y／這篇文章要介紹的是歌手 Taylor Swift 於榮獲紐約大學榮譽博士學位後，受邀至期畢業典禮並發表的演說。當時聽完後便覺得很值得分享，因此把原文放在這裡，底下有一些加註與突出的地方，也很推薦大家去看看演講影片！感受她的溫柔自信與魅力。
（影片連結會放在這篇文的最下方）
Last time I was in a stadium this size, I was dancing in heels and wearing a glittery leotard. This outfit is much more comfortable.
I’d like to say a huge thank you to NYU’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Bill Berkeley and all the trustees and members of the board, NYU’s President Andrew Hamilton, Provost Katherine Fleming, and the faculty and alumni here today who have made this day possible. I feel so proud to share this day with my fellow honorees Susan Hockfield and Felix Matos Rodriguez, who humble me with the ways they improve our world with their work. As for me, I’m…90 percent sure the main reason I’m here is because I have a song called ‘22’. And let me just say, I am elated to be here with you today as we celebrate and graduate New York University’s Class of 2022.
Not a single one of us here today has done it alone. We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures, those who showed us empathy and kindness or told us the truth even when it wasn’t easy to hear. Those who told us we could do it when there was absolutely no proof of that. Someone read stories to you and taught you to dream and offered up some moral code of right and wrong for you to try and live by. Someone tried their best to explain every concept in this insanely complex world to the child that was you, as you asked a bazillion questions like ‘how does the moon work’ and ‘why can we eat salad but not grass.’ And maybe they didn’t do it perfectly. No one ever can. Maybe they aren’t with us anymore, and in that case I hope you’ll remember them today. If they are here in this stadium, I hope you’ll find your own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this common destination.
I know that words are supposed to be my ‘thing’, but I will never be able to find the words to thank my mom and my dad, and my brother, Austin, for the sacrifices they made every day so that I could go from singing in coffee houses to standing up here with you all today because no words would ever be enough. To all the incredible parents, family members, mentors, teachers, allies, friends and loved ones here today who have supported these students in their pursuit of educational enrichment, let me say to you now: Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.
I’d like to thank NYU for making me technically, on paper at least, a doctor. Not the type of doctor you would want around in the case 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. Or if your emergency was that you needed a person who can name over 50 breeds of cats in one minute.
I never got to have the normal college experience, per se. I went to public high school until tenth grade and finished my education doing homeschool work on the floors of airport terminals. Then I went out on the road on a radio tour, which sounds incredibly glamorous but in reality it consisted of a rental car, motels, and my mom and I pretending to have loud mother daughter fights with each other during boarding so no one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest.
As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I’d hang on the wall of my freshmen dorm. I even set the ending of my music video for my song “Love Story” at my fantasy imaginary college, where I meet a male model reading a book on the grass and with one single glance, we realize we had been in love in our past lives. Which is exactly what you guys all experienced at some point in the last four years, right?
But I really can’t complain about not having a normal college experience to you because you went to NYU during a global pandemic, being essentially locked into your dorms or having to do classes over Zoom. Everyone in college during normal times stresses about test scores, but on top of that you also had to pass like a thousand COVID tests. I imagine the idea of a normal college experience was all you wanted too. But in this case you and I both learned that you don’t always get all the things in the bag that you selected from the menu in the delivery service that is life. You get what you get. And as I would like to say to you, you should be very proud of what you’ve done with it. Today you leave New York University and then you go out into the world searching for what’s next. And so will I.
So as a rule, I try not to give anyone unsolicited advice unless they ask for it. I’ll go into this more later. I guess I have been officially solicited in this situation, to impart whatever wisdom I might have and tell you the things that helped me in my life so far. Please bear in mind that I, in no way, feel qualified to tell you what to do. You’ve worked and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed your way here today and so, you know what you’re doing. You’ll do things differently than I did them and for different reasons.
So I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that. I will, however, give you some life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career, and navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope and friendship.
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, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. 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.
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 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 that 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 hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I wouldn’t know because I have 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 most are the people I now hire to work for my company.
I started writing songs when I was twelve 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 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 and throwing out the old idea because you just thought of a newer, better one. A plot device that ties the whole thing together. There’s a reason they call it a hook. 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 genres from country to pop to alternative to folk.
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 also have some terrifying news: It’s totally up to you.
I said to you earlier that I don’t ever offer advice unless someone asks 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, the media, interviewers, executives. This advice often presented itself as thinly veiled warnings. See, I was a teenager in the public eye 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.’ That meant a different thing to everyone person said it 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 is 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, and 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 perceive 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 in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, 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 canceled 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. And so this may be hard for you to hear: In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong people, under-react, 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 sometimes which path to take. There will be times in life when you need to stand up for yourself. Times when the right thing is 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 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.
Scary news is: You’re on your own now.
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 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.
As long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. And I’m 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.
看完了Taylor的演講稿後，不知道你們是否有什麼想法或感觸呢？我聽完以後最直捷冒出的一句話便是：真想在未來的畢業典禮上聽到這樣一場演講！也建議可以點擊這邊的連結，進去看看她的演講影片，才能更直接地感受到她舉手投足間的自適，一顰一笑中的自信。這也是我很喜歡這段演講的原因之一，很想學習她散發出的成熟與穩重感，以及演講時的語調、頓挫、姿體語言、表情控管、觀眾氛圍引導等等，都是很值得我們觀察與借鏡的。而文章內畫底線的段落是我覺得很有個人特色與幽默感的句子們，第一次聽到時也成功使我會心一笑，有些段落也連結了一些她先前寫過的歌（例如22或是Welcome to New York），讀起來特別熟悉與懷舊。
Taylor 是我很喜歡也一直有在關注的一位歌手，她的歌曲可以說是陪著我一起長大的。還記得爸爸會拿著對現在的世界來說太小、太厚、太緩慢，但對那時的我們而言是極為新奇而珍貴的Iphone4，插在客廳那台有些老舊的音響上，幼時無數個晚餐時光便是在她時而甜美輕柔，時而直爽激昂的嗓音中度過。有時我會捧著裝滿柳橙汁的杯子，在一字一字慵懶而有勁的But I've got a blank space, baby打上餐桌後的短暫空擋音效裡，輕輕擊上爸爸高舉著的玻璃紅酒杯，再一同豪邁地高唱And I'll write your name，一飲而盡。國小時作為鄉村流行樂重度成癮者，她的歌曲便成為了我的日常，特別是在一次聖誕節聽見了老師播出由她翻唱的Last Christmas，便徹底愛上了那個吟著A crowded room, friends with tired eyes I'm hiding from you, and your soul of ice，清純卻帶著點抑鬱的腔調，當時手抄了好幾頁的歌詞至今仍在。而從此以後，下雨時便自動為茫茫雨絲配上背景音Drop everything now Meet me in the pouring rain；躺在與陽光同樣和煦的草皮上，拂過耳畔的風彷彿在唱We were both young when I first saw you，邊闔上眼邊輕輕哼著旋律I close my eyes and the flashback starts I'm standin' there On a balcony in summer air，眼中浮現羅密歐側著身穿過人群，邂逅茱麗葉時輕輕說的那聲 "Hello"。記得國中時弟弟班上合唱比賽投票選了You belong with me，因此興致勃勃地陪著他練習，他拿水壺我拿梳子，抓著對方肩膀又唱又跳地質問You say you're fine, I know you better than that Hey, what you doing with a girl like that?，順便奚落了一下他試圖提高音階時揍成一團的表情。甚至在國中需要早起的清晨六點，也是在她輕柔醇厚的嗓音與吉他聲中甦醒，You were in college, working part-time, waiting tables Left a small town, never looked back.I was a flight risk, with a fear of fallin' Wondering why we bother with love, if it never lasts，這首Mine一直是我很喜歡的曲子，一個小故事，場景、情感、起伏卻都深刻（但當下惶恐於是否睡過頭的狼狽似乎不如現在憶起那般浪漫），“You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter" 這句話特別有意思，旋律也很適合吹頭髮時抓著吹風機充當麥克風，一邊甩著髮絲一邊高歌（啊....目前因與長髮訣別失去這項樂趣的我深度表示遺憾）。即便她後來換了曲風，我仍自適地沈浸於她踩著黑色長筒靴，恣意高歌Cause baby, now we got bad blood You know it used to be mad love，由火焰與廢墟中重生的飄逸。又或者是她字字輕快而斷然地獨唱著Reputation precedes me, they told you I'm crazy I swear I don't love the drama, it loves me的段落，使我著迷並鑽研了一段時間（是rap呢！更天一分天下唯我獨尊的帥氣無羈感）。想表達的是，很喜歡她的作品與氛圍，也推薦給大家聽聽，歡迎大家跟我們說說自己的想法，與Taylor的故事，或是推薦自己喜歡的歌曲，我們會再進行回覆！
（私心愛好：Picture to Burn, Our Song, Teardrops on my guitar, Love story, Fearless, Mine, Back to December, Spark Fly, Safe and Sound, Everything Has Changed, End Game, Willow)
"And being embarrassed when you mess up is 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."
「搞砸了某件事後的尷尬亦是人生體驗的一部份。那麼，我們何不站起身來，輕撣身上沾染的塵埃與頹喪，看看身邊那正駐足等著我們的身影，相視而笑，豁然無忌。這，便是生活至上的贈與，對生命最真摯的禮讚。」
這段是其中我最有感觸的，便用自己的話把它翻譯出來。或許生活有時突遇地震與嚴寒，無法風雨無阻。這時我們似乎只能努力地接受它，並像泰勒絲所說的那樣，試圖波瀾無驚地起身，淡然地笑一笑，繼續前行。
這是原版的！會有較多特寫她的鏡頭，可以同時拿來練習聽力！
這個版本是經過後製與翻譯的，會穿插一些她的照片與過往回憶，很有巧思與氛圍感。不過缺點是看不到英文字幕與她的全程動作表情。
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