Advice to My Younger Self (Part I)

1. When he walks away from you, don’t follow him. Stay sitting in what Cheryl Strayed calls the small, quiet room that is acceptance. You have to love and lose at least eleven more times before you meet the right one.

2. When your mother passes you the phone to talk to your grandma, take it even though you have math homework. Sometimes “later” is too late; in one week, she’ll be dead. 

3. Stealing from the lost and found and the supermarket is bad karma. Telling someone you have a disease to get attention is also bad karma. But quit beating yourself up over it; learning how shitty it feels to be dishonest will make you a more ethical person. 

4. In college, skim articles that make you compulsively eat Oreos while reading them. Be excessively thorough in only kindness and art.  And don’t take dance your senior year just to maintain a 3.9 GPA! You will look like a dying walrus on the floor and get a C. But also know that, in the end, nobody including yourself will care.

5. When you think you can’t do something, roll up your sleeves.

6. It’s okay to stop and walk in the middle of a run.

7. It’s okay to cry at the bank, the post office, and the pharmacy. But it’s a little weird at a tollbooth . . .

8. You’ll stop getting pimples when you stop picking your face. 

8. Before getting the tattoo on your wrist, make sure you know why you’re getting it and that you have a good explanation for it.

10. Don’t take the road trip with the road–raging boyfriend. At least don’t break up with him on the trip and then take him to lunch at a Mexican restaurant with funky tap water.

11. Laugh every time your father tells you he’ll come back to haunt you when he dies. Then stop laughing and tell him saying something like that isn't okay.

12. Never write in pencil; you won’t stop erasing. Learn to distinguish the writing that needs revision from the writing that doesn’t. Accept that your actions and spoken words do not have the luxury of revision and know that your ways of thinking always do.

13. Give guys who treat you like shit a zero –– no positive or negative. And don’t write them letters girl! Write poems and give them to your mother instead. 

14. Eat that Whole Foods salad slower so you don’t bite into the fork and chip your tooth.

15. Be patient with people in customer service; it’s not their fault.

16. If you don’t want to be on hold, hang up.

17. If you don’t want to win the asshole lottery, don’t play it.

17. Take the Korean boy from Physics to prom. In eight years, he’ll tell you he still loves you. And in eight years, the cute jerk you did take to prom will approach you at the YMCA in the hometown he never left and apologize. Drugs will have killed so many of his brain cells that he has a stutter.  

18. Eat chips at parties when you want to; they won’t make you fat. 

19. You’re not fat. Seriously.

20. Pretty packaging with nothing on the inside isn’t good enough for you. The guy who gets high and watches a surfer girl movie instead of talks to you when you’re over isn’t good enough for you. The one who tells you he adores you in small doses also isn’t good enough for you.

21. You are good enough for you.

22. Help your mother with the dishes and tell her she’s special and thank you.

23. Doing menial labor and living off of less than minimum wage is your true top–notch education –– be grateful. And smile while digging those trenches with the Quakers at mid-day in 90% humidity :)

24. Only accept an ambulance ride if you’re dying. If you do accept, remember your shoes.

25. When you want to get out of something, play dead. It might work!

26. Learn to use semi–colons early on and use them often.

27. Your father’s pain is not your fault.

28. Don’t date someone named Cletus.

29. “No” is a complete sentence. 

30.  Eat the ice cream even when you run tenths of seconds slower in a race than you want to, and you don't think you deserve it. You are worthy of love.

31. Don’t move into a laundry room in a house with three guys in their early twenties.

32. Save a few of the strawberries for your sister.

33. The banana bread he brings you has drugs in it. 

34.  Make sure you know which airline you are flying before you arrive at the airport.

35. Hug the woman on the street who gives you one hundred dollars.

36. Even when it seems useless, continue using your head, hands, and heart to create and connect.

37. Floss.