Everything's Going To Be Okay: 2017 Commencement Address (Patreon)

I was asked to give the commencement address for the graduating class of 2017 at Kimberton Waldorf School outside Philadelphia. Here is what came bubbling out of the beakers.

 (The text of this speech, may be reproduced, with credit, for free.)

Everything's Going To Be Okay

Words cannot express how good I wanted to make this speech for all of you. I wanted to make it perfect. I wanted to make it a towering work of beautiful genius. I wanted to serve it to you like one of those cakes you see on TV, so impossibly exquisite and intricate, the ones that really do look exactly like a watermelon. 

It won’t be perfect, of course. Its tower will wobble, it’s probably a little uncooked in the middle, and the icing cannot possibly turn out the right shade of green. Forgive me. Normally when I pretend to be a wise old lady who knows magical secrets about the meaning of life, I don’t have to look anyone but my word processor in the eye while I do it. 

Just as it is your first time graduating, it is my first time giving a commencement address. So, listen: we’re all in this together. We’re all a little nervous, we’re all a little excited, and we’re all a little uncertain of what the near future holds. As I approached the task of trying to tell you something remotely useful about life, adulthood, art, work, the human heart, and the value of an honest day’s worrying about things you cannot change, it felt very much like writing a first novel—you just desperately want to say something real and true and deeply important and earth-shatteringly original, to cram everything you think you know and everything you’ve ever heard and everything that’s ever meant anything to you into a few pages that cannot possibly contain all that plus witty banter, a twist ending, and a bit with a dog. But you try anyway, wobbly and uncooked and green, because you might never get another chance. 

Before I start in earnest, a little housekeeping, if you will. I did a lot of research in the weeks leading up to today, because I never got the chance to attend my own high school graduation, so I honestly had no idea how these things are meant to go. I watched or read just about every graduation address people agree was a great one. And as far as I can tell, all commencement speeches must, by law, include the following sentiments. I don’t want you to feel you’ve missed out on the full experience, and I certainly don’t want to get a citation, so let’s get them out of the way now. 

Try hard. Do your best. Don’t be afraid. Be kind. Make stuff. Life is unpredictable. Stay true to yourself. Money is hard. Be brave. Take risks. Follow your dreams. Stand up for what you believe in. Seize the day. Never give up. The future belongs to you. 

There. That feels better. Some of the pressure’s off. We’ve already covered the big flashy bullet points. Now we can just talk.

I am a total stranger to almost all of you. And yet, by an improbable series of events, I’m part of your rite of passage today. Our lives are intersecting at this moment, in this time, in this space, and afterward we will stream off in all our many directions like the rays of a very little star, and who knows in ten or twenty years what any of us will remember of this beautiful afternoon, among beautiful people. But this intersecting instant is ours, yours and mine, a temporary palace with invisible walls, to which only we have the key. It is an extraordinary thing, and I am honored to share space/time with all of you. 

I have tried to think of what I would have wanted to hear when I was your age. What I would have found interesting or smart or even semi-believable about life on planet earth. What I would have needed to hear about how to live on that planet, how to be, how to persist, how to strive, how to be good, not in the sense that children are told to be good, but to really be good, at life and love and money and art and complex social situations and finding matching socks in the morning. What I would remember now, if anyone had ever told me then.

And I keep coming back to last month, when I spoke with the senior class. I asked what you wanted me talk about, what you were interested in, what kind of speech you hoped to have at your graduation, it being your ceremony and all. There was a long silence. And one of you said:

Just tell us everything’s going to be okay.

I’ll tell you the truth, that was a gut-punch. Because on this side of 35, people don’t really say that to each other all that often, and if they say it, they don’t usually mean it. It’s a platitude, a phrase so overused its sucked dry of all its juice. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I struggled with the whole idea. How could I say that when I don’t always feel it myself, when I, too, am so often uncertain, when I, too, so often feel so small against the world. Because I want to be honest with you. This is no good if I just tell you a cheerful lie and send you on your way down the road to a house made of candy with a totally not sinister old lady living in it. And the honest truth is: the world seems like a terrifying place right now. The ground beneath our feet and the sky above our heads feel uncertain and unknowable. What is normal seems like it’s changing every day, and our most basic assumptions no longer hold. In the last month, I’ve sometimes felt like that phrase was haunting me, a challenge that went to the very core of who I am as a person and an artist, forcing me to confront everything I have ever tried to say in my books—because I’ve written it in a thousand different ways: love the world, be a part of it, have courage and luck and wishes and all will be well. So could I say it again when we are all so close and I have to look you in the eye or was I just playing around with all those wyverns and space whales and magic girls being stalwart in the face of darkness? Was it just a game? Something you write because it’s expected, because that’s how you make a happy ending? And I knew I could not in good conscience get up here and tell you what you want to hear if I didn’t mean it. If I thought for one solitary moment it was a lie.

So listen. Please. I have perhaps never said anything as important as this in my life. It is hard, but the things that matter always are. Lean in. Parents and teachers and brothers and sister and aunts and uncles, too. This is for you, too. Because if I know anything, I know that there really are magic words in this world, if you say them right, in the right place, at the right time, to the right people. Because I’m going to tell you stone cold truth, and this whole speech is nothing but a way to mean it as hard and as loud I can: everything is going to be okay.

It just…might take some time.

I realized that all anyone ever wants to hear is that everything is going to be okay. Believe it or not, my last job before I became a full time writer was as a professional fortune teller, and I realized very quickly that no one who ever walked through my door cared one bit about the cards or the stars or the lines on their palms. They just wanted to hear that everything was going to be okay. Every fairy tale, every self-help book, every summer blockbuster plot, every best man’s toast, every commencement speech ever is just that with different set dressing. The world has always seemed like a terrifying place when you’re only just entering it, and the future has always felt uncertain. This is not the new normal. It is the old normal. And we all survive it so that we can grow up and shake a little while we tell other people to try hard and do their best and follow their dreams. When I was a kid, we still did nuclear strike drills under our desks. Some progress has been made. More will come.

It just…might take some time.

I’m standing up here in the sun and talking to you as though I am an authority, not because of any success I’ve achieved in this world, not really, but because I’m a storyteller. Rituals require storytellers, and this is one of the great rituals of life. Graduations, weddings, holidays, funerals—these are the times when you can really force your loved ones to all be in the same place at the same time wearing something a bit sparkly. And after the feast and the dancing, the time comes for stories round the hearth, for a weird old girl who talks too much to tell tales of who we were and who we are becoming. Tales that fit us into a much bigger, much longer story already in progress, mark and explain our place in it, and tell us how to get through the next chapter. Tell us that there is a next chapter. That there always is. I am not here to tell you how to succeed in business by really trying very hard. I am here to tell you a story about the shape of things to come. About that uncertain future. About how to live in it, how to light its halls so it doesn’t seem quite so fearful, and how to dance there.

Often, a storyteller tells her own tale, cuts it and shapes it and polishes it into something that can reflect a bigger truth. And I could do that. I could tell you the story of my life, how uncertain I was of what I wanted and who I wanted to be when I was your age, how I studied dead languages until I found a living voice, the places I traveled, the choices I made, my mistakes and my lucky breaks, how I got my start as a writer and how I managed to not stop being one yet despite the world really wanting me to sometimes, how I tried hard and wasn’t afraid and didn’t give up and seized the day and followed my dreams, and hope that in that mirror you can see something of yourself, that it is okay to be uncertain, to not know who you are or who you want to be, to make mistakes, to make choices when you don’t know what’s right, that it’s perfectly normal if it feels like you’re spending your twenties repeatedly running face first into brick walls, that everything can come out all right in the end anyway—it just might take some time. 

But I don’t want to do that. Just now, I want to be an older kind of storyteller, the kind that beckons you in from the cold to take a seat by the fire. The kind that takes your coat, looks you in the eye, and tells you your own story even if they’ve never met you until this moment. So here it is. Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before, but I thought that, as you are crossing the strange borderlands between childhood and adulthood, you would not mind one last fairy tale.

Once upon a time in a kingdom not so terribly far from here, there lived a child who was very much beloved by her parents, who happened to be the king and queen. They tried their best to give her every good thing in the world and spare her every harm. They invited all the good fairies in the land to the christening. Each of the fairies gave the child a gift: beauty, great intelligence, ambition, kindness, the internet, functionally infinite commercial-free streaming media, virtue, a quick wit, a deep concern for social justice, bravery, and so on. But one fairy had not been invited to the banquet, because he was wicked and cruel and no one had ever even thought he was the kind of person who went to christenings anyway, and he wished to have his revenge for the slight. He swept into the hall with his eldritch hair streaming behind him and his red ribbons flying and shook the king’s hand brutally, hissing through clenched teeth: “This is my gift. When that child reaches the age of inheritance, she shall prick herself upon a spindle and fall down dead!”

And with that, the bad fairy returned to his tower to fume and to plan.

The king and queen were shocked, but it so happened that one good fairy had been in the ladies’ room and missed all the fuss. She had not yet given her gift. The fairy leaned over the royal child’s crib and said:

“Well, what a fine mess we all find ourselves in, hm? But this is my gift: It will only look like the death of everything, but it won’t be. It’ll be only a deep, long sleep, a sleep of years. And sleeps, even the heaviest of them, end. Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay. It just may…take some time.”

As the years went by and the child grew up, the world became a very different place than the one she was born into. In order to save the child from her fate, the king listened to a lot of mad old wizards, who were secretly bad fairies themselves, and ordered that every spinning wheel in the kingdom be burned on a great bonfire, which never did make much sense on account of the wizards being mad to begin with, and caused a massive economic crisis, as no one could get jobs in the textile industry any longer, and were forced to take unpaid internships with wealthy monasteries while working two shifts at local taverns to make ends meet. Explorers mapped the world entire, so that there were not nearly so many kingdoms for the taking as there once was, and young heroes suffered a great shortage of treasures and adventures, because so many of them had already been snatched up before they came along. And the child grew up worrying every night, for the cloud of the bad fairy future hung over her head, and she could see that her parents and the other nobles and everyone around her seemed to have so much, while she had only the cloud. 

“Just work hard,” said the king. “Don’t shirk and don’t go around talking about it so much. My advisors and I fixed it. That sort of thing can’t happen here.”

“Don’t cry, my darling,” said the queen. “Everything is going to be okay. It just may…take some time.”

But it did happen, just as the bad fairy said, that when the child reached the age of inheritance, she discovered a winding staircase in the palace she had never seen before, the best staircase, everyone said so, and followed it up to a little room where the last spinning wheel in the kingdom glinted in the sun. Having grown up in a world without spinning wheels, she did not recognize the danger, and immediately pricked her finger on the spindle. As she began to fall asleep, she looked out a high window in a high tower and saw that it had never been her cloud alone. It spread over the castle and all the countryside. Everyone she knew was falling asleep as well, drifting away as they heard the voice of the bad fairy whispering in their ear, their eyelids growing heavy, their shoulders slumping, their spines bending, and in her heart the child cried out to them to fight, to resist, not to listen to the terrible spell, to yell and stomp their feet and stay awake, no matter what. But the spell was a powerful one, and soon enough, she too was asleep.

And for awhile, the kingdom knew nothing, and did not dream, and sharp, cruel briars grew over the walls that closed that lovely country in. 

But you know the end of this story. Heroes did come. The briars did fall. The child woke. Everyone did. Together the beloved child and a good-hearted prince defeated the bad fairy and cast him down into his own horrible swampy moat where he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again. The kingdom did come roaring back as good as before and better, albeit with somewhat fewer spinning wheels. Everyone lived. 

Justice did come. The sun did shine again. Life went on. Joy was possible. Everything really was okay.

It just…took some time. 

You may think stories are stories and life is life, but life is nothing at all but a series of stories, some better written than others, some with a neat, linear structure, some all over the map, some realistic, some fantastical, some with a clear moral, some baffling to the last. In some of them you will be the hero, in some the sidekick, in others the love interest, the wise mentor, the loving parent, the fool, and in some, you may even be the villain, even if nobody ever means to be. We tell these stories, fairy tales, folktales, archetypes, mythologies, and we tell them over and over because they say something true about the world. If they didn’t, we’d just forget them, because it’s ever so much easier to forget than to remember. And stories, fairy tales especially, tell us how to survive. How to find our way out of the forest. How to solve the riddle. Stories tell us that dark lords do not last, they lose in the end, that bravery and kindness and love win out, that no cloud hangs low forever, that the sorrows and troubles of junior high and high school and even college do not last forever, that the truth burns away all deceptions, that if you care enough, if you try hard and do your best and don’t be afraid and be kind and make stuff and stay true to yourself and follow your dreams stand up for what you believe in and never give up, you can wake up the world from any sleep, no matter how deep.

It just may…take some time. 

And you have time. I know it may not feel like it, but you have so much time.

Everything is going to be okay is another way of saying happily ever after. Sometimes you get to swim around in the happily part. And sometimes you might have to focus on the after part for awhile. But the after always comes. It can’t help it. 

I realize that, in terms of practical life advice, that may not have had much in the way of actionable items unless you’re headed into a spinning-wheel related career. I would imagine you will hear a lot of advice today from a lot of people, and I’m just a stranger being way too earnest and making Sleeping Beauty weird for all of you. But all any of us can tell you is the story of our own lives, what worked for us, what we wish we’d done differently, what we want to spare you, what we want to show you, because that’s all anyone in this world has to share, the precious, impossible ember of their own brief experience, which, unfortunately, pretty much boils down to: Try hard. Do your best. Don’t be afraid. Be kind. Make stuff. Life is unpredictable. Stay true to yourself. Money is hard. Be brave. Take risks. Follow your dreams. Stand up for what you believe in. Seize the day. Never give up. The future belongs to you. 

It just might…well, you know.

But that doesn’t really help much, either. The world I grew up in is not the one you’re growing up in. The rules have changed—because the rules always change. I could tell you that to really make it in the arts you should lose everything in an economic crisis that had nothing to do with spinning wheels at all and then put up a middle grade fairy tale starring a girl with a ridiculous name and a title containing a word few children can pronounce, let alone define, on your website for free or and that would sound ridiculous and kind of dangerous, yet that’s what I did. That’s the reason I’m talking to you today and not working in a cubicle remembering that one brief moment in my life when I used to be a writer. Should I tell you to drop out of graduate school to get married? What a dreadful idea, it could never work out. Yet that’s what I did. Move to a state with fewer people than Florida has alligators and hope for the best? Good lord, why? Yet that’s what I did.

But what I did doesn’t really matter. You have to do what you’ll do. No single life is a repeatable experiment. There is no right way to be an adult—you can’t help becoming one, so whoever you turn out to be, you’ll have done it right. There’s no right way to be successful, as an artist or an engineer or a newscaster or a parent or a teacher or a penguin researcher in Antarctica. As far as I can tell at the grand old age of 38, having lived all over the world and done, seen, and created a lot of dumb and wonderful and scary and occasionally clever things with less guidance than I would have liked, there is no secret to life.

Except this. 

You will never feel any older than you do right now. Oh, you’ll be older. You’ll know more facts, have more stories to tell at parties, your joints will hurt more, you may need corrective lenses, you’ll look back on the music you like now and probably think it’s hilariously awful, but on the inside, you’ll still feel the way you feel today when you’re 73. Adulthood is the Great Lie. There are no adults. We’re all just kids in grown-up suits trying not to look stupid or get laughed at or left out of the other kids’ games or hit things with our cars or get in trouble at home or turn in our homework late or show weakness on the playground or let anything bad happen to our friends. And we do some convoluted things to make all that happen, because our toys are just so much much bigger. 

So don’t worry too much if you don’t feel big enough to take on everything yet. No one is. I’m giving this speech standing on a booster block so I can reach the podium. Don’t worry too much about modeling what you think an adult should be. There’s no should be anymore—that’s one of those lesser fairy’s christening gifts for our generations. The secret is that, standing up here, I am no different than I was when I was sitting down there: wanting to appear wise and cultured and witty, sure everyone knows I’m a fraud, burning up with the desire to do something amazing with my tomorrows, afraid I won’t be able to live up to my own standards or anyone else’s, distracted by being in love with some boy, trying to make my parents proud, trying to do everything right, trying to make a human connection with strangers in the most fumbling and inelegant of ways—and in the end, perhaps there is no other way to make a human connection, perhaps connection is too messy and strange and real for elegance. And don’t think I didn’t write this paper the night before it was due like I’ve been doing since 8th grade. I am still that girl watching the sun rise over the back of her typewriter and in twenty years you will still be these girls and these boys sitting on the grass in the June sun, and the only difference will be that your kids will be laughing at you for talking about whatever technology will then sound as ancient and absurd as a typewriter.

And an even deeper secret than that is that it’s not a bad thing. Once you know the secret, it’s wonderful.

Welcome to adulthood. It’s just like childhood, but taller, louder, and you can stay out a little later.

I said earlier that this is one of the great rituals of your life, and it is. Enjoy it. Enjoy everything. God, things go sideways sometimes and there are bad fairies afoot all over the place and the watermelon cake almost never looks anything like an actual watermelon but this world has so much good in it, so much gorgeous passion and astonishing strangeness and heart-shattering feeling in it that if you knew half the marvels ahead it would take your breath away. Enjoy it all, that’s what it’s there for. I would say it only comes once, but that isn’t really true. You’ll almost always get to ride the rides in life again. It just might take some time. But especially enjoy the rituals. They demarcate the grand expanse of time we have on this planet, carve it up into manageable pieces we decorate with special colors and songs and clothes and food. They are what make us human, these rites. Rites, and stories. They make us other than wolves and turtles and hedgehogs. Someday, when your memory starts to go all watercolor at the edges, you may look back and find it’s only the rituals you still remember in perfect color. 

Later this year, I’m going to be officiating my brother’s wedding—another big ritual with a big cake and big dresses. And as I thought about it, and juggled writing this and their ceremony, as I thought about how odd it was that I happened to be performing an ostensibly authoritative role at these two important rites of passage in the same year, it occurred to me that in some sense, they are the same ritual. Because this is a wedding, too. Come on, it looks just like a wedding. The aisle, the processional, the white chairs, the tents, the flowers, the flutes and violins, the speeches, the toasts, the matching gowns you’ll never wear anywhere else. And all happily ever afters begin with a wedding. This one is yours. A wedding of you to the world, to the great and galloping rush of life, to history and time and the drama of existence. So if I may be permitted to be the small, tardy fairy at your christening, this is my gift: Today, you stand up with your friends and family on a long green lawn beneath a bright heaven, and take the world to be your own, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part.  

By the power vested in me by no one in particular, I now pronounce you grown-ups.

And listen. 

Everything’s going to be okay.