Learn to put on your bracelets and zip up your dresses by yourself. There will be times when you will be alone. Get on a long plane ride. Look out the window. Understand the immensity of our world. Understand your insignificance. Understand your absolute importance. Press the send button. If you don’t say it now, you never will. Do not sneer at happiness or roll your eyes at sadness. Be aware that apathy is not healthy. You are more than the amount of people who want to have sex with you. That pit in your stomach when he doesn’t text you back, it shouldn’t be there. No one should be able to control you like that. Shopping is cathartic. Buy the shoes and deal with one-ply toilet paper for a while. It will get better, but it will never be perfect. Learn to live through the small moments of happiness. When they disappear, remember they will resurface. I promise that cookie will not change anything (except that it will make you smile). Please, please, take care of yourself. You are everything to somebody. You are everything to your self. That alone is enough.

The way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. We’re always stopping ourselves in mid–sentence because we’re so terrified of saying the wrong thing. Speaking is a kind of misery. And I guess I comfort myself by finding the rhythms and accidental poetry in everyone’s inadequate attempts to articulate their thoughts. We’re all sort of quietly suffering as we go about our days, trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe.

I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this.