The only real things I seem to have learned so far are:

1) It's okay to hate hanging out with large groups of people. You don't have to go out and pretend to love being in crowded rooms or be interested in lowest common denominator conversation that you never participate in anyway because you get so anxious when you know lots of people are listening and your head just goes blank and you don't even have anything you want to say but you want to say something just so you won't be the only person who isn't saying anything and you spend all night thinking of something to say but nothing seems right and you go home without having said anything at all and wonder why the hell you bothered to go out at all because you knew it would turn out like this. It's perfectly fine to not have the need to go to a place where the music is so loud you spend all night waiting to get home and take some Tylenol and go to sleep just because that's what people are supposed to love doing so much.
You can just stay home.

2) High school doesn't matter, really. After you leave no one will ever know what grades you got or how much you skipped class or what your SAT scores were or whether or not you had anyone to sit with at lunch. No one will give a fuck if that stupid asshole everyone thought was so cool told you you were a lesbian or if no one ever asked you to a dance that you didn't even want to go to anyway because you hated everyone at your school and they all thought you were a lesbian, and you knew it would suck and you'd have no fun, but you wanted someone to ask you and you wanted to be the sort of person who had fun at dances even though you sort of hated the kinds of people who did.

3) High school is the worst time of human life and anyone who says differently is lying to you.

4)College is not that hard. College has many advantages over high school such as optional attendance and the abundance of weed for Philosophy majors and occasionally professors who are incredibly passionate about what they do, which can be contagious ( but at least high school was free.) Do not go to college if you don't know why the hell you are there, especially if it is a private school; college should not be a $25,000 daycare center. Go do something else. If nothing else let me tell you that working full-time for minimum wage and finding that the body can be sustained on a spaghetti-based diet will usually give you the inspiration you need to find some kind of direction.

5)A BA is an expensive piece of paper and nothing else unless you get it in one of very few useful subjects, none of which interest you in the least.


6)One night you will lie awake and come to the actualization that many people whom you have shared long talks with, whom you have cried with, or whom have seen you naked will have nothing in common with you anymore or live three thousand miles away from you. This will make you very very sad. You will try to move forward and focus on new people whom you will be able to share long talks with, cry on their shoulders and who will see you naked. But you will make sure they all remind you of the ones you have left/have left you behind.


7)Wasting years of your life doubting your sexuality will only make you shy and repressed. There is nothing better than having your gay best friend drag you to a Gay bar one night, and he wears an eighties wig while a drag queen show goes on all night and men wearing cowboy hats have sexual intercourse on the VIP room, to remind you that you are not as weird as you thought you were.


6) Most sex you have in your teens and twenties will be stupid. One day you will be sitting at a Diner with your friends and over coffee you will make a list of the people you have had sex with. You will forget someone. Only the forgotten name will not be constant, it will rotate, and you will wish you had known this earlier and spared yourself a lot of nights laying on the floor sleepless, crying into a telephone, swearing how some boy/girl will be the death of you and swearing it again in bad poetry.

7)Talking about your experiences as if you are experienced often gives the opposite effect.

8)You do not have to have a career or a house, never less a husband to start with the child-bearing operation. At the same time, you do not have to have published your first novel or signed your first record deal or had your first solo exhibit at the Met by the day you hit 18. It is best to not peak too early. Look at what happens to child actors; the rest of your life will just be spent hoping for a spot on an E! True Hollywood Story.

9)Just because everyone from your high school is currently learning how to perform triple bypass surgery or winning law suits while you wouldn't even trust yourself to use your toaster doesn't mean you are a failure. Really. (I'm not really that sure about this one though)

10) One day you'll meet someone who makes you want to do cartwheels and write dirty things in foreign languages on the insides of their arms. While meeting someone who makes you feel so fucking good is awesome, it will simultaneously magnify everyone else's shortcomings and you will get angry that they didn't do THIS or they didn't support THAT or they never cared about THIS because now someone DOES and before you just weren't brave enough to expect it.

11)Being fucked-up is not the only way to be interesting,i t is just the easiest.

12)Sympathy and caring are different words because they are different things.