an ode to graduation
I wrote a “speech” for graduation. I mean, you can’t expect the girl who got a degree in waxing poetic and having something to say not to wax poetic and have something to say. I spent a couple of weeks working on it and then formatted it into a pretty little Instagram-friendly graphic. I planned to post it alongside some graduation photos. But the more I think about it, the more scared I am to share it. The pressure point is twofold: 1) my fear of being seen and 2) my fear of not being seen.
On Substack, there is a degree of separation. If you follow me on here, you are either a stranger or a very close friend. I can handle both of those things. What sends a shiver down my spine is the thought of an old acquaintance getting inside my head— a childhood friend, an old coworker, a friend of a friend who I once spoke to at a party. These people surely have no business knowing the intimacies of the last five years.
On the other hand, I want everyone to read it. I want to be told good job. I want to (as I lie about in the speech itself) be acknowledged for my suffering. I want an old lover to read it and find my desperate, limerent apologies hidden between the lines. Tell me I am good? Tell me you’ve forgiven me?
I am sharing this now because I feel like I am going to claw my eyes out if I don’t at least talk about graduation. Completing my degree is probably the biggest positive thing that has ever happened in my life. I want to celebrate it. I want to allow myself to experience the immensity of it instead of feeling numb and disconnected from such a wonderful achievement.
I have BSd my way to a BS degree! Who would have thought it possible! I am graduating with my degree in English, and after half a decade of studying writing, I feel it would be remiss not to write something about the last five years. This is probably cringe and I am sure that in the future I will look back and think “I can’t believe I wrote that, let alone published it for everyone to see”. But cringe is fake and I want to talk about how my degree has made me the person I am today, so that is what I’m going to do. Still, no formal training has prepared me for trying to put into words the expanse of the last five years but I’m going to do my best.
*
Oh! College! It is simultaneously a miracle that I completed a degree and an inevitability. The path of my life has always been leading me here. Who am I if not an English major? If not a writer? If not a self-proclaimed pretentious academic? I guess it’s time to find out!
Oh God. It’s really happening, isn’t it?
I have many opinions and feelings about my time as a college student. There is an urge here to detail to air out every bad experience within 6 degrees of separation of undergraduate life or what it was like to spend a whole year in what, in autopsy, has been diagnosed as a severe mental health crisis or to complain about certain courses or professors. But that is counterintuitive and also highly unnecessary. I have suffered, yes, but now is the season of flourishing. It is, after all, the growing pains and mistakes that changed me. This is not me seeking penance, no matter how much I would like it to be. My self-flagellation serves no one besides my own ego. All I will say is that the highest of highs follows the lowest of lows, and also I think the town of Logan, Utah may be cursed.“Forgive me,” said Francis Abernathy of The Secret History, “for all the things I did, but mostly for the ones that I did not”. I will leave it at that.
*
Studying writing and literature has opened up my world in ways I would never have been able to imagine. Through my coursework, I have discovered the richness of life. It sounds cheesy but it’s true. There is so much beauty all around us and within us-- you simply have to extract it!
College taught me how to be a person, partially through my studies and partially through my experiences. There is no learning inside your comfort zone, and in every possible circumstance, my career as an undergraduate pushed me out of my comfort zone like a chick out of a nest. I have discovered stories that have made me laugh, weep, open my heart, and roll my eyes. I have read a lot in the last five years. I fell in love with the Romantics and the Post-Modernists. I read an Irish play called Translations that felt as if it rearranged my DNA. It touched me so deeply. I got to do a deep study into The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde that took me across the country to present my research in St. Louis, Missouri. Five years of LeGuin and Orwell and O’Connor and Oliver and Shakespeare and Vonnegut. I have been thinking for days about how to verbalize the power of literature, how the stories and poems I have read have molded me from clay into something resembling a member of society but the words are like water in my hands. Some words that feel suitable are: indulgent, introspective, enormous, and cathartic. I’ll get there one day, be able to put into words what it feels like to read Bradbury by nightlight or to find a poem so beautiful that you spend the rest of the day walking on air. I will let you know when I figure it out.
Then, I met the USU community. I had classmates who championed me and challenged me. I had roommates who I loved (and may have unintentionally terrorized ala my year of crisis) and who were living embodiments of beautiful, carefree girlhood and strong, grounded womanhood. I had wonderful professors who pushed me, who gave me no more than I could stand but no less than I could handle1. I must admit, now that I have my degree in hand and nobody can take it… I’m still not entirely solid on how to format an MLA paper heading. If we ever crossed paths at USU, no matter how briefly, I hope you know you mattered to me, left your signature on the walls of my heart. I did not make it through college on my own. I wouldn’t be here without the unyielding love and support of my family, friends, and community. I wish I could thank all of you individually-- hold your face in my hands and tell you how much you have made a difference to me.
*
Now what? The expanse of the rest of my life is calling me. A million next chapters. Admittedly, I am going to spend my summer pacing, trying to figure out how to manage a week without counting the days in relation to when my assignments are due. I plan to read a lot with no intention of writing an essay about any of it. Then, I am sure, my gap year of rest and relaxation will turn into a year of drafting grad school intent letters and writing samples. I couldn’t leave academia behind even if I wanted to. Maybe I will study creative writing, maybe literature. There is also part of me, the Sylvia Plath writing in The Bell Jar, staring up at a tree of figs, debating an MA in Classics, becoming a Latin teacher in the Pacific Northwest. A devotee of Jung in a philosophy college. An anthropologist in awful khaki cargo pants. There is an above-zero (though still small) chance that I will renounce English altogether and live out my childhood dream of becoming a zookeeper. Maybe I will find a touring musical theatre company and follow them around the country.
Mostly, I want to write. Not for anyone else but for myself. I want to write all the silly and indulgent things that I have led myself to believe are too frivolous or not good enough. I want to write 100 terrible poems. I would like to draft a messy first draft of a manuscript that excites me and scares me. I want to lose myself in the writing just as I did in my teens and my early degree. I want to experiment and fail. I want to drown myself in messy drafts and passing ideas scrawled on the backs of receipts.
*
When I graduated high school, I decorated my cap with the last three lines of my favorite book: “All I know is that I’m here. And I’m alive. And I am not alone”. These words have been a lighthouse to me over the last half a decade. A mantra and a prayer. There has been so much change, but my favorite book has remained, and these words have remained tattooed on my heart. That is truly all I know. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m not alone.
Everything changes and yet everything stays. I think of Angels in America’s final lines: “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More life! The great work begins!”
Cheers, Utah State University! I did it!
There it is. My swan song to my undergraduate career. I had hoped I would have had something more prolific to write but this is what I came up with. Every other draft was too riddled with anger and grief and guilt. A litany of mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.
What I have written here is the truth, yes, but not the full truth. I have left out the tears, the desperation, the claw marks on the tender flesh of my spirit. Removed is my obsessive and all-consuming desire that burned every bridge I had built. I have wiped away the oil-slick fingerprints of anxiety and insecurity that coat the narrative. I’ve made it pretty just for you, like I was taught to. After all, “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”2. One day, I will share those stories. When I get brave. When I am not afraid of the haunting of my mistakes and misdeeds. For now, let me be good.
Here I stand at the end of a monumental chapter. It appears that the world only spins forward. There is music in the distance, a siren song at the edge of the fog, and I must go towards it. Oh, poor Holden, you were right. “Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”3
This line is borrowed from Savannah Brown, my favorite contemporary writer and a person who writes as if they can see the inside of my soul.
From Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
This one is attributed to Holden Caulfield of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye