The House, The Street, The Room.

1. It’s never too late to start over. 2. Do not become small for those who refuse to grow. 3. Click the send button. You typed it out for a reason. 4. Don’t forget to remind people how much they mean to you. 5. Don’t ruin something great because you think you don’t deserve it. 6. You don’t destroy the people you love. 7. Sometimes you have to keep on missing them until you wake up to find that you just don’t anymore. 8. Mental health comes before school, always. 9. Act like you trust people, but don’t. 10. There is nothing more beautiful than being desperate, and nothing more risky than pretending not to care. 11. Your first kiss will come when it’s time. It’s worth the wait. 12. Always remember how lucky you are to have yourself. 13. Nostalgia, whether you’re thinking of something good or bad, always leaves you a little emptier afterwards. 14. Feeling beautiful has nothing to do with what you look like. 15. Pour your heart into everything you do and watch every aspect of your life change one by one. 16. You’ll need other people and you’ll need to be that person for someone else, a living, screaming invitation to believe in better things. 17. Make yourself painfully aware of the characteristic and cookie-cutter personas you put on and others put on. Being the “cool girl” doesn’t mean smoking and letting guys walk all over you, and reading and writing doesn’t make you nerdy. Those associations have been taught by movies. Don’t feel like you need to fit into 1 persona. 18. Radiate confidence, even if it’s fake. One day it won’t be, and you’ll be untouchable. 19. One day you’ll realize I was the fresh air before your last breath. 20. Live in such a way that if anyone spoke badly of you, no one would believe it. 21. Take a second and look around. Remember where you are, who you’re with. You’ll look back on this moment and see the little things ended up being the big things. 22. Respect is a minimum. 23. We lose ourselves in the things we love. We find ourselves there, too. 24. Seek respect, not attention. It lasts longer. 25. You cannot change what you refuse to confront. 26. Nobody really knows what they want, not until it’s right in front of them. 27. Someone can be gone yet more present than anyone else. 28. You’ll never truly cherish the people in your life if you keep hoping for those that hurt you to come back to you. 29. Life doesn’t get better, you do. 30. Value yourself. The only people who appreciate doormats are people with dirty shoes. 31. If you don’t end up smiling while kissing someone, you’re probably kissing the wrong person.

An Introvert's Guide To Surviving A Breakup

So I lie awake every night, making poetry out of all the things I can’t say to you.

“Marry your best friend. I do not say that lightly. Really, truly find the strongest, happiest friendship in the person you fall in love with. Someone who speaks highly of you. Someone you can laugh with. The kind of laughs that make your belly ache, and your nose snort. The embarrassing, earnest, healing kind of laughs. Wit is important. Life is too short not to love someone who lets you be a fool with them. Make sure they are somebody who lets you cry, too. Despair will come. Find someone that you want to be there with you through those times. Most importantly, marry the one that makes passion, love, and madness combine and course through you. A love that will never dilute - even when the waters get deep, and dark.”

Yet viewing our genome as an elegant and tidy blueprint for building humans misses a crucial fact: our genome does not exist to serve us humans at all. Instead, we exist to serve our genome, a collection of genes that have been surviving from time immemorial, skipping down the generations. These genes have evolved to build human ‘survival machines’, programmed as tools to make additional copies of the genes (by producing more humans who carry them in their genomes). From the cold-hearted view of biological reality, we exist only to ensure the survival of these travellers in our genomes.