nineteen things i learned before turning nineteen

yes, this was inspired by that elle article.

when this posts, it will be the morning of my nineteenth birthday.

i believe in a lot of small things. like that people want to be good, and one day i’ll move back to europe, and if you say a wish out loud, it won’t come true. i might be an aspiring theoretical physicist in an intensive stem degree, but i check my horoscope every morning. sometimes, when i see one of those posts on instagram that says ‘save this audio and you’ll meet the love of your life’, i follow the instructions.

which is all to say that eighteen was the worst year of my life to date, and i am ridiculously thankful that my birthday is rolling around to provide a much needed fresh start. in the past year, i’ve often said, tongue in cheek: well, at least it can’t get worse. i’m not saying that now, because one of the things the last year has made me believe in more than anything are jinxes.

i feel like existing at the intersection of queerness and trauma has made me feel unready to grow up in a lot of ways. sometimes i feel like i must be eons older than i actually am, other times i still feel like i’m fourteen years old, cross-legged in gym class, hearing that school will be closed for an additional week following the march break. after years of feeling like i’m being forced to grow up and shoved back into the bedroom of childhood, i think i might be ready to be nineteen. (in jack antonoff’s words: for once in my life, i am right on time.)

that being said, here are nineteen things i learned before turning nineteen. i hope you can take some of them with you.

1. an experience being temporary doesn’t make it unimportant
a lot of people think they are the authority on how long you are allowed to grieve. usually they have some kind of equation, based on their own experiences, that decides how long you’re allowed to be hung up on anything that should happen to you. don’t listen to them. you determine the importance of the events in your own life.

2. you are tougher than you think you are, and you’ll find out when you need to
i’ve asserted a thousand times that i couldn’t survive losing this or that person, missing out on this or that experience, going through whatever cataclysm my anxiety-ridden mind managed to dream up. none of that has ever proven true. you are the arbiter of your own life. and you are made of stronger stuff than you realize.

3. don’t date people you aren’t attracted to
i can’t believe this is a lesson i needed to learn (three times, at that!). let me tell you this: no amount of societal or parental approval is going to make dating someone you don’t want anything less than the most miserable experience in the world. you do not need to prove that you’re a person worthy of being in the world by participating in a heterosexual partnership. faking it is a prison you will spend years trying to get out of if you engage.

4. your gut knows too little, your brain knows too much. listen to your heart
okay, i’m going to try and redeem this advice from being the corniest sentence you’ve read all day. your gut is great for knowing when to switch train cars or duck a ball aimed too close to your face. your brain is great at solving math problems or winning an argument. but at the end of the day, the biggest decisions of your life are going to be guided by your heart. so don’t listen to the knee-jerk response that comes out of fear, and don’t intellectualize your decisions to death. what do you actually want?

5. the only person you can’t lie to is yourself
i have to think it’s a universal experience to tell people you wanted something or someone you really don’t, and hope that in repetition of that story you can convince them it’s true. well, you can convince anyone, but if your heart is telling you no, if you know in the back of your head that what you’re pursuing isn’t real, it can and will come back to haunt you. you don’t have to be honest abe. but tell yourself the truth.

6. you will outgrow people you thought you’d know forever
… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. i’ve fallen into a hundred friendships that i thought would last forever, and ultimately fallen out. even though it hurts—believe me, i know—sometimes it’s a sign that you wouldn’t be compatible with someone in the long run anyway. bringing it back to my first point: it can still be important if it isn’t, in fact, forever.

7. moving on is not linear
i think a lot of media about loss tries to paint the end of grief as a morning where you wake up and your life feels hunky-dory again. truthfully, you can wake up one morning feeling hunky-dory, and the next day your heart might be broken all over again. one day you might be annoyed at yourself for thinking about them, the next you might be writing thousands of words about it. the more you punish yourself for how you feel, the harder it will be. your life will grow bigger around loss. and i promise, one day they will really be just a stranger you know everything about.¹

8. appearances aren’t everything, but they are something
i felt a lot more confident in my own skin once i started dressing and presenting in a way that made me feel good about myself. it’s not that you need a whole new wardrobe or skincare routine, but investing in looking the way you want to look will make you feel better about the face you’re presenting to the world.

9. there’s more to be said for being than having the aesthetic
i can’t tell you how many times i’ve wanted to look like an intellectual it girl. the type with refined taste, distant and interesting and impossibly cool. but there is, and will always be, a lot more pleasure in being the kind of girl who drinks cherry coke and reads joan didion and carts around a tote bag that says ‘i am silently correcting your grammar’² than there is in seeming like the kind of person who does those things. (further, you should do these things if and only if you really want to.) drink an overpriced latte, watch the waves crash on the shore, read the pretentious literature you love so dearly. doing is better than dreaming.

10. you regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did
this is advice people used to give me a lot, and i could never figure out why it rang true. i think it has something to do with the idea that when you take an action, make a choice, at least you learn what happens as a consequence. it’s the risks you don’t take that stay with you the longest. you’ll always wonder what would have happened if you’d tried.

11. getting the last word isn’t worth it
do you want to win fights against the people you love, or do you want to keep them around? in every relationship i’ve watched come together and come apart, one thing has been true: someone always had to have the last word. and it might feel gratifying in the moment to have gotten off that zinger you were thinking of, or leave the room knowing you’ve left destruction in your wake, but that’s no way to live. anyone who you care more about beating than loving is not someone you actually want to keep around. so if you do, in fact, want to keep someone around: don’t fight like they put you in a bear trap.

12. don’t be a small woman
if you grow up feeling like you’re too big for the world, the natural instinct is to tuck yourself in corners, make your love and desire more palatable, yourself easier to want. i’m telling you, you’re only going to resent the people around you for it. live your life enormously and happily and vicariously. people who are worth having will want all of you. being authentic is always going to feel better than being approved of.

13. the love of your life would want to be with you
if you believe in one love of your life—and, like i’ve said, i believe in a lot of things—believe in this too: they would want to be with you. they’d text you back. they’d pick up your calls. they’d actively run after being with you, because they’d be the love of your life! if there’s an ex or a crush (or even a partner) you’ve got that doesn’t show any interest in wanting you. i’ll accept that they might be important to you, but they’re not the love of your life.

14. you would want to be with the love of your life
desperate people say a lot of things. they’ll tell you that you’re the only person they could imagine being with. that you’re making a mistake. that this is the best love either of you can hope for, and none of it is true. don’t let anyone convince you to stay in, or return to, a relationship that you don’t want to be in. if they were really the love of your life, you would want them without being manipulated into it.

15. if it were easy, would it be worth doing?
there are times when you can decide whether you want to go with the flow or choose the path of most resistance. nuance is important: this advice is a question because it’s not a one size fits all situation. sometimes you will want things like your relationships and your hobbies and your commute to be easy. other times, when it gets hard, ask yourself: is this needlessly hard, or is the difficulty of this task evidence that it is worth doing?³

16. break it down into little steps
this can go for anything from a difficult test you need to study for or getting out of bed in the morning. whatever needs to be done: break it down into little steps. swing your legs over the side of the bed. stand up. walk across the room. open the closet. grab a shirt. if you stop viewing tasks as enormous challenges that have to be accomplished all at once and start seeing them as a series of little steps, they will become far more doable.

17. stop running metaphorically
this one is for anyone who feels that the bolter by taylor swift was written for them. i’m not saying that it isn’t in your best interest to exit a situation that isn’t working for you, i’m just saying that you shouldn’t run away from what’s hard or scary or requires effort to proceed. that degree is not too hard for you. that person has not changed so much that you don’t love them. dig your heels in and give it a fair shot before you decide to throw the towel in. in hindsight, there are a lot of things i wish i hadn’t run from.

18. start running literally
no one tell my mother that this was on the list. you don’t necessarily have to run, but i promise that if you get your body moving on a consistent basis, even if it’s just a fifteen minute walk, you will begin to feel better. i am both mentally ill and disabled and i am making this argument: exercise! not only does it give you endorphins and pay off for your physical health, it’s a great way to feel grounded in your body in an era when most of our time is spent staring at a screen. again, no one tell my mother i wrote this down. she does not need to know she was right about it.

19. no feeling is final
come on, i’m still so young, i had to borrow a lesson. and this quote by rainer maria rilke (which was also my high school yearbook quote, fun fact) has been the mantra of my entire year being eighteen. the first thing i told you to remember was that something being temporary doesn’t mean it isn’t important. and no one gets to decide how long something is important to you for, but i wanted to end by reminding you that the way you’re feeling right now will not last forever. don’t panic by making provisions for the future or fret over the past. stay in the moment. let yourself live.

same time next year?

all my love,
arden

1. thank you, olivia rodrigo!

2. yes, this is a real bag i own.

3. frequently the task in question is getting a degree, and yes, it being hard can mean it’s worth doing.