1. Make peace with your parents. Whether you finally recognize that they actually have your best interests in mind or you forgive them for being flawed human beings, you can’t happily enter adulthood with that familial brand of resentment.

2. Kiss someone you think is out of your league; kiss models and med students and entrepreneurs with part-time lives in Dubai and don’t worry about if they’re going to call you afterward.

3. Minimize your passivity.

4. Work a service job to gain some understanding of how tipping works, how to keep your cool around assholes, how a few kind words can change someone’s day.

5. Recognize freedom as a 5:30 a.m. trip to the diner with a bunch of strangers you’ve just met.

6. Try not to beat yourself up over having obtained a ‘useless’ Bachelor’s Degree. Debt is hell, and things didn’t pan out quite like you expected, but you did get to go to college, and having a degree isn’t the worst thing in the world to have. We will figure this mess out, I think, probably; the point is you’re not worth less just because there hasn’t been an immediate pay off for going to school. Be patient, work with what you have, and remember that a lot of us are in this together.

7. If you’re employed in any capacity, open a savings account. You never know when you might be unemployed or in desperate need of getting away for a few days. Even $10 a week is $520 more a year than you would’ve had otherwise.

8. Make a habit of going outside, enjoying the light, relearning your friends, forgetting the internet.

9. Go on a 4-day, brunch-fueled bender.

10. Start a relationship with your crush by telling them that you want them. Directly. Like, look them in the face and say it to them. Say, I want you. I want to be with you.

11. Learn to say ‘no’ — to yourself. Don’t keep wearing high heels if you hate them; don’t keep smoking if you’re disgusted by the way you smell the morning after; stop wasting entire days on your couch if you’re going to complain about missing the sun.

12. Take time to revisit the places that made you who you are: the apartment you grew up in, your middle school, your hometown. These places may or may not be here forever; you definitely won’t be.

13. Find a hobby that makes being alone feel lovely and empowering and like something to look forward to.

14. Think you know yourself until you meet someone better than you.

15. Forget who you are, what your priorities are, and how a person should be.

16. Identify your fears and instead of letting them dictate your every move, find and talk to people who have overcome them. Don’t settle for experiencing .000002% of what the world has to offer because you’re afraid of getting on a plane.

17. Make a habit of cleaning up and letting go. Just because it fit at one point doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever — whether ‘it’ is your favorite pair of pants or your ex.

18. Stop hating yourself.

19. Go out and watch that movie, read that book, listen to that band you already lied about watching, reading, listening to.

20. Take advantage of health insurance while you have it.

21. Make a habit of telling people how you feel, whether it means writing a gushing fan-girl email to someone whose work you love or telling your boss why you deserve a raise.

22. Date someone who says, “I love you” first.

23. Leave the country under the premise of “finding yourself.” This will be unsuccessful. Places do not change people. Instead, do a lot of solo drinking, read a lot of books, have sex in dirty hostels, and come home when you start to miss it.

24. Suck it up and buy a Macbook Pro.

25. Quit that job that’s making you miserable, end the relationship that makes you act like a lunatic, lose the friend whose sole purpose in life is making you feel like you’re perpetually on the verge of vomiting. You’re young, you’re resilient, there are other jobs and relationships and friends if you’re patient and open.

Love is not the answer. Get your twenties out of your system. Travel. Take risks. Move around. Quit school. Go back to school. Change careers. Change religions. Change your name if you want to. Do everything you need or want to do that requires absolute freedom to act quickly and often. Travel often. Travel light. Let your dreams and aspirations be your destination, but let curiosity be your guide. Follow every side road that intrigues you. Explore. Exclaim. Don’t worry about finding your way back. The only constant is change. The only threat is baggage. The twenties are carry-on baggage days. Preferably tote bag and a toothbrush days. Love is checked baggage. Love is freight. If you fall in love too soon, and allow yourself to get in too deep, you have just tied yourself to a freight train track. This doesn’t mean love isn’t the best thing that will ever happen to you. Eventually it might be. But probably not in your twenties. Twenties love is what divorces and mid-life crises are made of. Here’s what this particular train wreck looks like: a spouse you once loved more than life, sucking the life out of you. Kids, if they’re unlucky enough to be born to this relationship, that you’ll never be able to love more than you love yourself. Kids deserve better. Spouses deserve better. You deserve better. So follow this next simple rule.

It’s hard to leave pieces of your heart lying on the ground of city streets 3000 miles away. But it’s beautiful. We weren’t meant to come back with a fluffy conscience and a clear head. My heart aches for old memories. I miss old friends. And I always will. There’s no getting over it. But that’s what happens when you live with heart open and palms up. My heart didn’t get taken. I went with it open. It hurt then because I knew it wasn’t forever – and it hurts now because the times are behind me. But in the emptiness there is love. Parts of myself are gone. They belong to people and places far away, and that’s where they’ll stay. And if you want to have adventures, you have to be OK with that. You have to know from the start that the thing is going to change you – and then you have to let it. And then when it’s time to go home, you have to really go home.

I wish I could have met everyone you know. I wish I could have been there to hear everything everyone ever said to you, from the grandiose proclamations to the offhanded commentary. I wish I could have written it all down for later speculation, saved it somewhere I would have been able to reference whenever needed. Then, at least, I would know who told you. I would know if it was one person or a hundred, a school bully from across the playground or a past love who wanted to hurt you one last time before you went your separate ways. Because someone told you — convinced you, even, and it seems not to have been so hard-won — that you are not important.

You apologize for things which are not your fault, even for things which hurt no one. You will bump into a table and mutter that you are sorry to have hurt it, you will excuse yourself. If you happened to cross a stream of particularly rude passerby, you would hold the door open for hours on end, never entering the building yourself. There is a part of you which seems embarrassed to take up space, as though you don’t deserve the things you touch, the air you breathe, the chairs you sit on. You feel as though there is always a way to be more accommodating, less of an intrusion. But you are not intruding, you know. You never are. There is a way you move, a way you take up your space in this world (the space to which each of us is entitled, never more) that makes me wish I could be more like you. I feel boisterous, even occasionally oppressive. You are always kind, always humble, always so deserving of being there.

We are undeserving. It is we who are graced by your presence, and your generosity. You feel as though you need to give more to this world to earn your keep — that your being a kind person and deferring to others is somehow not enough — but that is ridiculous. It seems that you are just one of those rare, beautiful people who err a bit on the shy side, who assume the best in people, and who always move just slightly to the side of the stage so as not to compete for the spotlight. But you should have the spotlight, it should be turned to you. Its glow should cradle your face, and there should be a round of eager applause for you being here. When you step into a coffee shop, or a party, or a crowded commuter bus — I am glad you are there.

There are those among us who will be crippled by our delusions of importance, who tend to absorb the room as we walk in and push the furniture to the sides so as to better accommodate our presence. But there are also those who feel, often from being unjustly led to believe as much at some point in early life, that they have no importance. They feel that they are a burden of some kind, and are willing to accept being treated as a bit of relatively drab set decoration. You can see in their eyes that they nearly flinch with apology at the end of declarative statements, that their opinions are always tempered in a bit of empathetic softness. They are always doing on behalf of others, putting a million kinds of happiness before their own.

But you are important. You are important in a way that many people will never acknowledge, because they are too consumed with their image in the mirror or their voice on a recording to notice that they share the world with people around them. But you are important because you are good, because you look at your surroundings with tenderness and understanding. You don’t step on flowers when you walk, you allow a housepet to come to your hand instead of roughly insisting on your touch, you leave messages and wait for people to call you back at their convenience. You treat people with respect, and so rarely ask it for yourself. But you should. Because you matter. You matter to me, you matter to the woman you held the elevator for, and you matter to the friend you listened to while they unloaded the problems the world had put on them. You are more important than you will ever know, and never let anyone tell you that your economy of words is a stinginess of character. You are overflowing with love, and we can see it from a mile away.