I wish someone had told me this in my 20s

If I could go back and sit across from my 25-year-old self, I would take her hands, look her dead in the eyes, and tell her some things she absolutely needed to hear.

She probably wouldn't have listened. That's fine. I'm saying them anyway.

This is for her. And for every woman who is her right now.

1. You are not too much. Some people just don’t have the capacity.

At some point, someone made you feel like your emotions, your energy, your needs, your opinions were excessive. And you believed them. You started editing yourself down to a more manageable size: quieter, less intense, easier to be around.

Here's the truth. You were never too much; only too much for them. Those are completely different things. Remember, not everyone can understand abstract art.

The right people will never make you feel like a problem to be managed. Find those people and cling onto them like a backpack.

2. Your body is not a project. It’s a miracle.

I know how much time and energy you spend thinking about your body. Punishing it, negotiating with it, wishing it looked different.

But the brilliant Catherine O'Hara once said: "Take a thousand naked pictures of yourself now. You may currently think, 'Oh, I'm too spooky,' or 'Nobody wants to see these tiny boobies.' But believe me, one day you will look at those photos with much kinder eyes and say, 'Dear God, I was a beautiful thing!'"

I'm not necessarily telling you to raid your camera roll. But I am asking you: why wait to get old to see yourself as you should be seen now?

A guy I was seeing a few years ago told me that my hands and feet were really big and suggested that I might secretly be a man. I wish I could tell you I laughed in his face. I did give him a saucy retort, but afterwards, I thought about my hands and feet for longer than I'd like to admit. And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I still think I look like a clown.

That’s what we do. We take the stupidest, smallest observations from the most unqualified people and carry them around for years like they mean something.

They don't. He certainly didn't.

Your body is not a before and after. It is a living thing that has carried you through your entire life – through every physical and emotional pain, every reckless adventure, every version of yourself. And it deserves your love and gratitude long before it deserves your criticism.

F**k that guy, by the way (figuratively, only).

3. The right people feel like peace.

One of my favourite writers, Case Kenny, puts it better than I ever could: "Be as weird as you like and the wrong people will leave the party, but the right ones will join the dance."

The right friendships, the right relationships, the right rooms – they’ll feel like an exhale. If you’re constantly trying to earn your place somewhere, that’s not the place for you.

4. Knowing your worth is not arrogance. It’s honesty.

You've been taught – we all have – that ‘too much’ confidence is unattractive. That wanting things for yourself is selfish. That knowing what you deserve and refusing to accept less is somehow aggressive or difficult.

Fake news.

It’s actually the most important skill you’ll ever develop. The sooner you know your worth, the sooner you stop accepting less than you deserve. In work. In love. At every table you sit at.

Know your worth. Then add tax.

5. The opinions of people who don't love you are worth exactly nothing.

Right now, you’re giving enormous amounts of energy to what people think of you. People you barely know. People you don't even like. People whose lives you wouldn’t swap for yours in a million years.

Here’s a useful exercise: make a list of the people whose opinion of you actually matters. People who know you, love you, and want good things for you. It's a short list, isn't it? Let that be the only list that counts.

6. Not your people. Next.

There will come a point (and it’s glorious when it arrives, btw) where you simply stop having energy for people who drain you, diminish you, or make you feel less than. Not with drama or a big confrontation. You just quietly, peacefully lose interest.

This is you becoming yourself. It’s one of the great underrated freedoms of getting older and you are going to LOVE it.

7. There is no schedule.

I know the pressure you feel. The timeline you’ve constructed in your head. The things that should have happened by now, the things that need to happen soon, the creeping fear that you’re somehow behind.

But here’s the thing. There is no schedule. And the timeline – what is that based on? What someone else did? What society decided? It’s not real.

The women who built the most extraordinary lives did it on their own terms, in their own time. Your life is not running out. It’s just getting started.

8. It had to fall apart.

I won't pretend it doesn't hurt. It does. It may even hurt more than you think you can bear.

But I can promise you that there is infinitely more ahead of you than behind you. Most of my happiest moments and best days happened after the heartbreak I thought would kill me.

It wasn’t a loss. It was making space for something that actually fits.

You might not be able to see that in the middle of it. That's okay. Just know that the other side of it exists, and that you are going to arrive there more yourself than you were before.

Breaking up is nothing compared to breaking open. And when you break open, that’s when the light gets in.

9. Rejection is redirection.

Rejection feels like a verdict. Final, crushing, personal. Like someone held everything you were up to the light and found it wanting. Like every doubt you ever had about yourself just got confirmed.

Here’s the truth.

Rejection is redirection. It's protection. The door closed because that room was never big enough for you.

You might have been comfortable in that room. You might have stayed there for years, quietly wondering if this was it, or settling for ‘good enough’. But it wasn't yours. And somewhere, something knew that.

Rejection is not the end of the story. It is the plot twist that makes the story worth telling.

10. Age is not a warning label. It's a power surge.

This is the big one. The one I most want you to hear.

The world is going to spend a lot of time telling you that what you have right now – your youth, your skin, the way you look – is the most precious thing about you. It will imply, constantly and insidiously, that you’re on a countdown. That value depreciates with age. That the goal is to preserve what you have for as long as possible.

That's a lie.

As you get older, your body becomes more yours. The self-consciousness that plagued you – the constant awareness of how you looked, who was watching, whether you were enough – loosens its grip. You stop performing with your body and start living in it.

That's not some second-rate consolation prize. That is THE prize.

The most powerful version of you is not behind you. She’s ahead. And she can't wait to meet you.

Getting older is not something to be afraid of. It’s your most powerful era. The one where you finally come home to yourself.

I wouldn't go back to 25 for anything.

Not because those years weren't good. Some of them were extraordinary. But because I did not know then what I know now.

I didn't know how to take up space without apologising for it. I didn't know that the things that made me different were not flaws to be fixed but features to be leaned into.

I didn’t know then that the best was genuinely, absolutely, without question, yet to come.

Now I do.

And eventually, so will you.