Colson Whitehead, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, delivered a commencement address at Connecticut College that used the three-act structure of storytelling as a framework for understanding life. Act I — childhood through college — establishes the rules and the protagonist. Act II brings the complications that upend everything. Act III is the synthesis. Whitehead's insight here was that the chaos of adulthood isn't something that happens to a stable self — it's something the self has been preparing for all along. The 'slippery you's' of childhood, adolescence, and college — each version of yourself that you thought was the final one — were actually rehearsals for the upheaval to come. The person making 'really stupid clothing choices' as a teenager was already a creature of change and adaptation. This reframing was both comforting and unsettling. Comforting because it suggested that graduates were already equipped for chaos. Unsettling because it meant there was no stable 'real self' to find — only an endless process of becoming.