Hallie Brouillette

If you had told me four years ago that I would be speaking at a commencement ceremony, I wouldn’t have believed you. I always said I wouldn’t attend my graduation. My last one — graduating from high school — had brought me to tears of relief because my schooling was finally over. I was done with coursework, and no one would ever force me to read a book ever again. Then I became a literature major. Now, on the day of my second and possibly final graduation, I thought I’d tell you everything I’ve learned about being an artist and a scholar.

First of all, no one tells you the most challenging part of studying arts and humanities. It isn’t the readings or the essays. What they don’t want you to know is that you are not here for a degree. I know, you’re looking at me and thinking, “That’s exactly why I’m here.” Let me explain.

These last few years were more than a hurdle between you and your diploma. It was a time to explore your interests, develop your skills, and discover who you are. When I first came to UTD, I was determined to leave. I wanted to be a filmmaker or writer, and rereading “The Odyssey” felt like a waste of time. It was only after I changed my perspective that I began to understand the reason I was here in the first place. To write a pilot for a TV show about the Golden Age of Hollywood, I had to know history and theory and understand the literary adaptations made during the era. It took three years before I was prepared to write the story I have, and it could take another three years before I’m ready to show it to the world.

Which leads me to the second lesson I learned. To be an artist, you need to have thick skin. You have to know that out of all the ideas you put out in the world, not everything will survive. Take it from a writer. Today marks 85 days since I reached out to several literary agents about my writing. That’s 85 days that I have woken up and immediately checked my email to see if a single person believes in me.

I have learned that sometimes telling your story is like writing a message on a balloon and releasing it into the sky, hoping that someone will read it. Because that is at the heart of everything we do. Artists want to be heard. You may wait and wait, but it’s gone. Fear of failure is what keeps you from inflating the balloon in the first place. In a world where releasing your balloon is as simple as hitting post, the only thing holding you back from telling your story is you.

That’s why I will say if you know what you want to make, if you have a story to tell or a song to sing, then make it, write it, do it. It sounds a lot easier than it is, I know. I want to write novels, and stories, and films. My senior year, I wrote an entire novel. It was 400 pages long, told from the perspective of a girl reading love letters between her older sister and her fiancé during the Vietnam War. When I showed it to my professor, he looked at me and said, “Rewrite it. All of it.” So I did. Now its 315 pages, told from all three perspectives, and instead of letters, the characters record their voices on cassette tapes. It’s good. I might be bias, but it’s better than I ever imagined. If I had been younger, I might have put up a fight, thinking I had to defend my talent from someone who would never understand. It took my professor pointing out my mistakes to realize I was the one who didn’t understand myself all along. I had to completely destroy something that I loved to make something great. I can promise that it never gets easier starting over, but one of these days it will pay off. Not today, and maybe not tomorrow on day 86, but one day. I have a story. There is something inside of me that I need to say, and there is someone — even if it’s only one person — who needs to hear it. That’s the reason I do it, and that is my strength. As my favorite writer, Neil Gaiman, said, “One thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.” It’s all up to you.

To all of us graduating today, to all the artists and the teachers and the scholars — creative people of all kinds — it is up to you. For years, the rules have been laid out, practiced, and perfected. Now it is up to you to break them. All that’s left to do is ask yourself: Where do I begin?

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Hallie Brouillette came to UT Dallas from nearby Rockwall High School and is graduating today magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in literature. For the past year, she has served as executive chair of UT Dallas’ Meteor Theater, having previously served as the organization’s cinema education chair. During the pandemic, she helped design and launch the Meteor Theater’s streaming platform, Eclipse. She is a two-time recipient of the Jonelle and Bryce Jordan Scholarship for creative writing and is a member of the Sigma Tau Delta honor society. Her honors thesis project, supervised by Dr. Manuel Martinez and Dr. Kenneth Brewer, is “If You Want the Truth,” a 97,000-word historical novel set in the late 1960s. She already has representation by a literary agency and hopes soon to sell the novel to a publisher.