Draft of The Pessimistic Shrink’s 2021 Kenyon College Commencement address: “David Foster Wallace was a bit wordy”

Thanks to Kenyon for inviting me to speak. I hope, over the new few minutes, to entertain you with some interesting and possibly useful material, as that would be my substitute for inspirational words, which I don’t have. In fact, I hardly believe in the possibility of inspiration after childhood. That is when you are an open vessel, a unique machine that can travel the galaxies and all imagination on the fuel of questions, stimuli and mystery.

In these four years, you have learned some salient facts and professorial opinions in a wide range of subjects, all of them filtered through your psychological roots, or in a few rare cases, your open and clear heart. Clear hearts can be inspired. That’s my assumption, though I’ve yet to see one.

You have reached this destination carrying baggage and dreams, excitement and anxiety, depression and the curved gravity of personality. While everyone carries ideas, or rides on a magic carpet of thought into their adulthood, college graduates are more likely to be restricted from the real world by their mind which thinks instead of sees, “attitudes” instead of feels. You can test this. Will you approach your first job like a child chancing upon their first praying mantis or first-grade romance, with mute wonder or a melting heart? If not, then it is your complicated head that will be in the way.

I remember less enlightened times, when adolescence was stigmatized as a strange anteroom, an unnatural zone between natural childhood and necessary adulthood. It may be glib to look at the teen era as a no-man’s-land of video games and dull classes, gauche pseudo-sophistication and silly hair. A deeper and more harrowing fact is that it’s the place where childhood’s frustrations – what we therapists call “unmet needs” – were forged into metal that remained white hot, never cooling to a solid and sharp hilt and point. Your adult life is where that metal will reach its final stage, whether it becomes solid or never cools. You will join the others, older and oldest, on that plain for they are the same: solid or never finished.

If I have any advice for you, it would be to take David Foster Wallace’s observations about yourself as felt center of the universe and consider there is a fourth, best way: Not self, not others, not some indefinably judicious blending of both, but the world as center of your self. The praying mantises, any one of which could be God. The roses and manure to smell, the sun and the oceans to dive into, the wall at the end of the universe that must have a window in it. Lose yourself in the world, not in your infinite mirrors of ego. To do this, you may need to undertake the dark adventure of therapy, where those childhood frustrations are faced – in a voice that is finally heard – and expelled, in justice.

Thanks.