It’s 1987, and I’m graduating from a high school in Texas with a class of 1,200 other seniors. Lean On Me was voted our graduating song. At the time, it felt fitting in a general way –warm, communal, hopeful. Only later did I understand how much leaning I had actually done to get there.
I had moved to Texas after graduating from a high school in Trinidad with just 120 students. Going from a Caribbean island to a school with more than 5,000 kids was a shock to the system. This was a place with a smoking section, students driving trucks to school with gun racks in the back, cheerleaders still in uniform sitting in class. There were yellow school buses, pep rallies, Friday-night football, packed basketball games an entire version of American high school life I’d only seen on television.
For the first time in my teenage years, I was around girls I could actually talk to in class, on the bus, in passing moments that felt full of possibility. I caught the attention of two sisters who rode my bus route. I noticed the looks, the small signals. But my shyness held firm. I never asked either of them out.
It was my second missed opportunity.
When I hear Lean On Me now, I don’t just think of graduation caps and ceremonies. I think about transitions that required quiet courage, about how much I leaned on routine and familiarity, and how rarely I leaned into risk. Some songs don’t celebrate who we became –they remind us of who we almost were, standing on the edge, unsure whether to take the step.