On Saturday, May 22nd I gave the commencement speech for the graduating Women's Studies class at California State Univeristy Fullerton. What amazing ladies! Plus two men! The speech was twelve blasts, and the graduates -- guh! -- what an inspiration. It sounds so cheesy to say it, but it really was an honor for me.
I am working on getting some video uploaded, but until then, here's the text of the speechiest speech I've ever given. Thank you to Professor Jodi Davis for inviting me!
COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
Members of the Cal State University faculty, proud parents and friends, and, above all, graduates. First off, I would like to thank you for the invitation. This is my first time getting to speak to a graduating Women Studies’ class, and I can not think of a group of people closer to my lady poet heart. I am truly honored to be here.
I don’t remember a word of my own commencement speech 9 years ago at Chapman University. It sort of takes the pressure off. I was rocking some serious jet black Betty Page bangs at the time, and had no idea at all what was going to come next. I was just antsy to get my faux diploma already and get to the drinking my face off and doing this thing I’d heard of called decompression.
(Side note: I am a poet, so I know what I'm talking about—“decompression” is most definitely in the running for Top Five Sexiest Words in the English language. Why am I craving coconuts right now?)
I am so thrilled for you all to get to decompress, to have the pressure lifted from you after all the years of hustle and striving and caffeine pills and hand cramps from staying up all night writing 20 page papers. It’s about time. But before all that—there is no doubt of the importance of this day, and this moment, and of pausing to let it sink in what you have accomplished.
There has been academic success, yes. But first and foremost, today is evidence that you can successfully navigate a complicated and frustrating bureaucracy. My most serious congratulations. This is no small feat, and the skills you picked up doing it–how to wait in long lines, how to stay on the phone and request to speak to someone with more authority, how to file paperwork when the system breaks down—will serve you more times than you want to know. You can start a business, a nonprofit, a school, an entire nation with this skill set.
Because you chose to major in Women’s Studies, your commencement today is also evidence of something else. Your strong sense of self and of community. Your passion for the Great Search. Your instinct for justice and your love for underdogs. Your steadfastness in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty and unusual piercings. You all choose this path for different reasons, but you leave it with the same tattoo on your resume, that one that indicates you are probably one tough b---COOKIE.
In preparing for today, I asked several of my friends what they wished someone had told them when they graduated. The most common answer was this one – they wished someone had told them how many options were out there. We all left college with a very narrow view of what we would be able to do with our lives, or with our degree. And even though we slowly found our footing, we all felt pretty lost for a pretty long time. I don’t know if I can spare you that fate today.
Take it from someone who graduated in the year of 9/11—graduating into a struggling economy is rough, and this economy is brutal. It is the dominatrix of economies. You may have to struggle more than your Women’s Studies foremothers through no fault of your own or lack of talent on you part.
I can tell you a few thing you might expect from a fresh college degree in an economic downturn:
• Embarrassing jobs in retail or the food service industry that will illuminate for you just how overeducated you have become.
• Good jobs, great jobs even, where nonetheless, some officious male manager will decide to ram his inch of authority all up in your otherwise pleasant Friday morning. You will want to quit this job instead of paying your rent.
• Lots and lots of bean and cheese burritos.
But ladies, do not be discouraged! NO!
The good news is you are already on your path. It is impossible to stray from it. Everything you need to get where you are going will show up for you. The mistakes, the crappy jobs, all of it, it will make you hungry for something greater, and it will teach you invaluable lessons about HOW THE WORLD WORKS. When you get out there and begin to survive and then thrive, you will get a glimpse of how incredible you actually are. Making it in this economy will be like making it in New York City rather than Portland, Oregon. It will mean you can make it anywhere. It will be an impenetrable badge of toughness and radness!
Treat every internship, every volunteer gig, every job as an opportunity to gain an important skill. And rack up those skills like a ninja racks up quiet weapons. Maybe you already know what you want to do, and maybe you don’t, but someday you will know exactly what you want to do. And wouldn’t it be great if, when you realized what that is, you already had all the skills you needed to make it happen?
The reader’s digest of my own path goes like this: after graduating university, I lived at home for a year working part time as a grant-writer and glorified paper work filler-outer for an early childhood education center while also working evenings at an upscale sex shop which made most of its money selling bachelorette party supplies.
I was craving adventure and still obsessed with this poetry thing, so I used my contacts from the National Poetry Slam and booked my first European Tour, on which I supported myself reading poems around Germany from a self-made chap book called Divine Intervention, that came with a free Our-Lady-Of-Hangovers prayer card. It was amazing. I went crazy broke after an overdraft fee I unknowingly incurred somewhere in Paris sent me into Check Systems.
Thus forced to settle down and get my first “real job”, I found one coordinating education programs at a great little family resource center. I divided my time there between managing 65 employees working with 300 youths, and teaching art classes to remedial readers and English language learners. When after two years, I couldn’t get the organization to give me health insurance or pay me more than $28,000 a year for the 60+ hours a week I was working, and exhausted from the constant specter of having funding for my programs and my job cut, I decided I needed to go learn the art of fundraising. I picked up what I thought would be a development assistant job at Habitat for Humanity.
I got my first hilarious lesson in fund development when four weeks into my new job, the Director of Development quit, and instead of hiring a new one, the Board of Directors decided it would be cheaper to just use me for awhile to help them get to their 3 million dollar annual goal. Let’s just skip over that year of golf tournaments and Galas and speeches in the corporate boardrooms of the very mortgage lenders that would cause our entire economy and housing industry to collapse. I was so stressed and blinkered from all this “meaningful work”, I leapt at the chance to take a position at regional office when it arose, to do what I thought would be the easier work of directing Communications . Hundreds of press releases and media events and grant proposals later, I was forced to learn graphic design and develop websites just to keep the department running. Budgets were tight, and the housing market was on its way down already, and before the whole world knew it, we knew it, as all of our sponsors and donors began closing their doors and donating their office furniture to us.
About that time, Ms. Hillary Clinton, our lady of perpetual determination, decided to run for the Presidency of the United States. I can only describe that year as the year I woke up to my repressed ambition. And it wasn’t personal. It was this fierce ambition for all of womankind. I suppose before Hillary, a part of me thought it was impossible that I would ever see a woman obtain that kind of power and status and respect in this country. So I decided not to want it, in a pre-emptive strike against heartbreak. What unlocked in all of us that year. What heavy oceanic debt we owe her. When the opportunity came up to go work for her campaign in the months leading up to Super Tuesday, it took me all of two minutes to decide to risk losing my job, leave everything behind and do it for as long as I could.
It was the most emotional year of my life. And even though my heart belonged to Hillary, as it will belong automatically to the next serious and amazing female candidate for the presidency, the day when Barack Obama was sworn in, I collapsed like a little baby and just bawled my goddamn eyes out with joy.
Here is what that year taught me:
If you stay true to yourself and pay attention, amazing things will happen.
If you root out whatever sense of entitlement is inside you; whatever small or large resentments are eating at you; if you remind yourself gently and constantly to feel gratitude, amazing things will happen.
If you take huge risks for the people that you love, and who believe in you, amazing things will happen.
If you discover a hero, and set about to impress that person, amazing things will happen.
Suddenly, there you, transported from your dreary office to a hotel bar in South Carolina, arguing with a man twice your size that, among other things, Lil’ Kim is one of the most underrated murder rappers, and Hillary Clinton is the most qualified candidate for the presidency by leaps and bounds, and that man does something he has never done before, and admits a lady has a point.
Suddenly, there you are, in the shadow of a towering Magic Johnson and Bill Clinton, surrounded by swooning union workers, or backstage at a huge outdoor rally, and Delores Huerta (Delores Huerta!) is laughing about the scene everyone is causing.
Suddenly there you are, in the grocery store, stunned into stillness looking at the face of the first black American president on the cover of Time Magazine. And you know, to the very edges of you, that you will see a woman on that cover.
It was right then that I knew I had to be a poet full time. I had to really try like I had never tried to access whatever greatness was within me. I already had the discipline to do the things I didn’t want to do but had to do. What I needed was the discipline to do the things I loved to do, even when I didn’t feel like doing them. I resolved to overcome whatever was holding me back. I am still working on it, but the work I do today, writing and performing and speaking and teaching and producing, is the most challenging and back breaking and totally worth it work I have ever done.
So to all of you standing today on the cliff of “what to do with your life,” I say TAKE YOUR TIME. Getting to know yourself and sorting out your heart is so important and can not be rushed. But at some point, you will feel pulled to take the wheel in one direction or another. And if I may be so bold as to place an order—
What the world needs more of, is, yes, love sweet love, but also:
Liberal hippie moms .
Subversive librarians.
Tree hugging entrepreneurs.
Scary smart attorneys who eat bullies for breakfast, who eat wetlands developers like they’re carb-free snack bars.
Brazen performance artists willing to do anything to remind people about spontaneous joy.
Parade organizers.
Radical florists.
Psychic elementary school teachers.
Organic farmers and ranchers.
Peach enthusiasts.
Lesbian homeopath acupuncturists.
Good cops.
Bad ass self defense instructors.
Bankers with a conscience.
Oil spill cleaners.
Good listeners, aka therapists.
Emotionally unstable but brilliant inventors.
Deeply uncool designers and artists.
Abortion protest protestors and loving receptionists and administrators at Planned Parenthood offices.
Powerful healers, armed with chicken broth and lavender oil and blood pressure stabilizers.
Earnest party throwers who know how to use the tools of vodka and silent auctions to fund research and find cures for autism, cancer, heart disease, AIDS, and selfishness.
Anyone willing to lend out their seven season box set of Buffy The Vampire Slayer DVDs. (Call me!)
Unstuffy School Board Members, unstuffy City Council Members, unstuffy Mayors, who care deeply about the good of the group, who have a hint of vision, who have a passion for ending discrimination and violence and overconsumption and waste, who can rally a group of people on incredibly important community projects for parks and schools and sustainable economic growth and killer pumpkin patches!
Multilingual pacifists.
People who speak Evangelical Christian and believe in marriage equality.
Wisecracking nurses.
Female presidents. (No pressure. I’m just saying.)
I could go on and on. And I want to impress upon you how vast this list truly is. The sheer number of careers available to you now is overwhelming. And you will be able to try out many of them. Experience with me a little awe at the place and time in history you are living. Information is more accessible then ever. Entire libraries are at your fingertips. If you can free yourself from judgment about what “should be,” and let go of the “how”, I’m telling you. This is not true of the population in general, but it is most certainly true of the graduates in this room—you can do whatever you set your mind to.
As a working poet, which is only slightly less rare than a unicorn mime, I am in a position to defend this cliché platitude.
And let’s be honest. Who decides to be a poet for a living? Nobody sane, nobody who wants to buy a house and take their dog or cat to the vet when it gets crazy skin rashes, nobody who values financial security and constant reinforcement of their worth.
But security is an illusion, and the desire to be famous or make a lot of money is a terrible terrible reason to do anything. In the words of our great fallen comrade, Notorious B.I.G. , aka Biggie Smalls, “mo money mo problems.” Of course, Biggie was standing on a mountain of cash when he said that. But he still had a really great point.
If you have a dream, and you are honest with yourself, you know you can never give up on it. It your sacred duty to yourself to strive, and grow, and believe. You must fake confidence every day. Or at least 5 out of 7 days. An unmanifested vision is a delusion. All greatness stems from deluding yourself. So, go forth and delude yourself. Fake it ’til you feel it.
If you have a dream and you are not honest with yourself about it, your body will have words with you someday. In the form of some horrible stress-related illness. Or back problems. Or worse—uninspired insomnia.
And if you do not have a dream, get one. First follow what makes you angry. Then follow what brings you joy. The answer will come to you.
When the going gets tough, put your head on a diet. Fill your head with great stories of the good things people are doing to innovate a way out of the mess we are in. Fill your head with Stereolab, and Louis Armstrong, and Ani Difranco, and ABBA. Fill your head with great poetry and fiction. Love and nurture yourself, in whatever ways you discover you need it.
Be Amazon huntresses and hunters of great living. Spend all the time you need trying new you’s on for size in your mind. Imagine the work that wouldn’t feel like work, or that sounds challenging and exciting in a good way. Try it. If you hate it, try something else. Don’t stay unhappy for too long and don’t give up.
This world needs you. More than ever. As it says in the introduction to Inga Muscio’s Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, “We all know the numbers. We are fucked.”
24% of all women in this culture are raped in their lifetime, and another 19% have to fend off rape attempts. Which means that unless one man is incredibly busy, a lot of men are rapists. We know that as many as 22 million women have been molested by relatives, and 6 million of those are molested by their fathers. We know that 565,000 children are injured or killed each year by their parents or guardians. And we know there are more slaves in the world today than came across on the middle passage. We are fucked.
So why not give up??? Because life is good. Life is pretty f***** great actually. And if we are not guardians of life and joy and radness, no one else will be. If we are all to survive we must reclaim this world from the corporations and people who are destroying it for profit. And before we can do that, we have to reclaim our bodies and our hearts and our minds from that same grasp. We must find our own personal power, and teach others how to do the same.
This world needs wise, lush, fierce warriors. This world needs women and men who are brave and awake and foolish and emotional. This world needs you and your talent and your crazy unkempt imagination. So, as you all go out into the "real world", let there be no doubt that you are essential.
Congratulations graduates!
