Excerpts from a Commencement Address I Will Never Be Asked to Give
The year I turned twenty-two, there was this popular musician — graduates, you won’t remember her, but your parents will — called Taylor Swift, who came out with a song called “22.” This struck everyone I knew as insane coincidence. “Have you heard the song?” they would say, after asking how old I was becoming, and would promptly play it from their cell phones. (This was back when everyone carried a little rectangular screen at all times and treated it like a kind of indispensable sensory organ.) Anyway, almost everyone I knew turned 22 that year, too, and the song was rolled out at each person’s birthday as if it were a brand new idea.
The whole year I couldn’t escape it. When I bought wine at the Trader Joe’s next to campus, the cashiers would look at my ID, wink, and start singing under their breath: I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22. One friend told me that when he turned 22, he was going to listen to the song every day for the entire year, and, every day, write a blog post about the experience of listening to it. I told him that sounded like torture.
I got more degrees than I had planned on, but when I did finally graduate, I travelled halfway across the world to “devote serious time to my novel.” I would hop dutifully from cafe to cafe for eight hours a day, trying to meet a self-imposed word count. I hoarded my coffee cup close to me so no waiter could take it away (this small ceramic thing was evidence I was a paying customer), and I would gradually dilute it with so much milk that by the time I left it was cold and white as the stagnant house paint in the extra bucket in my parents’ garage. I did not finish the novel, not even a full draft, like I told everyone I was going to.
Finally, I flew back to the States (as they said) to start the real job that had been waiting for me the whole time: the kind of job my parents approved of, where I went to an office every day and swapped riddles with my nerdy coworkers and wrote to-do lists for computers to follow line by line.
While I had been off trying to treat my novel like my full-time job, I had reached the undeniable conclusion that the book was a big delusion — it was never, ever going to be published. Still, when those coworkers asked me to grab a drink after work, I would refuse. “I have to feed my novel,” I said, like people have to feed their chickens or the bacterial cultures you grow in a lab. “He gets so lonely during the day. He starts chewing off all the cabinet knobs.”
Let me be clear — this long document on my hard drive was not like a dog. No: it was never really happy to see me when I came home, and it sulked whenever we were in the same room. It was more like some baby wild thing I had found and been compelled to nurse back to health. It didn’t really love me, but at this point, what could I do? It couldn’t go live on its own. I was stuck with it. When I went on vacation, or to a concert, I felt guilty for leaving it by itself.
It was not quite a source of joy, but I kept tinkering with it anyway. I needed something like that, something leashed to me. I thought that when I graduated, the only way I’d be able to deal with it was by rereading all of the Harry Potter books. Instead, I fed my novel.
This morning, a podcast told me that pieces of writing meant to be spoken should be written while standing up: it gives them more energy. I did not write this standing up. I wrote most of it lying on the floor of my apartment, tearing hunks of bread off a loaf in a paper bag, in the one corner where I could get the internet. This is not the kind of writing that requires me to use the internet, but without it, I feel scared.
Do you see what I did there? I wanted you to think that I wrote this speech this morning! You want to know when I really wrote it? I wrote it when I was twenty-four. I hadn’t even started that real job yet, with the riddles and the computers. I didn’t know if I would keep feeding the novel. I was in Dublin, living in an apartment with shit Wi-Fi and the guy who was going to listen to “22” every day for a year.
I had this blog called helen & erson, which was a pun off my name that I thought was pretty clever — and if the blog was a pet, too, it was more like a pet rock, in that I could leave it alone for months and it refused to die. The academic in me thought that thesis of the blog was about the smudgy line between reality and fiction in daily life, and this character called Erson made an appearance in almost every post. Every time, he was different — a single name for anyone and everyone. My friends, the only readers of this blog, sent me text messages like: “Who the fuck is Erson? Do you have a new boyfriend?”
I posted this commencement address on that blog when I was twenty-four and procrastinating my novel. I was never going to be asked to give a commencement address. This morning — this morning for real — when I still didn’t know what I was going to say to you, I printed it out. (Do we use paper for things like this, still?)
I am not qualified to be talking to you — talking like twenty-two is my deep past when really it just happened to me, like something uncommon and lucky. I could tell you, in closing, that we write our own futures, but we also write our own pasts. But that would be some typical graduation bullshit, wouldn’t it?
