Dear Mom and Dad,
A month from today, I graduate college.
I know that neither of you can be there. I know you want to be.
And I know if you were going to be, you’d be worried.
The kind of worry that is still heard over applause or the many “congratulations” that taper into empty, habitual terms. The sort of worry that is heard loudest in your questions.
I still hear them from wherever the both of you are and even though it’s not going to be at the dinner table or the photographs or the small talk that feels a bit like a waiting room, I still hear you and await the sort of questions that may inspire some doubt, but it is because you really want me to believe something about them.
I am graduating from NYU Film School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts that may only mean something in a field that hardly exists and continually declares that there isn’t any more space.
Disney cut 7,000 jobs, Warner Brothers is 50 billion in debt, a writer’s strike looms — how dare I be a person that believes I could be an exception or that I have something to share?
Despite how the prospects look, I think I still might.
Graduating from art school in a recession, especially when you have no money, two famous (or living or stateside) parents, or a plan to fake my death when the debt gets to be too much takes some nerve. But in the absence of you or your home as refuge, I cannot afford to believe in your doubt. Maybe what I’m doing is just human combustion and calling it a firework, but at least the noise would be enough.
“Look!”
Drown in the facts if you want — the world is mostly awful. You don’t need to say that to me. Here we are. I would still choose this because of what I want to say back.
My work is not a study or exercise of a niche medium — it is a discipline of love. You both knowit well. Here we are. I want you to be happy that I learned more of it beyond what you could teach me.
“Look!”
It is, despite the doubt, the harshness, the economics and the ways I disappointed you that I still brave the waiting room, refusing admonitions and what the world believes about the matter. I didn’t choose what makes me qualified or what makes me look good - artists choose what we cannot live without. We chose to bet on, with great investment, what we love. And even if the world tells us there is no value in it or that it makes no sense, I choose to tell the world that life is not about making sense. Life is about miracles.
Love is mostly that.
“Look!”
A world that denies the value of love (or those who do) since it cannot be predicted or rendered is a worse and worsening one. We use art to animate the larger truths of the world to invite any good in it.
Love will never make a fine technology, or a convenience; nonetheless, it is an ever-growing breakthrough. The kind that gets one to shock themselves, to cut the panic cord, to recognize and overcome themselves as their greatest opponent, to deny logic, to lie to themselves on the odds, to hurdle risk and to endure.
By showing up for this world, I have already done the hardest part.
You have taught me to be unafraid because we have never dealt in sense anyways. Though I’m sure you wish I had chosen something that may create more of it, I don’t.
When facing your worry about the world, I cannot promise anything of the tangible parts it likes, the return it likes or the answers to the questions it likes. But the only questions I actually need answers for are my own. This degree was never a promise, it is an offer.
And I can only offer to teach you, and the world, about the person I am becoming through the discipline of love. I believe something about her.
The culmination of love might get me some things if I impress other people enough with that, but the practice expects me to do it with the hope of only impressing myself by saying “yes.” Am I actually closer than being just 8 seconds from displaying my most hidden parts? Do I mind? Especially if the world finds them ugly?
Only the world has ever constructed the belief that this place is ugly. Love can never be ugly.
I may get to the places I want to go anyway, but I will work with the knowledge that the most important place I can ever go is inward. And maybe I can only ever know my innermost self and, consequently, get a chance to blow up, if I hold a light to myself a bit.
Success is only really that if there’s integrity to define it. You can still get some power— but whatever you derive it from - in age, in titles or status — love teaches you to never honor it more than the way you feel and to believe something about that.
It declares that the world owes you absolutely nothing, but urges you, with the same magnitude to still find it in you to add something to it. It admits that whatever you add will not prevent any epic failure or grievance in exchange. I don’t need to teach you that.
It allows what doesn’t become yours, to only hurt you for so long. It allows whatever does, to hurt you far longer because love expects that you offered all of yourself to it. I, also, don’t need to teach you that.
Love prepares you to make tough decisions and for tough decisions to be made about you. It asks you to thank both of them at the same time. And to believe something about them, even if you lose or are denied — in that case, it instructs that you to take no denial for personal measure. It prompts you to still listen, but don’t make a doubter.
It confesses to you the hardness of the world — demonstrated through its own offering of destruction. Love reminds you to pay attention to whatever destruction does by believing something about how you endure it — the newer and more defined parts - you!
Love only asks that we believe in one thing more — whatever it is. Through its discipline, pursue it with radical thinking. Bet on it. And if the world tells you it doesn’t make sense, love encourages that you loudly admit that you do not need to make sense to the world either.
“Look!”
Maybe if I offer myself up, even to disappoint, to be crushed, in the teaching, the pursuit of love - the world will believe something about it.
I hope you will.
Sincerely — your daughter, Avery Isabel Sweeney