STOP! whatever you’re doing right now just stop. Put down your phone and stop feeling bad about yourself because you don’t look like Maddie Carina and all the other pretty pale Instagram girls. They’re beautiful but don’t waste your youth wishing you looked like them, it’s just not worth it. Put down the box of SPLAT hair dye, red is not your color. While you’re at it put down the sheers, by the time you’re 20 you’ll regret wanting that thin hair fringe you saw on Tumblr and you’ll want thicker hair.

When you’re 18 you’re going to fall in love with a band member and you’ll devote every moment to him. You’ll still love him until this day but I promise you, you’re not in love with him because you don’t even know what love is. When you’re 21, he’ll get engaged. You’ll be heartbroken, but by October you’ll be into your professor so deep you won’t even remember his name. When your professor breaks your heart, you’ll swear “that heartbreak hit differently” and it did. He awakened something in you that you didn’t even know you had. You’ll get over it though because like the other one, you love him but not in “that way” because you still don’t know what “that way” is.

Take the time out of your day to go watch a makeup tutorial and buy a better flat iron so you can make yourself feel pretty. Boost yourself, but in a healthy way. If you don’t, when you’re 22, no matter how much makeup you put on you’ll still feel like an ugly duckling. You’ll wish that you would’ve been taught to love yourself from a younger age. You’ll remember every rejection you’ve faced because you weren’t pretty enough. You will remember the eating disorder you had before you started high school. How a boy that made fun of you in middle school for being fat, asked you out because you were skinny and it felt good at the time. You will want that feeling back, but you will fight the urge with every being in you to go back to unhealthy ways because you know this time that eating disorder will kill you.

I’m not going to tell you to go easy on yourself because I know you won’t because no one ever does. I will tell you to take more chances. Not in the “tell your crush you like him” type of way. You already know how that’s going to go. Get up and go to the quinceanera you were invited to. You’ll have a great time. Your couch and TV will be there for you when you get back. You’ll regret not taking advantage of being 16 when you’re 23. Remember to always keep a disposable or insta camera with you. As you get older those pictures will be one of your most prized possessions.

You’ll think you have the worst luck at this age. Honey I hate to break it to you but it gets so much worse. You cried when only six people remembered your 17th birthday. Just wait until you turn 24 and it’s like you don’t even exist. You’ll want to hold a grudge against your friends for forgetting, but you won’t. You are bigger than that. You need them.

By the time you’re almost 25, everything that you thought would never happen to you will have happened. There will be mornings where you wake up and wish you hadn’t. But there will also be mornings that you wake up so excited to live life that you can barely breathe. Your life is not easy. For every good day there are two bad ones.

But I want you to remember one thing… you’ll be okay.