5 Pieces of Advice I’d Give to Myself at Age 21

I learned a number of difficult lessons on my twenty-first birthday—a day that I remember now in snapshots: Sitting impatiently behind a desk in espadrilles and my favorite dress, determined to start celebrating the moment my statistics exam was over. Dialing my long-distance boyfriend’s number again and again, my eyes searching the clouds for the plane that he had said he’d be on. Filling a basket with exactly what you’d expect a twenty-one-year-old to buy on her first trip to the liquor store: A six-pack of spiked strawberry lemonade, a bottle of too-sweet white wine, and two nips of Jim Beam. Dashing barefoot down the front steps of my apartment in the pouring rain to accept the delivery of a decadent chocolate cake that my parents had sent from five states away.

Then, later that night: Standing outside of a restaurant, frantically responding to excuse after excuse from people whose friendship I immediately found myself reevaluating. My boyfriend admitting that he’d never actually bought a plane ticket over a crackling cell phone connection. Putting on a smile for the camera, flanked by two of my best friends and two others who they’d invited at the last minute to make the table feel less empty. Silent, bitter tears rolling down my cheeks as my boyfriend apologized to me again and again from two thousand miles away.

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Today, at age twenty-seven, my life would be nearly unrecognizable to that twenty-one-year-old girl; but I still recall the excruciating discomfort of reevaluating the person you are, the choices you’ve made, and the people you’ve loved when you realize you’ve been in denial for far too long.

There are so many things that I would tell that girl if I had the chance. I imagine passing her on the street on that day in June—before the rain clouds and bitter disappointment rolled in—and telling her, “These people don’t deserve your unconditional love. Save it for the people who do.” For my family, who sent me a cake from seven hours away to make sure that my day was filled with chocolate and joy. For my true friends, who showed up when no one else did and called in reinforcements. For future partners, whose enduring love and dedication I wouldn’t be able to appreciate until I’d been let down one more time by the on-again, off-again boyfriend who never came through in the end.

Here’s the advice I’d give my younger self if I had the chance—and to all of the other young women navigating the often-painful, always-worthwhile process of growing up.

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Learn to Trust Your Intuition

When I was younger, I constantly felt blindsided by bad situations—as though I’d sleepwalked into the deep end of a pool and found myself drowning, with no recollection of how I’d gotten there. I’d pore over my memories and berate myself for not seeing the signs all along.

I trusted people wholeheartedly who had shown me their true colors from the start, convinced that I could change them. I stubbornly pursued dreams that were completely impractical in the dangerous pursuit of other people’s praise.

I wasn’t just suppressing my intuition—I didn’t even know what my inner voice sounded like, let alone what it might have to say about the choices I was making. When the inevitable came to pass, I would find myself questioning everything—from my memories and perceptions to my sense of self. If I’d been so wrong about something so significant, what else had I missed?

I know now that my intuition is a superpower. It silently runs under the surface, taking in and processing information as I go about my day—until all of a sudden, it spits out fully-formed answers to questions I didn’t even know I had.

So, how did I learn how to listen to my inner voice again? First, I had to understand that my intuition wasn’t what had led me astray—I had simply been ignoring its warnings. I had carefully curated my reality by suppressing any thoughts that ran counter to the outcomes that I desired. I accepted the lies that people fed to me because I desperately wanted them to be true. I systematically discredited my internal barometer until I lost touch with it completely, leaving me incredibly vulnerable to being swept away by other people’s manipulation.

Learning to listen to your intuition is like turning the dial of a radio until you find a clear signal in the midst of the static. I was so focused on living up to other people’s expectations of me that I had turned up the volume on everyone else’s voices while turning down my own. Over time, as you allow yourself to trust your gut feelings, you can begin to discern your own voice from other people’s. It’s a difference that you can feel, in the same way that people say that “you know when you know” when you finally experience true love.

When you develop the ability to trust your intuition without questioning its validity, you find yourself making decisions seamlessly, without needing to convince yourself that you made the right choice. When I’m stuck between two options that feel equally strong, I’ve found that there’s always one option that I intuitively know is right, and a second option that I have trouble turning down because it’s closely tied to someone else’s feelings. It can be hard to tell the difference; but I’ve figured out a clever trick for quickly revealing which choice my intuition knows is best. I flip a coin—but it doesn’t actually matter which side it lands on. In the moment before I check to see what the result was, I always find that I’m silently rooting for one option over the other. Problem solved.

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You Can’t Change the People You Love

I once subscribed to what I’ve come to call the “Beauty and the Beast” myth about love: That if you love someone enough, they’ll be motivated to become the partner that you deserve. It was this flawed belief system that caused me to enter relationship after relationship with people who could never give me what I needed—and it also caused me to blame myself when these relationships inevitably failed.

I could see in retrospect that their undeniable flaws—their penchant for lying about literally everything, for example, or trying to date as many girls as possible at the same time—were the reason that the relationship could never get off the ground. I also realized once the relationship was over that I deserved far better than what I had been putting up with for the last however-many months. However, I truly believed that if I had behaved perfectly enough within the relationship, that they would have been motivated to treat me how I deserved, transforming them into the person that I knew they had the potential to be.

Here’s the thing: I fell in love with the person who I believed they could be—not who they actually were. I would bend over backwards to change myself into the person they needed me to be—the cool girl who was okay with being lied to or ignored until our relationship was convenient for them—while they gave me nothing in return. I would ride my bike for three miles in the middle of the night to be there when they got home from a show. I would empty out my savings account and fly halfway across the country to see them when there was no other way.

What I ultimately found was that when you show a shitty deeply flawed person unconditional love, they might try to be the best version of themselves for a time—but in the end, they can’t keep it up. When they’re forced to confront their true self—the person who’s always letting you down—it doesn’t motivate them to change in the long run. The shame of disappointing someone who loves them more than they deserve causes them to self-destruct, in spite of themselves. They regress into their worst self—lying, cheating, exploding, running away, or whatever behavior is a reflex or a comfort to them. Worst of all, they don’t have the self-awareness to know why they’re doing it—so they hurt you one last time by leaving you with the blame, or without any explanation at all.

Once I understood that real love is about meeting someone where they are—when the success of your relationship is not contingent upon them becoming someone other than who they truly are—my life changed. This not only lets our partners off the hook; it lets us off the hook, too. The advice I’d give my younger self would be, “You are deserving of love even when you’re not perfect; and it is not your duty in life to love people who don’t treat you the way that you deserve, no matter how much potential you see in them.”

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There’s Value in Every Experience

We tend to judge the value of an experience based on its outcome. If we interview for a job or get into a relationship and it doesn’t work out, it was a failure. (Or worse: You were a failure.)

Each time that a relationship ended, when my dreams of what the future might hold had been clawed away from me, I’d be left clutching onto deep feelings of resentment. When I had given so much of myself to people who didn’t deserve it, it was hard to not feel bitter about I had been treated and how much time I had wasted.

What ultimately freed me from this downward spiral was realizing that no experience is a waste, no matter how painful it might feel at the time. Every experience brings us closer to figuring out what’s right for us. Every experiment generates new data that helps us to learn and grow in the right direction.

The advice I’d give my younger self is that all experiences have value, regardless of whether they’re meant to last a lifetime. An experience that’s finite was still worth your time because it transformed you into the person that you needed to be for the next stage of your development.

What did I learn from those ill-fated relationships? Rather than getting caught up in rumination and resentment, I learned to harness the feeling of being wronged. I let it motivate me to set healthy boundaries in every area of my life—boundaries that are incredibly strong because they were forged in fire. I learned to clearly state my needs, and to never let someone take more from me than they give back. I learned to create my own happiness, independent of my relationships, and to stop holding my breath until other people realize the value that I bring to their lives.

Most of all, I learned to love the person that I’ve become—not in spite of trying experiences, but because of them.

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Take Advantage of Your Free Time

When I was twenty-one, I moved into a studio apartment in Beacon Hill, the most picturesque neighborhood in Boston. As a senior in college, I was so consumed with schoolwork and grad school applications that I totally failed to appreciate my surroundings. I took the shortest route from Point A to Point B, bemoaning the long, uphill walks I had to take to get home from the subway and the grocery store. What was I hurrying home to? Teetering stacks of books and dirty dishes, and a TV that was always on to fill the silence.

I should have taken the long way home whenever I had the chance, taking all of the pictures that I thought I’d take if I ever got the chance to live in my favorite neighborhood. I should have wandered down every alley until I knew their names by heart. But instead, I hurried home, failing to notice the beauty of my surroundings because my mind was preoccupied with finite concerns.

Again, a few years ago, when my job was seriously eroding my sanity, I spent my free time either catching up on work or desperately distracting myself from thinking about how miserable I was. When I wasn’t working, I was binge-watching Netflix and catching up on sleep. One of the reasons why I started this blog was to give myself a sense of purpose that was entirely separate from my job. It helped me to reclaim my free time for learning and growing and experimenting. Today, I can count the number of times that I’ve brought work home with me on one hand. The anxiety never goes away entirely; but I do my best to confront it head-on rather than kicking the can down the road for weeks or months at a time.

Anxiety is like a camera lens that zooms in on the tiny details in a life-sized landscape. When I’m unhappy, I live moment by moment, focused solely on quashing whichever negative emotions rise to the surface, one by one. When I’m directing all of my energy toward distracting myself from confronting difficult things head-on, however, nobler pursuits like creativity and learning become impossible. When I think about all of the seasons of my life that I’ve wasted like this, I can’t help but mourn all of the incredible creations that I could have brought into the world had I been willing to process my emotions rather than denying their existence.

That’s why I do my best these days to use my time intentionally. In the limited number of hours that aren’t dedicated to work or sleep, I try to balance my obligations with my passions. I’m protective of my free hours, only giving up my time for things that I need or want to do.

I’ve also learned to accept that the things that make me happy aren’t necessarily the things that make other people happy. I’m an introvert, writer, and highly sensitive person—each of which means that I need a lot of quiet time in order to feel like myself. I spend my weekends cooking, writing, gardening, kayaking, and spending quality time with the people (and animals) that bring joy to my life.

Though Instagram might lead you to believe that “self-care” is synonymous with a day at the spa, it’s really about showing yourself compassion by living in synchrony with your body’s signals. The advice I’d give my younger self would be, “Don’t let other people’s expectations determine how you spend the limited time you’re allotted, or you’ll find yourself looking back one day and wondering where the years have gone.”

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Don’t Rush to Grow Up

Throughout my life, I have always been rushing to reach the next milestone. I’m as ambitious as I am uncomfortable with uncertainty; so whether I’m chasing a degree or a job title, I think too much about how to get where I’m going as quickly as possible, and not enough about whether I’m headed in the right direction to begin with. In the past, when I reached a fork in the road, I rushed the decision-making process to fast-forward through the misery of ambiguity and indecision. It wasn’t until I had traveled miles down the road I chose that I would realize I hadn’t fully thought through the long-term implications of my decisions.

What I wish I’d realized is that your early twenties represent a rare opportunity to try on different identities and lifestyles for size. For example, before I met my last serious partner, he had a job that allowed him to live in different cities for several months at a time—something that I almost certainly would have done if I hadn’t met him so young and set down roots in Boston when I was still in college. Rather than taking the time to experiment and let my identity develop organically, I let myself be defined my external achievements like my degrees, my job, and my relationship status.

When I was twenty-one, I was in my final year of college, splitting my time between rushing to graduate and applying to master’s programs. What I would tell that ambitious, incredibly stressed girl now would be, “Lean into the uncertainty.” I didn’t just want a master’s degree because I wanted to pursue a career in social science research—I was afraid to graduate without a plan, and I figured that a graduate degree would look great on my resume no matter what. I know now that that’s not the right mindset from which to make a life-altering decision. I was focused on minimizing uncertainty and proving my worth to other people when I should have been thinking about discovering the right career path for me, one step at a time.

The advice I’d give my younger self would be to stop rushing to reach milestone after milestone, and to instead enjoy the short window of freedom I had to craft a life that reflected the person I wanted to become. I always assumed that I’d find happiness and fulfillment once I’d achieved my goals; but it took years for me to realize that I needed to prioritize my own well-being at every stage in order to end up with a life that suited me.

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That’s the advice I’d give my younger self—but what would yours be? (Share this graphic if my advice resonates with you!)

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