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.
Even the term cringe might someday be deemed cringe.
I promise you,
you're probably doing or wearing something right now
that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious.
You can't avoid it, so don't try to.
For example, I had a phase where for the entirety of 2012,
I dressed like a 1950s house housewife.
But you know what? I was having fun.
Trends and phases are fun.
Looking back and laughing is fun.
And while we're talking about things that make us squirm,
but really shouldn't,
I'd like to say I'm a big advocate
for not hiding your enthusiasm for things.
It seems to me that
there is a false stigma around eagerness
in our culture of unbothered ambivalence.
This outlook perpetuates the idea that it's not cool to want it,
that people who don't try
are fundamentally more chic than people who do.
and I wouldn't know because I've been a lot of things,
but I've never been an expert on 'chic'.
But I'm the one who's up here,
so you have to listen to me when I say this.
Never be ashamed of trying
Effortlessness is a myth.
The people who wanted it the least
were the ones I wanted to date
and be friends with in high school.
The people who want it the most
are the people I now hire to work for my company.
I started writing songs when I was 12,
and since then it's been the compass guiding my life,
and in turn, my life guided my writing.
Everything I do is just an extension of my writing,
whether it's directing videos or a short film,
creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on a stage, performing.
Everything is connected by my love of the craft,
the thrill of working through ideas and narrowing them down
and polishing it all up in the end, editing,
waking up in the middle of the night,
throwing out the old idea because
because you just thought of a new or better one,
or a plot device that ties the whole thing together.
There's a reason they call it a hook. *hook一般指歌曲中最吸引人的部分
Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me,
and I can't focus on anything
until it's been recorded or written down.
As a songwriter, I've never been able to sit still
or stay in one creative place for too long.
I've made and released 11 albums.
And in the process,
I've switched genre from country to pop,
to alternative, to folk.
And this might sound
like a very songwriter centric line of discussion.
But in a way,
I really do think we are all writers
and most of us
write in a different voice for different situations.
You write differently in your Instagram stories
than you do your senior thesis.
You send a different type of email to your boss
than you do your best friend from home.
We are all literary chameleons.
And I think it's fascinating.
It's just a continuation of the idea
that we are so many things all the time.
And I know it can be really overwhelming
figuring out who to be
and when,
who you are now,
and how to act in order to get where you want to go.
I have some good news.
It's totally up to you.
I have some terrifying news.
It's totally up to you.
I said to you earlier
that I don't ever offer advice unless someone asked me for it
And now I'll tell you why.
As a person who started my very public career at the age of 15,
it came with a price.
And that price was years of unsolicited advice.
Being the youngest person in every room for over a decade
meant that I was constantly being issued warnings
from older members of the music industry,
media, interviewers, executives.
And this advice
often presented itself as thinly veiled warnings.
See, I was a teenager
at a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with the idea
of having perfect young female role models.
It felt like every interview I did
included slight barbs by the interviewer
about me one day running off the rails.
And that meant a different thing
to every person who said it to me.
So I became a young adult while being fed the message
that if I didn't make any mistakes,
all the children of America would grow up to be perfect angels.
However, if I did slip up,
the entire earth would fall off its axis,
and it would be entirely my fault.
And I would go to pop star jail forever and ever.
It was all centered around the idea
that mistakes equal failure
and ultimately
the loss of any chance at a happy or rewarding life.
This has not been my experience.
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.
The times I was told "No"
or wasn't included,
wasn't chosen,
didn't win,
didn't make the cut.
Looking back, it really feels like those moments
were as important, if not more crucial
than the moments I was told "yes".
Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown
made me feel hopelessly lonely.
But because I felt alone,
I would sit in my room and write the songs
that would get me a ticket somewhere else.
Having label executives in Nashville tell me
that only 35 year old housewives listen to country music,
and there was no place for a 13-year-old on their roster,
made me cry in the car on the way home.
But then I'd post my songs on my MySpace.
And yes, MySpace. *MySpace：21世纪初非常火爆的网络社交平台
And I would message with other teenagers like me
who loved country music,
but just didn't have anyone singing from their perspective.
Having journalists write in depth, oftentimes critical, pieces,
about who they perceived me to be,
made me feel like I was living in some weird simulation,
but it also made me look inward
to learn about who I actually am.
Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport
Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport
in which I lose every single game
was not a great way to date in my teens and 20s,
but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely.
Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age
was excruciatingly painful,
but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of, minute by minute,
ever fluctuating social relevance and likability.
Getting cancelled on the Internet and nearly losing my career
gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine.
I know I sound like a consummate optimist,
but I'm really not.
I lose perspective all the time.
Sometimes everything just feels completely pointless.
I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism,
and I know that I'm talking to a group of perfectionists
because you are here today, graduating from NYU.
So this might be hard for you to hear.
In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong person,
underreact, overreact, hurt the people who didn't deserve it,
overthink, not think at all, self sabotage,
create a reality where only your experience exists,
ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others,
deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right,
feel very guilty,
let the guilt eat at you,
hit rock bottom,
finally, address the pain you caused,
try to do better next time, rinse, repeat.
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.
How will you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments?
You won't.
How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices?
I won't.
The scary news is you're on your own now,
but the cool news is you're on your own now.
I leave you with this.
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,
and when I do, you will most likely read about it on the internet.
Anyway, hard things will happen to us,
we will recover, we will learn from it,
we will grow more resilient because of it,
and as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing,
we will breathe in, breathe through,
breathe deep, breathe out,
and I am a doctor now,
so I know how breathing works.
I hope you know
how proud I am to share this day with you.
We're doing this together,
so let's just keep dancing like we're the class of 22.