This is my favorite time of year. While I’m not much for Pomp and Circumstance, I eagerly await fresh graduation speeches, in part because I still feel like I have more to figure out about life. Like I’m not-quite-adult.
I won’t entertain the idea that graduating from college this year is unfair. Nothing in this year is fair, or actually in life. I’m sorry. The consideration of fairness is a practice best dropped now. You are graduating anyway, in spite of it all. Your task is larger, and more difficult. This is the truth for every graduating class… you, class of 2024, have awareness out of the gate. Bravo, you’re saving veritable weeks of couch lounging anguish wondering if it is “just you” or if life sucks as much for everyone right after graduation.
(The suck is equal)
1. Henceforth, you are responsible for making your own friends and maintaining your own friendships. It may surprise you that you are less-good at this than you think, so here are some ways to do this: knock on doors, smile at people, strike up conversations. Ask good questions.
2. Maintaining friendships does not correlate to the use of social media. Social media is a method and a platform, but can be used rampantly without substance. Have substance.
3. You are not required to be grateful for everything that happens in your life, but you are invited to make meaning. I personally find it unhelpful to consider what you did to elect a particular circumstance, and wildly inspiring to consider what to do next, once you have realized where you are.
4. No one does it alone. You can choose to collaborate OR profit from the labor of others. Choose wisely.
5. Karma does not mean that you get what you deserve, it means that you will keep finding yourself in the same circumstances until you do something profoundly different. You’ve lived long enough now to notice some of your own tendencies, and then it is your choice to reenact unfortunate paths, or take uncharted steps. Make new mistakes.
6. Safety and certainty are illusions, and we each find bizarre and unique ways to create these feelings in our lives. Some people feel safer with guns. Some people safer without them. Some people prefer certainty to adventure, and are uncoiled when their favorite soup is discontinued [me]. Prepare to be uncoiled, and see behind the sloppy brushstrokes of your illusion of “safety.”
7. You will hurt people, hopefully not on purpose. It will then be your responsibility to understand how and why and take an appropriate action. This will involve speaking with mentors and trusted advisors, not following the plot lines of your favorite HBO series or what your BFF thinks is right. Doing this sooner will build your humility muscles, which will prevent you from inflicting bigger and worse hurts later on.
8. Give only from your excess. If you only have one cookie, that is not your excess. If you are in debt, money is not your excess. When your cupboard is bare and your heart is broken and the world is on lockdown, you must dig into the unending well of gratitude because this will be the source of your excess. You can never overspend from gratitude, so dig, find, give, repeat.
9. When you have excess money, time, and energy, redistribute it, and yes I mean five dollars. Sitting on that extra five dollars will prevent someone else’s excess from finding it’s way to you. Sometimes that’s a smile. Sometimes it’s a kidney. Thankfully, there is no amount of dollars one can correlate to kidney matching. Kidney matching is magic.
10. Live with other people. Most people should not be left alone for long periods of time, because alone is where unreasonable thoughts fester. You will make many mistakes in navigating the living circumstances you choose, so learn from them and improve each time.
11. Before you head to the doctor, the gym, or the salon, remind yourself that your body is not wrong. Have a few friends remind you of this before, during, and after if you find yourself considering for one blessed moment that there is any wrongness in you. Decorate the hell out of yourself, heal what ails you, but do not wrong your self. Ever. Again.
12. Adulthood means asking for and receiving appropriate help, henceforth.
13. Adulthood also means having discordant, concurrent emotions. Do not silence dissenting opinions that arise from within yourself. Listen.
14. Do not spend much time investing in your 20 year or 10 year or even 5 year plan, and instead, daydream about your possibilities in these same time frames. I promise, the investment will pay dividends.
15. Invest in your tomorrow-self with small loving actions, like loading the dishwasher, or declining one more drink, or using a condom. Tomorrow-self is so grateful to wake to a clean sink, a clear mind, and a sense of responsible adultness. Thanks, yesterday me, for having my back on this one.
16. Make friends with people who work in different fields and thrive on different planes of existence.
17. Master a handful of recipes. Guacamole and pancakes count. Ice and toast do not. Share them.
18. Hand write cards. Recipes. Recipes on cards. No one ever uncovered a crumpled up email in the back of their closet when they were trying to do a little spring cleaning. Things with meaning can be small, and even small things can be lasting.
19. Start appointments with your therapist with a short list of things you really don’t want to talk about - do not make your therapist dig the truth out of you. This will save you approximately one million dollars and loads of minutes.
20. Privilege is where you are right now. If you are graduating, you are part of the 6.7%, which means loads of you are in the 1%. Do not imagine that it is solely because of your hard work and efforts that you are in this seat, and do not relent the responsibility that this bestows upon you. Consider yourself responsible for a disproportionate (aka: excess) segment of resources. You have excess. Redistribute this, early, often, and always.
21. Also, that unending well of gratitude exists, even for the wealthy.
22. We know based on celebrity behavior that excess money does not make people happy. We know based on the Sacred Text of the Lord of the Rings that excess power corrupts. Save yourself by hoarding neither. By doing this, you will save others, too.
23. Own your worth. Do not work in such a way that you put yourself into poverty of time, energy, or money.
24. Do not apologize for existing, or taking up time or space. You are made of time and space. You can create time and space. You are a magician of physics every time you assert your right to exist.
25. Pass the mic. Get curious about the loudest voices in the room and ask yourself who hasn’t spoken. Wisdom rarely grabs the mic, but will speak when invited. Seek wisdom.
26. Ask better questions.
27. Remember that losing and liberating are two ways of describing the same experience.
28. Commencement means beginning, where as graduation means ending. Consider what you’re beginning.
29. Count all wins.
30. Count only wins.
Onward,
K
PS: The OG [virtual latte] post was on another platform, called “Ask Better Questions” and you can see it here, if nostalgia has you or if you’re waiting to board a plane.
PPS: My most favorite graduation speeches ever are by Anne Lamott (of course), Jim Carrey (whose middle name is Eugene?!), and Hamadi Ulukaya (chills, and not from the yogurt).