Taylor Swift gave a speech at the New York University Class Of 2022 commencement ceremony, which took place at Yankee Stadium. The pop star also received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the institution.

“Hi, I’m Taylor. 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,” she joked in the opening lines of her speech. After thanking NYU’s board of trustees and her fellow honorary degree recipients, she went on: “I’m 90% 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.”

“I’d like to thank NYU for making me technically, on paper at least, a doctor,” she said later on. “Not the type of doctor you would want around in case of an emergency. Unless your specific emergency is that you were desperate to hear a catchy song with an intensely cathartic bridge section. Or if your emergency was that you needed a person who can name fifty breeds of cat in one minute.”

“I never got to have a normal college experience, per se,” she continued. “I went to public high school until 10th grade and then I finished my education doing homeschool work on the floors of airport terminals. Then I went out on the road for radio tour, which sounds incredibly glamorous but in reality it consisted of rental cars, motels, and my mother and I pretending to have loud fights during boarding so no one would want to have the empty middle seat on Southwest.”

“As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I would hang on the wall of my freshman dorm,” Swift went on. “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 in one single glance we realized we had been in love in our past lives. Which is something you guys have all experienced at some point in the last four years, right?”

Toward the end of her speech, she talked about living life as a celebrity:

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, media, interviewers, executives. This advice often presented itself as thinly-veiled warnings. I was a teenager at a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with having perfect young female role models.

[…] Having journalists write in-depth, oftentimes critical pieces about who they perceived 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 20s. But it taught me to protect my private life fiercely. Being publicly humiliated 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 cancelled 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 feels completely pointless. I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism, and I know I’m talking to a group of perfectionists because you are here today graduating from NYU.

So this might be hard for you to hear, but in your life you will inevitability misspeak, trust the wrong person, underreact, 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, hit rock bottom, and finally address the pain you cause, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat.

Here’s the full commencement speech:

Before the ceremony, Swift posted a TikTok of herself getting ready for graduation: “Wearing a cap and gown for the very first time – see you soon NYU.” The clip was soundtracked by beabadoobee’s recent single “See You Soon“:

@taylorswift Wearing a cap and gown for the very first time – see you soon NYU 🥺🥰🗽#swifttok #classof2022 ♬ original sound – Taylor Swift