Advice to My Younger Self (Part II)

 

ADVICE TO MY YOUNGER SELF (PART II)

1. Hooking up with the bread-delivery man is a poor choice.

2. Cultivate healthy boundaries and don’t let a homeless boy move into your bedroom. (He will manipulate you with expensive almond butter funded by the government and emotionally abuse you).

3. Don’t pet your fish.

4. Forgive your college friend for hiding drunk in your closet all night and seeing you naked; in five years, he’ll jump off a bridge. Everybody fucks up and deserves a second chance.

5. Filling the prescription for anti–anxieties is making an indefinite contract with Hell.

6. Resist ordering a refill when a different homeless man moves into the vacant room across from you and steals your medication. 

7. Say no to psychiatrists named Dr. Helper and Dr. Trainer. Say no to religious school.

8. Quit working for the family that underpays you and then, when you say it’s too expensive to fly home for Thanksgiving, says, “Make more money.”

9. Don’t mutilate the teddy bear he gives you; your dog will almost choke on the stuffing.

10. After you break up, don’t mail him your favorite red shirt that says “The White Mountains” on it. He probably won’t  use it as a blanky, and you’ll want to represent New England when you move to the Rockies. (It’s not as if you give a damn about The Red Sox).

11. Don’t play all your cards at once.

12. In Kindergarten, spend more time making friends on the playground and less trying to dig up your class pet to study the bones. Later, don’t skip social activities to burn calories (this is a real clinical disorder; acknowledge it and get over it).

13. Wear gardening gloves, or your fingernail will get infected and never be the same again.

14. If it hurts when you touch it, don’t touch it.

15. Caution: walking away from and forgetting about the hose filling the mop bucket will cause a flood that damages $3,000 worth of equipment. Pay attention!

16. Caution: you’ll eventually get caught running from your bedroom to the bathroom topless.

17. No need to feel guilty about picking your neighbors’ white raspberries and another’s plums; fruit–overflow onto the sidewalk is fair game.

18. Be nice and take care of the chickens living outside your bedroom window. 

19. Finding a butcher’s knife in the middle of your living room floor is a red flag.

20. Quit pledging allegiance to red flags. 

21. Quit opening fortune cookie after fortune cookie until you get the story you want.

22. Infatuation isn’t love. 

23. You’ll beat your sister in scrabble eventually. (You won’t even have to drug her).

24. Sadness doesn’t belong to you. 

25. Make plans you’re prepared to abandon.

26. Thin = happy isn’t an equation. Happiness is unconditional.

27. For you, comfortable = content isn’t an equation. Appreciate this about yourself.

28. When a boy wants to cheat on his girlfriend with you, and you tell him he can’t have his cake and eat it too, and he tells you it’s your cake he wants to eat, ask him what flavor he thinks you are. You’ll always wonder. (Lemon? Blueberry pumpkin spice? With or without nuts? Definitely with nuts . . .).

29. Don’t miss strawberry–picking season again!

30. Don’t bother fully unpacking or hanging shit on walls. By twenty-six, you’ll have lived in eleven dorm rooms and seven apartments in six states.

31. Don’t allow your father to steal chicken wings from your plate. Probably don’t eat unwrapped candy from Grandma’s purse.

32. Don’t take the Royal Academy of London piano exam in third grade if you don’t want to.

33. Use your sock as a napkin. 

34. The cookie you eat from the dumpster behind Whole Foods will taste like trash and make you sick. No shit.

35. Don’t let anybody live “rent free” in your head.

36. Quit looking for resolutions; they don’t exist. 

37. Stay.

38. Go.