Today is my birthday. Moment of silence please. Don’t even say it. I’m not having a breakdown over my age, I look 17, and it’s fine. The secret is sunscreen cause it certainly isn’t gentle living. I wish I could just be excused from my birthday, like my fams could just ignore it like they politely ignore all my questionable life choices. I feel a party assembling around me. I am suspicious. I’m a fucking birthday Grinch like I am a regular Christmas Grinch.

A decade in retrospection: what my twenties meant to me

So yesterday on my bday eve, a very dear friend sent me a birthday message and told me that something they had learned from me was my ability to reflect on life’s experiences and use them as an opportunity to learn and not regret.

I can’t help but feel like all I fucking do is fuck shit up and learn how to be better and it makes me grateful for the friends I have for sticking fat. I’m not one to wallow in self-pity; I have too much perspective for that.

Okay, back to what I learned in the last 10 years.

1. Loyalty where loyalty is due.
2. Forgiveness is overrated.
3. Trust what you know to be true.
   – The truth is a terrible thing. Your truth is your reality. Watch your ass
   -Your experience of a person is who they are to you, not what they project to others.
4. A mistake made more than once is a decision.
5. Apologise through your actions. You can always change.
   – Don’t expect forgiveness. You are not entitled to it. Expect to improve. Have the humility to do so. You are not so good you can’t be better.
6. Never do anything you can’t live down
   – The trick to living without regret is to remember that you answer to yourself, God and your Mother.
7. Never compromise your principles
   – It is the only thing what will hold you together when you have nothing. You need to know who you are.
8. No point being the richest cunt in the cemetery
   – Remember that you’re living to die and this is your one experience of life. Feel as much as you can bear.
9. Find the lesson
   – You are not given more than you can endure. Don’t break.
   – Let go of the people who don’t want to stay. You’re done with the lesson. Let go or you will keep relearning it.
10. I have terrible taste in men.

These are the things that I learned the hard way and by no means intended to be come across as preachy. i had to do 10 for aesthetics and OCD. People rarely learn shit actually rephrase you can’t teach people shit. they need to fuck it up for themselves. Also who am i to talk? I wouldn’t be in exile if I had actually figured anything out properly. It was actually really helpful to do this list (would recommend).

xx SJ