26 Things I Learned(ish) Before 26

10 days late, of course. I'm still working on punctuality.

• You’re not a loser until you decide to give up.

• Romance your friends! Buy them trinkets and coffee and leather bound copies of their favorite books.

• Romance yourself! Spend quality alone time that requires you to leave the house. Read a book in the park. Take yourself out for ice cream. Do all the things you watch the women with glass skin do on TikTok.

• Stop hanging out with people you don’t like!!!!

  • More on this: If you don’t like someone, do not let their treatment of you influence the way you feel about yourself.

• It’s so easy to get crabby. When you feel yourself slip into your inner Dasha Nekrasova, GET OUT OF THERE!!!! Do something to remind yourself that life is wonderful, actually.

  • More on this: (Still coming to terms with this actually) It is so much more fulfilling to be happy than to be droll and chic.

• Old friends can become new friends if you just give them a call.

• You cannot control “bad” emotions. Let yourself be jealous or petty or unfairly angry. It’s better to feel everything and let your human self be satisfied rather than bottle it up and let those feelings become real and everyone else’s problem.

• Sometimes, your world-ending problem can be solved by eating something. Carbs are your friend.

• Stop assuming everyone is out to get you. They’re probably not thinking about you, and if they are, it usually means they’re a freak.

• You are allowed to not like things that are objectively good. Samuel Beckett is a better writer than I could ever dream to be, but I will shoot myself before sitting through “Waiting For Godot” one more fucking time.

• On a similar note, you can just not like things without finding a moral or political reason why it’s “bad”. (No, I don’t think “Obsession” is an inherently misogynistic movie. You just didn’t like it, and that’s fine.)

• Moisturizer, water, and sunscreen are your friends. (And I’m aware that’s not groundbreaking information, but it’s easy to forget the basics.)

• People come and go, but the person you have to spend the most time with will always be yourself, so you might as well let yourself like her.

• Let yourself be embarrassingly ambitious. Vision boards work!!!!

  • More on this: Talking and thinking about how much you want something to happen is not the same thing as working towards it.

    • More and more and more on this: Comparison is helpful and dangerous. Let it motivate, rather than crush you.

      • One more on this: It’s so easy to be happy for people you genuinely love and fill your life with joy. Surround yourself with those people, and jealously will be a lot rarer.

• Your phone is the devil, a semi-necessary evil that will eat your time and spit out your brain if you let it. Find a book you like from the library and let it be good enough that it takes you away from TikTok/instagram/Facebook (god forbid). Right now, I like “Margo Has Money Troubles”.

• Real love is rare. And wonderful. And worth the wait.

• The people who have gone out of their way to be hurtful are never people who have lives that you envy.

• Your body will change and it will be a pain in the ass and also wonderful. (New Boobs! Yay!)

• Fail all over the place. Bomb at an open mic, put together a show that wrecks your nervous system, take a pottery class and make a pot that explodes in the kiln. Failure is interesting, the spice of life! You will be a better person for it.

• Some people just want to be miserable. Let them!

• Wearing vintage fur is fine. The animal would be dead by now anyway.