Trying, cringing, and letting go

These notes began as excerpts, not a review. The words below are Taylor Swift’s, selected from my notes on her 2022 NYU commencement address. Each quotation is a separate selection, not part of a continuous transcript. I have kept the English wording from my notes, joined the short lines into paragraphs, and lightly normalized punctuation.

What to carry

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. 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.

Living alongside cringe

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. You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to. Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth.

Making mistakes

My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my life. And being embarrassed when you mess up, it’s 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.

Losing and choosing

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 which path to take. There will be times in life where you need to stand up for yourself. Times when the right thing is actually 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 sit and listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. 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.