TAYLOR SWIFT’S NYU COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

(…) 8’40

I never got to have the normal college experience, per se. I went to public high
school until tenth grade and finished my education doing homeschool work on the
floors of airport terminals. Then I went out on the road on a radio tour, which
sounds incredibly glamorous but in reality it consisted of a rental car, motels, and
my mom and I pretending to have loud mother daughter fights with each other
during boarding so no one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest.

As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I’d
hang on the wall of my freshmen dorm. I even set the ending of my music video
for my song “Love Story” at my fantasy imaginary college, where I meet a male
model reading a book on the grass and with one single glance, we realize we had
been in love in our past lives. Which is exactly what you guys all experienced at
some point in the last four years, right?

But I really can’t complain about not having a normal college experience to you
because you went to NYU during a global pandemic, being essentially locked into
your dorms or having to do classes over Zoom. Everyone in college during normal
times stresses about test scores, but on top of that you also had to pass like a
thousand COVID tests. I imagine the idea of a normal college experience was all
you wanted too. But in this case you and I both learned that you don’t always get
all the things in the bag that you selected from the menu in the delivery service that
is life. You get what you get. And as I would like to say to you, you should be very
proud of what you’ve done with it. Today you leave New York University and then
you go out into the world searching for what’s next. And so will I.

So as a rule, I try not to give anyone unsolicited advice (được cho đi một cách tự
nguyện, không ai yêu cầu) unless they ask for it. I’ll go into this more later. I guess
I have been officially solicited in this situation, to impart whatever wisdom (sự
từng trải, sự sáng suốt, hiểu biết) I might have and tell you the things that helped
me in my life so far. Please bear in mind that I, in no way, feel qualified to tell you
what to do. You’ve worked and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed
your way here today and so, you know what you’re doing. You’ll do things
differently than I did them and for different reasons.

So I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that. I will, however, give you
some life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career, and
navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope and friendship.

The first of which is: Life can be heavy, especially if you try to carry it all at once.
Part of growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and
release. What I mean by that is, knowing what things to keep, and what things to
release. You can’t carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable
promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. Decide what
is yours to hold and let the rest go. Oftentimes the good things in your life are
lighter anyway, so there’s more room for them. One toxic relationship can
outweigh so many wonderful, simple joys. You get to pick what your life has time
and room for. Be discerning.

Secondly: Learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid
being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is
unavoidable over a lifetime. Even the term ‘cringe’ might someday be deemed
‘cringe.’

I promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will
look back on later and find revolting (khó chịu, phẫn nộ) and hilarious. You can’t
avoid it, so don’t try to. For example, I had a phase where, for the entirety of 2012,
I dressed like a 1950s housewife. But you know what? I was having fun. Trends
and phases are fun. Looking back and laughing is fun.

And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm (lúng túng) but really
shouldn’t, I’d like to say that I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for
things. It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of
‘unbothered ambivalence.’ (sự mâu thuẫn trong tư tưởng) This outlook perpetuates
(làm kéo dài, duy trì) the idea that it’s not cool to ‘want it.’ That people who don’t
try hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I wouldn’t know
because I have been a lot of things but I’ve never been an expert on ‘chic.’ But I’m
the one who’s up here so you have to listen to me when I say this: Never be
ashamed of trying. Effortlessness (sự dễ dàng không cần cố gắng nhiều) is a myth
(điều hoang tưởng). The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to
date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it most are the
people I now hire to work for my company.

I started writing songs when I was twelve and since then, it’s been the compass (la
bàn) guiding my life, and in turn, my life guided my writing. Everything I do is
just an extension of my writing, whether it’s directing videos or a short film,
creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on stage performing. Everything is
connected by my love of the craft, the thrill of working through ideas and
narrowing them down and polishing it all up in the end. Editing. Waking up in the
middle of the night and throwing out the old idea because you just thought of a
newer, better one. A plot device that ties the whole thing together. There’s a reason
they call it a hook. Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me and I can’t focus
on anything until it’s been recorded or written down.

As a songwriter I’ve never been able to sit still, or stay in one creative place for too
long. I’ve made and released 11 albums and in the process, I’ve switched genres
from country to pop to alternative to folk. This might sound like a very songwriter-
centric line of discussion but in a way, I really do think we are all writers. And
most of us write in a different voice for different situations. You write differently
in your Instagram stories than you do your senior thesis. You send a different type
of email to your boss than you do your best friend from home. We are all literary
chameleons and I think it’s fascinating. It’s just a continuation of the idea that we
are so many things, all the time. And I know it can be really overwhelming
figuring out who to be, and when. Who you are now and how to act in order to get
where you want to go. I have some good news: It’s totally up to you. I also have
some terrifying news: It’s totally up to you.

I said to you earlier that I don’t ever offer advice unless someone asks me for it,
and now I’ll tell you why. As a person who started my very public career at the age
of 15, it came with a price. And that price was years of unsolicited advice. Being
the youngest person in every room for over a decade meant that I was constantly
being issued warnings from older members of the music industry, the media,
interviewers, executives. This advice often presented itself as thinly veiled
warnings. See, I was a teenager in the public eye at a time when our society was
absolutely obsessed with the idea of having perfect young female role models. It
felt like every interview I did included slight barbs by the interviewer about me
one day ‘running off the rails.’ That meant a different thing to everyone person
said it me. So I became a young adult while being fed the message that if I didn’t
make any mistakes, all the children of America would grow up to be perfect
angels. However, if I did slip up, the entire earth would fall off its axis and it
would be entirely my fault and I would go to pop star jail forever and ever. It was
all centered around the idea that mistakes equal failure and ultimately, the loss of
any chance at a happy or rewarding life.

This has not been my experience. My experience has been that my mistakes led to
the best things in my life.

And being embarrassed when you mess up is part of the human experience.
Getting back up, dusting yourself off and seeing who still wants to hang out with
you afterward and laugh about it? That’s a gift.

The times I was told no or wasn’t included, wasn’t chosen, didn’t win, didn’t make
the cut…looking back, it really feels like those moments were as important, if not
more crucial, than the moments I was told ‘yes.’

Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel
hopelessly lonely, but because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the
songs that would get me a ticket somewhere else. Having label executives in
Nashville tell me that only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music and
there was no place for a 13-year-old on their roster made me cry in the car on the
way home. But then I’d post my songs on my MySpace and yes, MySpace, and
would message with other teenagers like me who loved country music, but just
didn’t have anyone singing from their perspective. Having journalists write in-
depth, oftentimes critical, pieces about who they perceive me to be made me feel
like I was living in some weird simulation, but it also made me look inward to
learn about who I actually am. Having the world treat my love life like a spectator
sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and
twenties, but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely. Being publicly
humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful but it
forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute by minute, ever fluctuating
social relevance and likability. Getting canceled on the internet and nearly losing
my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine.

I know I sound like a consummate optimist, but I’m really not. I lose perspective
all the time. Sometimes everything just feels completely pointless. I know the
pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism. And I know that I’m
talking to a group of perfectionists because you are here today graduating from
NYU. And so this may be hard for you to hear: In your life, you will inevitably
misspeak, trust the wrong people, under-react, overreact, hurt the people who
didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self sabotage, create a reality where
only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others,
deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the
guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, try to do
better next time, rinse, repeat. And I’m not gonna lie, these mistakes will cause you
to lose things.

I’m trying to tell you that losing things doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the time,
when we lose things, we gain things too.

Now you leave the structure and framework of school and chart your own path.
Every choice you make leads to the next choice which leads to the next, and I
know it’s hard to know sometimes which path to take. There will be times in life
when you need to stand up for yourself. Times when the right thing is to back
down and apologize. Times when the right thing is to fight, times when the right
thing is to turn and run. Times to hold on with all you have and times to let go with
grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in
the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to listen to the
wisdom of those who have come before us. How will you know what the right
choice is in these crucial moments? You won’t.

How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices? I won’t.
Scary news is: You’re on your own now.

Cool news is: You’re on your own now.

I leave you with this: We are led by our gut instincts, our intuition, our desires and
fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes. So will I.
And when I do, you will most likely read about on the internet. Anyway…hard
things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow
more resilient because of it.

As long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe

through, breathe deep, breathe out. And I’m a doctor now, so I know how
breathing works.

I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you. We’re doing this
together. So let’s just keep dancing like we’re...the class of ’22.