lined up to talk, but they got sick, so he called me up last night and I said „um, yeah, I think I meant maybe next quarter.“ And then I called back 5 minutes later and said I’d give it a try. And I guess what I have to say fits under the umbrella of the care team because it has to do with high school and drugs and alcohol, but the big picture has more to do with figuring out your life and having goals for yourself and knowing what you want. After saying all that, the hard part is figuring out where to start and how to fit it all in without putting you all to sleep, so I’ll start with a story I told some of my chemistry class yesterday about when I was a freshman in high school. I was talking about how much I learned about drugs in my health class—yes, my teacher went over all the big ones—stimulants, depressants, amphetamines, etc, but the main anti-drug education I got was from the guy I sat next to. He was 18 years old, looked like he was 25, and he was in my freshman class and told me daily the running street price for any drug he could think of. I knew that I never wanted to be like that guy. But that wasn’t when I made my decision about drugs. I never really made a decision—I just never considered them. There was never room for them in my life. I was a runner. From the age of 15, I had a job. I knew I wanted to go to a super-expensive college, so I knew I needed to do everything I could to earn a scholarship. I knew I couldn’t lie to my parents, and I knew I couldn’t handle their faces if I ever disappointed them so greatly. I wanted my teachers to respect me. Drugs just weren’t part of the picture. And lucky for me, I never noticed any peer pressure. And most of my friends felt pretty much the same way about the issue.

Over time, though, some of my friends changed. Some of them did hang with the „party crowd“ on the weekends. Some of them thought it was totally cool to talk about getting wasted and how many beers they downed. I imagine some of you notice the same changes in some of your friends. I’ll be honest and say that I had a couple of beers my senior year to see what the big deal was, but it just wasn’t something that was fun to me or worth making a habit of, so I didn’t try it again for a long time. Most of my friends were the same friends to me that they always were—we just had some different hobbies, and although I didn’t really get their hobbies, I didn’t really worry about them either. A few of them, however, did things under the influence that I know they regretted and that I hated to see them suffer through the guilt of later.

This is the time when it would be expected for me to throw in some anti-drug horror stories. But we all know that although the horror stories are true and do exist, they are not typical, so it’s really easy to ignore them as unrealistic. So I’m going to throw in a couple of non-horror stories. Nobody dies or crashes a car or anything like that. Story #1: I’m going to talk about Matt, the fastest guy on my sophomore cross country team. He was so fast—amazing to watch. He would do his own workouts without the team, even though our team was pretty good, no one could keep up with him. I remember one day when he ran 5 miles, came back to the track to run two 5-minute miles and then ran 5 more miles. Totally insane and pretty heroic. He was able to do all that and party every weekend—drink, get high, throw up, and then get up the next morning and run. He was young and strong and unstoppable. To me, he fell a few points on my hero-rating-metere when I saw him in party-mode. But he continued to be an amazing runner. He earned a division 1 scholarship for cross country. Unfortunately, at college it’s easy to extend the party lifestyle away from the weekend, so it wasn’t long before the partying interfered with the running, and then the running interfered with the partying, and then there was no more running and no more scholarship. Such a talented guy, but he threw it all away—maybe he quit, maybe he was kicked off the team, I don’t know, but it still makes me angry. I don’t know waht Matt is up to today. He is probably just fine, maybe even married with kids and a great job, and maybe he would have quit running anyway, but I don’t think so. It’s not a horror story, I know, but I still feel it’s not the right story for him.

The next guy I want to talk about was a closer friend of mine. Robby, the guy that tried to hold my hand on the ferris wheel at the state fair in the 9th grade. Very cheesy move. I was having none of it, but we were able to get past the uncomfortable stuff and be friends through high school anyway. He joined the party crowd pretty early on, and then his parents went through an ugly divorce, and his dad moved out, and his mom wasn’t around much, and by senior year, he was going to smoke pot at the park during lunch and showing up at calculus high. He—also a runner—would even come to cross country practice high, and he would run with me because he couldn’t keep up with the guys when he was stoned, but the team was so big that the coach never noticed, and it never occurred to any of us that we should point it out to her. The calculus teacher didn’t notice either—none of his teachers did. He made great grades and got into Chapel Hill. No worries, right? At Chapel Hill things got worse, and he had to drop out for a bit. It took him a while—about a year, but he got back on track. End of story # 2.

Ok, so maybe you think both those stories are pointless. Both those guys are fine now—what’s the big deal? But each of them has regrets about the part of their lives that they lost and will never get back.. To be positive, they probably learned great lessons, but wouldn’t it have been even better for them not to have had to learn those lessons? And for me, knowing how their paths went after high school, I wish I’d had the knowledge and the guts to say something early on. I went to a huge high school. We didn’t have a care team. Our teachers were busy enough trying to teach the kids that actually wanted to be in class that they didn’t even notice if a couple of guys with blood-shot eyes were pretending to take notes in the back. But we kids noticed, and we didn’t do anything. That’s my regret, and that’s why I’m telling you their stories now because I can’t help either of them any more but maybe their stories will reach someone here.

And I guess that’s my big point about life that’s I’m trying to get out with all these rambling words—try to live it without regret. I knew that I would regret not talking to you guys today, so I did it, whether it matters or not. I didn’t regret not going out with Robby after the state fair hand-holding incident when we were 14. But I do regret not saying, „man is everything ok? what you’ve been doing is just not you“ when we were 17 and I had the chance. He probably would have laughed it off, but maybe it would have registered somewhere with him. Going into college—the one I had wanted to go to and worked so hard for—I knew that the social scene would be different than high school, and I was right, there was more pressure there. So going into college, I did make a decision not to get into the underage drinking scene. Life is complicated enough. I knew I wasn’t comfortable with it, I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to make friends, and I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to be defined. I definitely don’t regret that decision. It was what was right for me at the time. I’m not saying that now because I expect you seniors to make that same decision, but I am saying it so that you know it’s ok to make that decision. What I do expect for you all is to make your own decisions—don’t let life just happen to you, and definitely don’t let other people make decisions for you.