4. You don’t owe anyone anything about the way you look. Thinness, prettiness, youthfulness – these are just things a patriarchal society teaches women they must possess in order to be accepted (by men). You owe them nothing.
5. You will have your first real taste of life’s fragility. At some point in your 20s, you’ll experience the very real and very bittersweet coexistence of life and death. The people around you will start having babies; the people around you will start dying. Depending on how lucky you are, you will, at some point, be faced with the terrifying and inescapable and humbling nature of mortality. Your parents, guardians, family members — they will start to fade. Watching them fade will be one of the hardest things you will ever have to do, and it will be hard because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. But it will make you realise that the very value of life lies in its impermanence. You will cherish every waking moment with the fading people. You will become more grateful than you have ever been.
6. Being afraid doesn’t mean you aren’t brave. There is no such thing as someone who does brave things without being utterly terrified while doing them.
7. Don’t lie about your meter readings. It catches up with you.
8. Similarly, just pay the damn TV license.
9. The patience you have for your loved ones grows astronomically. It will stop seeming so irritating when your mum calls you for the tenth time to ask you how to reset the WiFi, or when your friend turns up late to drinks for the fifth time in a row. The little things that once seemed so important will matter less and less. Really, you’ll learn, they just don’t matter at all.
10. Accepting a partner’s flaws doesn’t mean accepting disrespect. There is a delicate line to be walked like a tightrope between helping someone grow, and letting them exploit the good in you.
11. Stand up for yourself. Forget what you were taught about being a good, polite, quiet woman. Be unapologetic, get loud, fight back. No one ever told a man to take up less space.
12. You probably aren’t going to neatly fold that fitted bed sheet. Just shove it in the drawer until it’s time to change your bedding. All the creases get stretched out anyway.
13. You probably aren’t going to eat the other half of that avocado. It’s going to turn to inedible brown mush in your fridge before inevitably fermenting in your bin. Just use the whole damn avocado.
14. You probably aren’t going to ‘stop at one’. Eat another chocolate, order another glass of wine. If life was made to lived by small, fleeting moments of joy it would be insufferably boring (although you’d probably have more money).
15. You probably aren’t going to buy a house at 25, get married by 28, and have three kids and a golden retriever named Lucky by 30. As women, we’re sold the idea that ‘having it all’ happens by the time you’re 30, and that if you haven’t achieved it, you’ve somehow failed. Your life will now plummet into geriatric misery and everyone else’s “successes” will leap out and smack you round the face whenever they’re posted on Instagram (this will be often). But you must learn to resist comparison culture as much as possible. You are on a different life trajectory to other people, and there is nothing wrong with that. You are not a failure if you haven’t been knocked up by the time you’re 30. You are not a failure if you don’t own a house during one of the country’s biggest economic crises in decades. You’re doing just fine. Besides, ‘having it all’ is a myth anyway.
16. Any job that equates your worth to the hours you put in – especially overtime and out-of-hours work – instead of the actual work you’re doing, is categorically not worth it. And your manager deserves to be reported to HR.