The day I learned I was going blind was the first time I had truly seen.
550 days ago, I was diagnosed with glaucoma, an incurable eye disease that gradually strips its victims of their sight. The optometrist had pulled my parents into his office, careful to send me to the waiting room before shutting the door. But the walls were thin, and I caught the words anyway: functionally blind by his twentieth birthday.
That night, I watched my mom choke on her own tears for hours, her heaving frame outlined by empty bottles as she cursed the gods she never believed in. I strangely couldn’t find the tears to cry. Instead, I opened the coffee-stained journal beside my bed and wrote a number at the top of a fresh page.

My countdown had begun.
Every morning, I wake expecting the world to look almost the same, but a little softer. A little dimmer. A little less alive, less mine to live in. And every morning, when I open my eyes and realize I can still find the cracks on my ceiling or a fiery sliver of light across my desk, I cry because I know that today is not the day the world fails to reach my eyes, and I cry because I know I am one day closer to waking up in darkness.

It was also 550 days ago that I took my first photo with a real camera, a beat-up 2008 Canon—older than I am—with a single memory card. I took that photo here, at Andover; my dad passed the camera down to me the day before I was set to start a photography class I had signed up for without much thought.

As of the day I’m writing this speech, my journal tells me that I have 1,548 days left of sight. And, whether by fate or some cruel cosmic joke, that is also the exact number of photos remaining on my only memory card.

Photography became my refuge, a way of preserving the most beautiful sights I have witnessed for the final days of my countdown when I will no longer be able to revisit them. People assume taking pictures is simply about capturing what’s in front of you, but they forget it's also about choosing what deserves to be remembered.

With my days slipping into a murky darkness, I started turning my lens toward the most ordinary corners of my life: the etchings on Bulfinch’s tables, smudged reflections in classroom windows, the flickering halos around campus streetlights after rain. While sinking into blurriness, I was confronted by clarity—the strange, startling revelation of everything I had been overlooking. I had spent fourteen years not noticing how many shades of white could exist on a single wall, how pearls of morning mist drag across the grass outside my room, or the way sunlight passing through rotting leaves throws faint constellations across autumn grass. I began noticing the color of people's eyes, the shapes of my friends’ smiles, all the tiny lines and freckles that had grown on my parents’ faces that I had never bothered to study. I found myself memorizing people. Their laughs, the scent of their clothes, how hard they squeeze my shoulder, the way they’d sigh when faced with a particularly rough week: every person became a kind of photograph, something to be remembered beyond the fleeting moments I would know them for.

Each frame I capture I take is an act of defiance, a tiny rebellion against the darkness that awaits me. Each shutter click means I was here. I saw this. This moment mattered. And even when the world slips from my view, those images will remain as fragments of memory for others to stitch together, evidence of the love in my eyes that I hold for each of you. I look out at this Chapel now, full of people I have walked beside, sat near, eaten across from, laughed with and laughed at, passed a hundred times on the way somewhere else. You, too, are photographs, puzzle pieces that fit together into the most important picture I will ever take. And even if this is the first time you’ve seen my face or heard my name, your faces and voices and presence on this campus have composed a vision of Andover that no disease can steal from me.

Blindness is not poetic. It is not noble or inspiring. It is scary. It is inconvenient. It is unfair. I will likely never transcend the fear or the anger. Some nights I lie awake, scratching my eyelids until they bleed, wondering what it will be like to walk through a world I can no longer see, or whether the memory of a face can truly substitute the real thing, or whether the darkness will be sharp or soft, sudden or gradual. I feel my lungs closing up as I watch the numbers in my journal slip into nothingness.

But I refuse to spend the next 1,548 days mourning what I still have.
My imminent blindness has given me gifts I did not ask for and cannot return: a profound appreciation for the things most people never slow down enough to notice. A sharper awareness of the beauty that appears only when you are not rushing to reach something else, and a sense of urgency that has nothing to do with panic and everything to do with gratitude.

I don’t know what the future looks like, and truthfully, I likely never will. But while I am still here in the present and the light still reaches me, watching my life spill out onto this page before me, I intend to memorize every detail.

I have learned to love the blur.
To all of you here today, after you leave this Chapel, I ask you to look, not at your phone or the asphalt beneath your feet. Look at this campus you are fortunate enough to walk through daily. Look at Andover with absolute certainty that one day you will see it for the last time. Learn to love what you used to ignore. And most importantly, look at everyone surrounding you. Notice the way they carry themselves down the paths and how their faces change when they need help. Never let the people and places of your life become backdrops to rush through.

Above all, the last 550 days have taught me that you do not need to be losing your sight to open your eyes to the hidden wonders around you. That choice falls on you.
For now, I close each day with the click of a shutter, capturing a world whose beauty I will look back on with love for a lifetime.
Now you see me.
And for as long as I am able to name you, the eyes that color my life, I see you, too.