If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?
Pay attention to the people with whom you can be entirely yourself, because being known will turn out to matter much more than being chosen.
And if I had more time to explain myself to my younger self:
Listen. I’m not going to tell you what to do. You wouldn’t listen anyway.
I’m just going to give you the odd nudge.
When you’re worrying about whether someone really likes you, stop trying to read every look, every pause, every change of tone as if it were a coded message. Sometimes people are uncertain because they are fourteen or fifteen too. They don’t know what they’re doing either.
When you’re with the friends who make you laugh until you can hardly speak, notice that. Don’t treat friendship as the waiting room for something more important. Those afternoons, those phone calls, those stupid jokes, those people you can be ridiculous with — they matter more than you know.
And don’t keep chasing the idea of a “proper girlfriend” as though having one would settle something about you. It won’t. There isn’t a certificate. You don’t become more grown-up because somebody agrees to go out with you. Nor are you diminished when somebody doesn’t.
If you like a girl, like her. Enjoy being with her. Ask her things. Listen. Don’t spend the whole time trying to work out whether you are succeeding.
Also — and this one matters — Mum and Dad are adults. Their unhappiness is not a problem you have to solve. You are allowed to love them both. You are allowed to be irritated by them both. You are allowed to enjoy being with one without feeling that you are betraying the other. Their divorce belongs to them. You don’t have to carry it around as part of your luggage.
When you find yourself trying very hard to please somebody, ask yourself quietly: do I even like them?
When you’re excluded from something, don’t immediately assume the people inside are having a better time than you are.
When somebody makes you feel small, don’t work harder to win them over.
When someone makes you feel clever, funny, relaxed or interesting, move towards them.
And when you make a fool of yourself — which you will, repeatedly — don’t conduct a post-mortem for the next three days. Most people were thinking about themselves, not you.
You’re going to spend quite a lot of these years imagining that everyone else knows the rules. They don’t.
You’ll also think that certain things are terribly urgent. A dance. A kiss. A telephone call that hasn’t come. Whether she likes you. Whether your friends know. Whether you are experienced enough. Whether you are behind.
You aren’t behind.
There is no timetable.
So occasionally, when you can, stop trying to get to the next thing.
You are already in it.
And if I could only get one sentence through the earpiece before the connection went dead, I think it would be this:
I can also make this more specifically 1970s and teenage-you in tone — less therapeutic, more wry, practical and slightly conspiratorial, as though your sixty-something self is whispering advice during an actual disco, phone call, family row or first kiss.
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