I remember my first terrible strands of grey hair. I was all of 25 but suddenly I knew that I was going to die someday. I knew that whatever beauty I had was only going to fade, wrinkle, sag, disappear. I knew with absolute certainty that if someone didn't love me now, I was doomed to be alone forever. None of that turned out to be true (well except for the dying someday part). What is true is that when I look back on that moment from the vantage point of age and graying pubic hair, all I can do is laugh. I laugh, because it is hard these days to actually remember most of that aching, desperate, calamitous decade of my 20s. Not because I was lost in a haze of prescription drugs or buried in obsessive career building but because I was consumed with becoming. I was like puzzle pieces suspended in green jello, dimly seen, slowly moving, unclear. But as the years passed, those pieces eventually melded together. Soggy and slightly wilted, but solid.

I cannot promise you that love will come your way. But I can promise that the nature of what you are feeling now will evolve and that desperation can be tackled. Beating it begins with taking a big deep breath and saying out loud, "This too will pass." Then going out and getting a dog or a parakeet, becoming a Big Brother, learning to play the tuba, volunteering to help hospice patients, and taking risks. Risk being awkward, obnoxious, boring, too loud, geeky. Tell bad jokes to strangers, dance by yourself, try to make the old woman on the bus smile, and to give yourself the gift of forgiveness.

We do not know what will happen to us. There is no timeline for expectations. Love is an impossible and wondrous force that is entirely out of our control and it will often only show up, as many wise persons have said before, right when we least expect it. You wanted me to help you "be more confident." I can't do that. Because confidence is not a behavior. The word, broken down, means "with faith." So my greatest wish for you is that you explore trusting in time. Give yourself over to the adventure and you may be infinitely surprised. At this moment you feel alone, (but in the words of Dear Sugar) b. and yet.... c. and yet... d. you are loved.

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

your writing, which features “unfiltered emotion, unrequited love,” and discussion of your “vagina as metaphor” will be taken less seriously than that of men. Yes, it probably will. Our culture has made significant progress when it comes to sexism and racism and homophobia, but we’re not all the way there.

often framed as specific rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant. There are things you can do to shed light on and challenge those biases and bullshit moves.

But the best possible thing you can do is get your ass down onto the floor. Write so blazingly good that you can’t be framed.

But it isn’t the unifying theme.

You know what is?

How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this” and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior

It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you—,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.”

You need to do the same, dear sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug. That you’re so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you’re here to do. And when people are here to do that, they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.

So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.

attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy

because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low.

- cheryl strayed