Khakpour shared her favorite Walt Whitman quote — which had also been her own senior quote — as the philosophical anchor of her speech. The line suggests that despite all the turbulence of life's experiences, your essential self finds its way through. She added her own 'non-poetic footnote': 'So pick yourself wisely, kiddos.' The combination of Whitman's transcendent faith in identity with Khakpour's practical immigrant pragmatism captured the speech's central tension. As a fiction writer who had 'made up anywhere from 800-2,000 characters' since age four, she saw self-creation as a natural extension of storytelling: 'There was nothing more normal to me than making up people, even if I turned the project on myself.' She challenged the Army's 'Be all that you can be' as aiming too low: 'What about be all that you want to be?' For an audience of high school graduates standing at a crossroads, the Whitman quote offered reassurance that their essential selves would survive whatever adventures and mistakes lay ahead — but that they still had agency in choosing who that self would be.