Three years ago at this time, I was invited to address the students of the Honors Residential Commons here at Virginia Tech as part of their end-of-the-semester gala. Here is the text of those remarks.
It is an honor and a privilege to get to speak with you tonight, so thank you, very much, for inviting me. I have been asked to talk about some wisdom I wish I had known prior to MY graduation. I am happy to do so, and I promise to be brief. In fact, you can set your watches: this speech will run 8 ½ minutes. But as many of you know, I am pretty direct, shall we say, so, um, buckle up.
My very first class on my first day of college was an introduction to Shakespeare course taught by Dr. Rose Zimbardo at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island, where I grew up. Dr. Zimbardo began that very first class as follows: Imagine that normal reality is a straight horizontal line, she said. In a Shakespearean tragedy, in the tragic arc, someone rises above his or her station in life and must be brought low by the end of the play to restore normal reality. Think of Macbeth, for instance. He is not supposed to be the King of Scotland, and so by the end of the play he must fall to restore the rightness of the world. But in a Shakespearean comedy, she said, things fall apart. The comic arc curves down. Things are misheard, misunderstood. Identities are mistaken. Deceptions, confusion, and conflict rule. In the middle of a comedy, it is all chaos and madness and frustration. But at the end of Shakespeare's comedies, there are always marriages and often multiple marriages. As a result of the upheavals, the lovers who are supposed to be together are now at last together, long lost brothers are reunited, and the like. The moral of the comic arc, then, is that things HAVE to fall apart so that the world can be remade in a better, healthier, more right way. So here is the first piece of wisdom I wish I had known when I was your age: Things fall apart for us precisely so that we can be remade in better, healthier ways. I didn’t really understand this wisdom or embrace or value it until I had lived through it many times. But the fact is that my life since the age of 16 has been a series of, well, devastating comic arcs, multiple times in which my world, in which I, repeatedly fell apart, times which were by no means funny, not in the least: losing my first serious girlfriend, my parents’ divorce, getting the diagnosis of my son’s autism, 9/11, the shootings here at Virginia Tech, the deaths of my parents, and so on.
It may be difficult to understand how falling completely apart, how exceedingly difficult, sometimes horrifying events can allow us to be remade in better, healthier, more right ways, so let me offer an example in more detail. My wife, Aileen Murphy, is a poet who teaches here at Virginia Tech as well, and four years ago she contracted Guillan-Barre Syndrome, a bizarre autoimmune response to a virus in which her antibodies attacked her own nervous system, rendering her paralyzed from the neck down. Indeed, she spent 10 days on a respirator in Roanoke Memorial Hospital unable to move or speak. We have a good marriage; and we work hard at it; but none of what we were or knew or were able to do helped us in the slightest. Everything we were and knew and were able to do proved insufficient for the tasks we faced. Imagine, if you will, two language geeks, two writers – a poet and a technical communicator – with 17 years of college and 3 advanced degrees in English between us, people who had spent every day for a quarter of a century living and working together in close contact, best friends, in fact, our faces inches apart, unable to communicate anything in any way. Everything had come undone; our world and our lives had completely fallen apart. At the same time, though, the shockingly rapid progression of Aileen’s disease was pushing me toward her, driving us together, hard, and fast, toward a different and deeper sense of intimacy which we worked out over a month of my 18 hour days with her in the ICU, a physical, spatial, temporal, behavioral symbiosis that even 25 years of marriage left me unprepared for. I had to become something new, something bigger, stronger, more generous, more patient, more tolerant, more empathetic, more resilient and – this is very important – more willing and able to ask others for help. Please don't misunderstand me: I hated every minute of Aileen’s and my individual and collective suffering that October, and I hope to never experience anything like it again, but I am grateful for the unexpected gifts of that experience. We had, it seems, begun to take each other, our relationship, and our many accomplishments for granted. We are much closer now. But we had to fall apart precisely so that we could be remade in better, healthier ways.
But as far as I know, none of you are married, so let me move closer to your experience and to my point. When I was your age, when I was in your shoes, I was, in fact, a mediocre student at a mediocre university, and I spent my entire undergraduate education in a hard core, all-consuming, life-threatening love affair with drugs and alcohol. Indeed, my very best thinking, the height of my coping mechanism, the very best response I could muster to the challenges of being a sensitive person in a difficult world was to medicate myself all day every day and get obliviously drunk and stoned every night, for a decade, using an ever more powerful and dangerous combination of chemicals. Eventually, though, it stopped working. Eventually, I weighed 40 pounds less than I do now, I couldn’t get high enough or stay drunk long enough to ease my pain, and one Sunday evening during my third semester of graduate school, I sat on the edge of my bed and started crying. I didn’t know why, and I couldn’t stop, but in retrospect it is now clear that I was, in fact, dying, and that Sunday evening I knew it. I realized I simply had to stop, but I also knew that I couldn’t possibly stop, not on my own. I had been trying for years. But by hitting this bottom, by bottoming out on this comic arc, by coming completely apart, I was able to become something new, something bigger and more capable. Up to that moment in my life, I knew that asking for help was a sign of weakness, an admission of failure. Pretty much everything in our culture told me so. But by hitting bottom, I was finally able to learn how to ask for help. In my desperation, on death’s doorstep, I called a friend, who called the counseling center, which eventually led me to a 12 Step program and to the wise people there who reached out and saved my life by mentoring me in my recovery. Things had to fall apart for me so I could finally, finally learn that asking for help is not a sign of weakness, so I could finally learn that asking for help is a sign of intelligence and strength.
I share this with you tonight because I still feel like I am still new to honors, new to honors students, to honors culture, to the HRC, still learning about you all, and yet too frequently what I hear from you sounds distressingly familiar to me. Some of you are struggling. You tell me – or a least strongly suggest – that you are unhappy about your majors, or your career paths, or your relationships, or your behaviors, or some difficult combination of these things, but you don’t know what to do. And you invariably paint these matters – which are perfectly normal, which are the very stuff of being alive and aware and engaged – as some kind of personal failure or failing. In short, the wisdom I wish knew when I was your age and in your shoes is this: 1) that our lives come apart, that our lives HAVE to come apart, precisely so that we can be put back together in a better form, and 2) that asking for help is a sign of strength.
So, please, as a holiday gift from you to you, cut yourselves a freaking break. Go easier on yourselves. Try to embrace that no matter what your current difficulties are, you are right where you are supposed to be learning exactly what you are supposed to be learning, and that these difficulties shared are difficulties halved. We have a new year and a new semester right ahead of us. So here’s to renewal, to change, to becoming new things, to doing things differently. Thank you for listening.
