Taylor Swift's NYU Speech Urges Class Of 2022 To 'Live Alongside Cringe'

Taylor Swift achieved her “Wildest Dreams” on Wednesday (May 18), obtaining a honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from New York University and walking onstage in a cap and gown for graduation at Yankee Stadium to deliver an inspiring speech to the Class of 2022.


“I’d like to thank NYU for making me technically, on paper at least, a doctor,” she mentioned. “Not the kind of doctor you would want around in the event of an emergency, unless your specific emergency was that you desperately needed to hear a song with a catchy hook and an intensely cathartic bridge section.”


On her social media, she posted a video of herself getting ready for the commencement.


“I’m 90 percent sure the main reason I’m here's because I have a song called ‘22’,” she joked. Quite unfortunately, the speech turned out to extend a minute over the 22-minute mark. Yet she also could not reject extending a “Welcome to New York” to the full audience. “It’s been waiting for you,” she said.


While in her speech, she congratulated the graduates for their achievements. Yet she never attended college, she empathized with the graduates’ unusual university experience while in the global COVID-19 pandemic. “I imagine the idea of a common college experience was all you wanted too,” she mentioned. “But in this case, you and I both learned that you don’t routinely get all things inside of the bag that you selected from the menu in the delivery service that is life.”


Having been in the public eye of fame since she was a teenager and understanding the fear of perfectionism and failure, the pop superstar reflected on her life and the lessons she learned. Normally, she doesn’t give unsolicited opinions “unless asked for it,” nevertheless in this case, she gave solicited life hacks to the graduating class based on her experience “navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope and friendship.”


One segment of suggestions she gave is that “life can be heavy, especially in the event you attempt to carry it all at once” – and to be discerning. “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,” Swift mentioned. “You can’t carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle began. Determine what is yours to hold and allow the rest go.”


Another life hack? It's OK to “live alongside cringe” since it’s “unavoidable.” And Swift is a big supporter that one should not hide their enthusiasm for something. “It appears to me that there really 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 hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do,” she continued. “But I’m the one who’s up here, and also you've got to listen to me As soon as I mention this: Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth.”


At the same time, Swift drops a lot of harsh truths also. “In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the incorrect people, under-react, overreact, hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self-sabotage, design a reality where only your experience exists, ruin properly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to prepare it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, attempt to do better next time, rinse, repeat,” she said.


Despite all of the media scrutiny, rumors and scandals during her career, she looks back and says that “mistakes led to the ideal things in my life.” “A lot of the time, once we lose things, we increase things too,” she continued. “We are led by our gut instincts, our intuition, our desires and fears, our scars our dreams. And also you will screw it up some days. Hard things happen us. We recover. We are going to learn from it. We plan to grow more resilient because of it.”


And to conclude the heartfelt speech with a fitting bang: “Let’s just keep dancing like we’re the Class of ‘22.”


According to Rolling Stone, where you could also find a full transcript of Swift’s speech, the superstar was a subject to a half-semester course at NYU taught by the magazine’s employees writer, Brittany Spanos, in the Clive Davis Institute of Recording Music.


Since 2021, Swift has been re-recording her master recordings and studio albums that were released prior to her 2019 album Lover. for now, she has re-recorded and re-released Fearless and Red. It has however to be confirmed what will follow, however on May 6, she re-released songs “This Love” and “Wildest Dreams,” leading fans to speculate 1989 may be next album. Recently, Swift dropped a brand new song, “Carolina,” which has been teased and featured in the trailer for the upcoming film Where the Crawdads Sing.