Painting by Kristofer Granger

Dear me,

You do not have to be anything. You do not have to be right. You do not have to be a student. You not have to be smart all the time. You do not have to know everything, and you don’t have to fight all the time. You don’t have to exercise every day. You do not have to write every day. You do not have to have that perfect writer image you have of yourself. You do not have to be anything at all.

You do not have to beat yourself up for not being the best writer. You will get there. You do not have to pressure yourself to write a blog once a week. You know that you are the most indisciplined, frolicking, person who drifts though life, bouncing from one passion to the next. All you have to do are the little things that make your soul dance.

You don’t have to exercise every day and eat the things that make you hangry, but you should listen to your body. If your body says move, then get up and move – even if you are dancing at midnight in your pyjamas. Your body will tell you what you want, and what you need. You know the difference between a good craving and an indulgence. Neither is bad, but you know what is good for your body. You know – not your trainer, not your doctor and not any fad dieter who is paid to confuse the masses. If you know your iron is low, eat some spinach. Your body tells you what it wants. You don’t have to do anything more than take control of your life.

You don’t need to sit down every day for one hour staring at a blank page frustrating yourself at your inability to create. You don’t need to spend hours distracting yourself online because you feel like a failure. All you need to do is listen to the beautiful choruses of voices inside your head, and when you think you can, write them down. Some thoughts will get written, some won’t, but at least you won’t drive yourself insane trying to stick with the status quo of bloggers.

You also do not have to be the psychic writer who sees where her stories will take her. You do not have to put pressure on everything that you write. Just write them down, and let it go into the world. If it goes, it goes. If it does not, then at least you still have a piece of your heart written down. Success adds up. Virality is not something that comes instantly, even though you have told yourself it does.

You do not have to drop everything and follow your dreams. You do not have to adhere to the conventional responsibility that adulthood has thrust on you. What you need to do is stop fighting with yourself about where you should be and go where you want to. You have spent a year of your life rotting away in bed because you could not agree with yourself. How about just doing what feels right in the moment and just go with it? We take too long to deliberate on things when we could spend it looking at beauty.

If there is one promise – one resolution that I will make to myself, it is to embrace my wonderful, glorious messy self. I’ll embrace the frizzy hair, chubby thighs, squeaky voice. I’ll embrace all of it. I’ll dance when I want to – even when I’m not in time. I’ll laugh when I want to – unapologetically and without care. And I will forgive myself for every time I fall short of this promise – every time I beat up on myself. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to love the beautiful mess that you are.