Notes to my younger self (Blog post)

Married by 30, that’s what I always said. In fact I think it was something more along the lines of

‘If i’m not engaged by 30 i’m going to be STRESSED OUT’

Im sure my 21 year old self would be devastated to hear that, the timeline she had always hoped for isn’t quite going to plan.

It was my 28th birthday 5 days ago and I am currently right in the middle of my self proclaimed ‘quarter life crisis.’ The funny thing is I do believe that it might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to me, I said to my friend Emma the other day:

Maybe that’s why they say your 30s are your best years but in any case, if I could go back and tell my naive 21 year old self anything… this would be it:

Sat by a lake somewhere in Switzerland someone asks to the table ‘if you could meet your younger self, what would you tell them’

I sat and paused for a long time and thought about what I might tell my younger self not to do, but there wasn’t anything. I don’t really have regrets because all the mistakes I’ve made or the difficult situations I’ve been in have lead me down a particular path, or taught me a lesson that I obviously needed to learn. I’ve been fired from jobs, had my heart broken, quit a few times, had A LOT of injuries, broken up with friends, lost money, gained money, been really stupid with money, almost been homeless a couple of times and all of that had been part of my very important journey.

“I dunno” I said “I reckon I would just tell me that everything does work out in the end and to not spend anytime worrying about whether it does… to just trust the process”

“Nah”’ said Kev, “buy Bitcoin.”

If one day, someone came up to you and said you have exactly 6 months. 6 months until you meet the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with, the person you are going to marry, the person you are going to share a bed with, share everything with.

How would you spend that 6 months? I would hope you would spend it doing all the things you know you will no longer be able to do once you meet the love of your life. Sleep in the middle of the bed, go on dates, travel, explore, use the time to discover more about yourself.

I’m not saying that life ends when you meet someone, but a new life will begin and what no one tells you is you will never get this time back and trust me you will feel nostalgic for the chaos of your 20s.

Don’t think for a second that you won’t look back and miss every hangover, every shitty apartment, every house party or one night stand. Being single in my 20s has been the biggest privilege, i’ve been able to move freely around the world, living in different places, meeting new people, learning about what makes me happy and what doesn’t.

Finding my person and the life we’ll have by the beach together with our Italian greyhound is definitely something I deeply want. But the best thing I did for myself is remove the pressure of trying to find it and instead enjoyed the process of becoming the love of my own life first.

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Something not enough people talk about is the sheer romance of female friendships. The love I have experienced from my female friendships is so unconditional and pure, the women in my life have held such safe spaces for me, we buy each other flowers, write each other letters, send long voice notes. We pick each other up and put the pieces back together, lie in bed together when the day has been heavy.

With my friends there’s never judgement just ‘how can I help.’ Pour into your female friendships because I believe that between all the love, I have found my true self because of the females around me.

“Nearly everything i know about love, i have learnt from my long term relationships with women” - Dolly Alderton.

A simple but very important rule that was taught to me by my wise aunt Tal, never plan a first or even second date for a Friday or Saturday. What happens when they flake and then you are left with no plans on two of the most sacred evenings of the week?

Until someone has shown they are worth your time, don’t give up yours.

I can’t remember a time that I didn’t hate my body. For the whole of my 20s I have been in a battle against it. Losing weight took over my entire brain, there wasn’t 5 minutes that went by where I didn’t think about food or the way it would effect the way I looked.

I felt disconnected to my body, like it was working against me. It started as an obsession with ‘healthy’ eating but the longer it went on the more controlling I got and by the time lockdown had ended there was nothing healthy about what I was doing to my body.

Weight wasn’t the only thing I lost, I lost my period, I lost dinners with friends, I lost the ability to enjoy holidays, I lost intimacy and I lost confidence. I was embarrassed in my own skin, tired, hungry and the thinner I got, the more obsessed I became with the way I looked.

The worst part? I love food so much and for most of my life I have turned it into my enemy.

The first step for me was opening up to people I trusted and the more I did, the more I was shocked to find how many people I know struggled with the same thing.

I recently did a ski season where the guests in our chalet had a literal chef cooking all their meals. One week we had a group of guests where every single night all the women would do is talk about how guilty they felt for all the food they were eating, how they were going to skip breakfast or not eat bread for a month when they got home. How sad, I thought… imagine staying at a luxury chalet with a chef and not even being able to enjoy it because you were so consumed with what you look like.

What a waste of bloody time

I’ve wasted my best years worrying about what I look like and I’ve finally had enough, I won’t waste one more second.

On my 28th Birthday Shiv bought me a loaf of sourdough bread, there is a funny backstory to that loaf of bread but OBVIOUSLY i’m also going to turn it into an incredibly symbolic metaphor.

I’m a bit of a nomad at the moment so last week I was staying at Emma’s, one night she got back from work at 12pm to find me half asleep in her bed.

Emma: “How was your day?”

Me: ‘“Yeah it was good, had a bit of an existential crisis though”

Emma: ‘“oh, shall we talk about it?”

Me: “yeah…kind of want some toast too”

Emma: “with cheese on it?”

Me: “perfect.”

So we sat round her table and debriefed on the problems of the day and used my Birthday bread to make cheese on toast followed by the dessert option of toast and jam.

Cheese on toast might not seem like a big deal but for me it meant everything. It wasn’t that long ago that eating and enjoying bread just wasn’t an option for me, let alone at 12pm.

Recovery is the hardest mental challenge I have ever been through, and everyday I have to make a choice between my happiness and the voices in my head. I refuse to waste one more moment of my life’s purpose hating my body.

Food isn’t the enemy, food is laughing round the dinner table, it’s sharing Birthday cake with your friends, it’s cheese on toast at midnight or making drunk tuna pasta at 4am, it’s experiencing different cultures and places.

For anyone who has been on a similar journey, I am sorry. I’ve always put off writing about this topic because I know there is no quick answer but if I could go back and tell myself one thing it would be that what I look like is the least impressive thing about me and that life is short so for the love of god just eat the bread.

As an intuitive person I’ve always been pretty good at understanding why I feel a certain way, I spend time rationalising my thoughts and feelings. I’ve read all the self help books, I’ve listened to all the podcasts but overtime this became tiring because I started to over intellectualise my feelings, instead of allowing myself to feel and move through them.

It’s amazing to see the stigma around therapy start to ease, rather than being something that only ‘broken’ people need, it’s understood that working on yourself is healthy because life is hard and living in our heads is even harder. My over intellectualising lead me to think that I didn’t  need therapy, or that it wouldn’t be helpful to me.

I can categorically say it is the best money I’ve ever spent, therapy is incredibly painful especially at the beginning, I wish I could tell myself not to wait until your darkest moments to start the healing journey, therapy is useful to everyone and if you are privileged enough to have access to it. Do it.

Repeat after me, therapy is sexy.

I was born shy, I always tell people the story of when my parents got called into the head teachers office when I was 8 years old because the school were concerned I had an eating disorder. Turns out I just couldn’t figure out how to open my lunch box but was too afraid to tell anyone.

Over the years I have forced myself out of the corner I always used to hide in, and i’m sure most people I know today would be surprised to hear that I was once afraid of quite literally everything. Although I learnt to hold presence in a room, I still find it incredibly hard to take up space.

Women particularly are taught to stay small and if I had a bloody PENNY for the amount of times on dates I’ve been told i’m ‘vEry OpiNionAted.’ Luckily I’ve stopped dating insecure men but, the problem runs deeper than all the Williams from Clapham whose mummies still do their laundry when they go home.

The world has conditioned us to mistrust and dislike strong women, instead of being respected they are thought of as out spoken or too much. I constantly have to challenge my thoughts when I catch myself feeling distasteful towards confident women because i’ll be honest, 9 times out of 10 my first reaction is ‘she’s so entitled’ or ‘I just find her a bit annoying.’

I am someone that wants to be liked, I want to be trusted and by taking up space you put that at risk. So I leant into self doubt, I apologised too much, when someone complimented me I would shake my head and look at the ground, and over the years I’ve noticed that from making myself small in front of others, I have convinced myself that I am small. But i’m not small, I deserve to take up space, we all do.

We have a responsibility to become who we were meant to become, so be bold, wear what you want, make your voice heard, accept the compliment, challenge your feelings of resentment towards other women… and for the love of God, if necessary, ask someone to open your bloody lunchbox.

When you feel yourself shrinking just remember you were put on this earth to take up the whole God damn room.

I have a baby cousin Ezra, I know everyone says this about babies they know but he is honestly an angel sent from the heavens. This morning I had him on my lap and we were doing some colouring in, he picked up a crayon and rather than sticking to the lines in the book he just scribbled across the whole page without a care in the world.

In my head I thought, you go Ezra… fuck those lines.

The beauty of your 20s is trial and error. For a really long time I held myself back because I was always waiting for the right time.

“I’ll move jobs when I have more money”

“I’ll wear this when I’ve lost some weight”

“I’ll go on holiday when I’ve got more time”

Finding reasons why not to do something is the easiest thing in the world, the harder thing is actually making the jump.

I made the decision to get out of my own way, to stop putting my life on hold because this is not a practice run, there is no preview of your life… you don’t get to watch a 30 second trailer of how things play out and see if you like the outcome.

For my Birthday I got cards and inside my wonderful friends spoke of how brave I am for going after what I want. It was only when I started colouring outside the lines that life had placed on me that I started to feel closer to myself but in choosing to follow a life that I want, I put myself at huge risk and there are days where I don’t feel brave at all. I’ve spent the last 12 hours in a complete spiral because I quite literally have no idea what I am doing, and at 28 that is terrifying. But should that fear have stopped me from going after and figuring out what I actually want? Absolutely not.

I could waste my whole life waiting to feel ready enough to exist within the questions, but we have to accept that life does not come to us to be perfectly understood but it does beg to be fully experienced.

It takes a lot of energy to have hope for the future, so give yourself permission to start small, ease yourself into it. Loving yourself and existing boldly doesn’t need to be big life changes or revelations sometimes the path to the life you’ve always dreamed of is made by practicing hope and by just listening closely to the things that light you up.

The small things might not seem to make a big difference at the time but ultimately they end up reminding us that we are in fact alive and a part of something larger than ourselves.

So don’t sit on your potential. Colour outside the lines baby, that’s where the magic happens.