'Decide what this time will make of you': Author Veronica Roth's words for the Class of 2021

Veronica Roth, best-selling author of the of "Divergent" series and several other novels, grew up in Barrington and graduated from Barrington High School, Class of 2006. At the Daily Herald's request, she wrote a commencement address for the Class of 2021.

Dear Graduates,

I think about you guys all the time - about what it would be like to spend your last year of school not indulging in nostalgia, as I did, but adapting to the strange new circumstances in which we now find ourselves: too familiar with Zoom, not familiar enough with awkward graduation parties, low key fretting about the weird maskne breakouts along our jawlines, etc. I'm sorry you lost out on some of these precious normalcies. It reminds me of this exchange from "The Fellowship of the Ring" - Frodo says to Gandalf, "I wish it need not have happened in my time." And Gandalf replies, "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

So I'm here to reflect, not on what you've lost by living in "such times," but on what you actually have. This year has acquainted you, a little earlier than usual, with a difficult but important truth. I remember learning it in my mid-20s - after years of working on my anxiety disorder in therapy, I realized that while it might improve, it would never actually go away. Before that, I had this idea of what my personality would be like without it - what my brain would be like if it was "normal." And I had to let that go. I had to deal with the raw material I actually had, instead of the fantasy I wouldn't reach.

Try as we might, we always have ideas about baselines - what's normal, what's fair, what's average - and we struggle when we feel we're given a deviation from that baseline. But as we grow older, we begin to see the unfairly good hands we are dealt as often as the unfairly bad ones, and we can start to let go of those fantasies of what's "normal."

So no, graduating in 2021 is not the stuff of high school comedies and photo montages set to Green Day. But there is good in it. You have been acquainted with reality in a particular way, and it can be your strength, if you let it. Times of loss and hardship can either harden us or soften us. They can make us bitter that we didn't get what we felt we deserved, or they can foster in us deep compassion for people who are struggling. They can make us cynical about the way the world operates, or they can instruct us about how we'd like to improve things. They can make us grateful for every moment of ease, and ready to meet every moment of challenge, knowing we've done it before and weathered it. Loss and hardship can form us into wiser, stronger, more loving people - if we let them. If we don't let ourselves get sour instead.

And I believe in your capacity to avoid that sourness. Every time I talk to people your age, I'm impressed by how much you know, how wonderfully busy your minds are, how careful you are to be respectful of differences. I know that you can stave off bitterness and embrace compassion. I know that you can bear up under difficulty - you are already doing it. You made it to this graduation. You adapted, and endured, and embraced what you could. God, I'm so proud of you all. You're amazing. Well done.

My parting words for you, then, are to know what you've already done, where you've already been - and to decide what this time will make of you. Will you get stuck feeling trapped in a life you didn't choose, and become bitter about an experience you didn't get? Or will this time be a reminder to you, for the rest of your life, that we are all given particular burdens to bear - and the way we ease them is by bearing them together?

Graduates of 2021: be soft, and kind, and wise. Shoulder each other's burdens. Make a gentler world, if you can. I can't wait to watch you do it.

And above all, be proud of yourselves. You made it. Congratulations.

- Veronica