Essays & Errors: Show Work in Progress/Public Bio(s)
May 31, 2024
(My first draft, in May 2020, I wrote for those graduating amidst a pandemic. Since then, I've interpolated and polished. Until today, only a handful have read or heard this speech.)
Dear graduating students, trustees, parents, administrators, faculty, distinguished alumni, and assembled guests, thank you for this opportunity.
Parents, let me introduce you to what, here on campus, is called a trigger warning. I suggest you cover your ears for the next 47 seconds. You won't like what you hear.
Graduating students: your parents often say they only want what's best for you.
This is not true.
Rather, they want what is safest.
Once upon a time, safest and best were the same. When you might have taken candy from strangers, played with rabid dogs, or put forks into electric sockets, your parents could claim to know what's best for you. Even now, washing hands and wearing masks are both “safe” and “best”. But, as you entered adolescence, in most areas of your life, those two words diverged.
The Safety Dance continues here on campus. In place of your parents’ broad, lasting skin-in-the-game remains a narrow imagination. So, in loco parentis is the motto of the Administrator Guild. No trigger introduction needed for you, admins. [put hands over ears]
[sotto voce]: Hell, they invented trigger warnings. In fact, their dreaming up ever new ways to help you safe grows their ranks. And your tuition.
“Tuition”, of course means both costs and the lessons they pay for. So, today I aim to help you better bargain with—and for—your life. To get you a better deal than the admin’s treasurers and bursars here would indulge, let’s start with this imaginative reckoning:
Inexperience brings mistakes. Mistakes offer lessons. Lessons lead to wisdom.
The Covid crisis has accelerated this equation—and uncovered some life bargains.
To do so, I’ll first tell you my three stories of commencing amid crises. Then three lessons I gleaned, and honed into tools that I aim to show how you can apply to your own life.
A year before high school graduation my parents split. My college fund went to pay divorce lawyers and a second household. With my parents tied up with my younger, disruptive brothers, no one took me to visit schools. So, I didn't even apply to college. I had no plan.