18 again. Again.

Way back in January I guest posted on Chosen Chaos with a letter to my 18 year old self. Now Jamie has got together everyone that did the same in one awesome party. Click on the link to come and join in. Bring a bottle!

Before you go, have a read of what I would say to my 18 year old self and have a think what you would say to yours...

Hey.
There are a few things that I would like you to fig­ure out sooner than you end up doing so lis­ten hard please.

No seri­ously, put the beer down, pay attention. Your body is amaz­ing. It is going to build actual peo­ple. Actual, liv­ing, think­ing, feel­ing, won­der­ful peo­ple. And then it is going to feed them so they grow big and strong and loved. AM-AZ-ING. Sure it doesn’t do the best job in the world, it misses some bits off but that makes those peo­ple more spe­cial, not you any less spe­cial, although it will take you a while to fig­ure that out too. My point is don’t give it such a hard time because it isn’t exactly how you would like it to be. Your thighs are not the size of a rhi­nos and the size of your boobs is not as impor­tant as you think right now. The fact that they can sus­tain life - that is what is impor­tant. In about 2 years time your obses­sion with your weight and diet­ing and try­ing to look like what really would only resem­ble a stick is going to come to a head. It’s going to be messy. There are going to be tears and drama and drugs and pro­fes­sion­als and rela­tion­ship break­downs that will never recover. Phys­i­cally you will get over it but emo­tion­ally not so much. So how about we just skip that bit and start appre­ci­at­ing your body now? Yeah? Cool, OK.

Men. They won’t make you feel bet­ter about your­self. Stop pick­ing ones you know you can’t have. I know that you think it is eas­ier to be in these casual, fleet­ing rela­tion­ships. But you are wrong friend, wrong. Have some respect for your­self please and move on when you realise they are no good, don’t try and change them or help them, or worse, per­suade them that they are inter­ested. They are not worth your time, energy and tears. One day, when you think you will be left on the shelf for­ever (ridicu­lous at 24!) you will meet some­one that won’t let you off with a casual rela­tion­ship. Some­one who stalks you until you agree to go on a date (sounds scarier than it is, there is this web­site called Face­book that has some­how made stalk­ing not only OK, but pretty stan­dard — weird I know, but what can I say, the world changes in the next 10 years). Someone that gen­uinely likes you for who you are. Some­one who can see all the things you can’t. Some­one whose favourite thing about you is how much you can make him laugh, not how skinny or suc­cess­ful or drunk you are. Some­one that will turn out to be your soul mate. Yes, yes, I know you don’t believe in all that ‘the one’ non­sense, I am still scep­ti­cal myself but hon­estly — you are won­der­ful together, I don’t see how any­one else could fit so per­fectly with you. So now you know he’s com­ing, just wait patiently right? Avoid all those other jok­ers and in turn avoid all that heartache.

So that’s what you do wrong but now we have sorted those let’s talk about what you did right.

Travel. Do it. Leave home, go to the other side of the world. Then go back and then go away again. The expe­ri­ences you will have won’t all be good but the lessons you learn will be and the friend­ships you make, even the ones that don’t last will stay with you for­ever. And it comes in handy when you meet that man we were talk­ing about — he’s not exactly a small town guy. Or a one town guy. You’ll see.

Go to school, to 6th form and to uni­ver­sity and get your­self an edu­ca­tion. The qual­i­fi­ca­tions them­selves will mean lit­tle in the end mainly because you make a ter­ri­ble choice of what to study for your degree but you know what? You get that 2:1 so it’s not all bad. And as you always said, it was too much to ask you to make that deci­sion at 18. The peo­ple you meet and the expe­ri­ences you have make it all worth­while. Friends for life every­one said before you went and they were right.

Love, laugh, drink and be merry. Cry, learn, grow. Be strong, be weak. Be a good friend. Be your­self. Don’t be ashamed or afraid.

So there you go. In the next 10 years you are going to expe­ri­ence highs higher than you ever knew pos­si­ble and lows like you would not believe but that’s adult­hood for you. You are going to learn some hard lessons so it would make life eas­ier if you just got those first two I men­tioned out the way. But remem­ber this — you are lucky. You are lucky to have a body that works and is healthy. You are lucky to be able to travel around half the world and see the things you get to see. You are lucky to have the oppor­tu­ni­ties you have had and will have. You are lucky to fall in love with some­one so amaz­ing and be able to have chil­dren. Some­times you lose sight of this, try not to.

One last thing — when you go out tonight, how about doing just the one shot of sam­bucca instead of 6? No? OK, well don’t say I didn’t warn you, tomor­row is going to hurt.