Oprah Winfrey’s Commencement Address

My hat’s off to you! My hat’s off to you!
[crowd cheers: Go Girl!]

You all have “gone” girls! I want to say thank you, Dr. Walsh and to the esteemed faculty, to those of you parents–what you have been through, God Bless you–and to the greatest class that has ever graduated from Wellesley. I must say–you are my heart, Dr. Walsh is right. I saw you walking in and I started to weep, and I don’t consider myself a weeper, but I guess I must be if I started to weep, because I know what it takes to get through here and I am so proud of all of you for getting through.

You all know this, that life is a journey and I want to share with you just for a few moments about five things (aren’t you glad they aren’t ten) five things that have made this journey for me exciting. Five lessons that I’ve learned that if I had gone to Wellesley I could have not made as many mistakes, but five lessons that I’ve learned that have helped me to make my life better.

First of all, life is a journey. I’ve learned to become more fully who you are and that is what I love about this institution, it allows women to come to the fullest extent of their possibilities who they really are and that’s what life does–teach you to be who you are. It took me a while to get that lesson, that it really is just about everyday experiences, teaching you, moment in, moment out, who you really are. That every experience is here to teach you more fully how to be who you really are. Because, for a long time I wanted to be somebody else. I mean growing up I didn’t have a lot of role models. I was born in l954. On TV there was only Buckwheat, and I was ten years old before I saw Diana Ross on “The Ed Sullivan Show” with the Supremes and said I want to be like that. It took me a long time to realize I was never going to have Diana Ross’ thighs, no matter how many diets I went on, and I was not going to have her hair neither unless I bought some. I came to the realization after being in television and having the news director trying to make me into something that I wasn’t and going to New York and allowing myself to be treated less than I should have been–going to a beauty salon, you all know there is a difference between Black hair and White hair. That is the one thing you learn the first week at Wellesley: how did you get your hair to do that? What I learned going to a beauty salon and asking them, after the news director told me that my hair was too thick and my eyes were too far apart and I needed a makeover, sitting in a French beauty salon, allowing them to put a French perm on my Black hair and having the perm burn through my cerebral cortex and not being the woman that I am now, so not having the courage to say, “this is burning me,” and coming out a week later bald and having to go on the air. You learn a lot about yourself when you are Black, and a woman and bald and trying to be an anchor woman. You learn you are not Diana Ross and that you are not Barbara Walters who I was trying to be at the time.

I had a lot of lessons. I remember going on the air many times and not reading my copy ahead of time. I was on the air one night and ran across the word “Barbados,” that may be Barbados to you but it was ” Barb-a-does” to me that night and telling the story as an anchor woman about a vote in absentia in California, I thought it was located near San Francisco. This is when I broke out of my Barbara shell, because I am sitting there, crossing my legs, trying to talk like Barbara, be like Barbara, and I was reading a story about someone with a “blaze” attitude which, if I had gone to Wellesley, I would have known it was blasé and I started to laugh at myself on the air and broke through my Barbara shell and had decided on that day that laughing was OK even though Barbara hadn’t at that time. It was through my series of mistakes that I learned I could be a better Oprah than I could be a better Barbara. I allowed Barbara to be the mentor for me, as she always has been, and I decided then to try to pursue the idea of being myself and I am just thrilled that I get paid so much every day for just being myself, but it was a lesson long in coming, recognizing that I had the instinct, that inner voice that told me that you need to try to find a way to answer to your own truth was the voice I needed to be still and listen to. 

 I choose this because Oprah says When people show you who they are, believe them which to me means if they arent truthful the first time why should they be trusted the second time. She wants us to believe that when a person shows you who you are accept that.