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1. Learn how to crawl and walk.
2. Learn how to ride a bike, swim, and play monopoly.
3. Go to school and learn all the things you’ll spend all your adulthood unlearning.
4. Gain childhood trauma.
5. Dream of running away from home.
6. Encounter Barbie, and allow a plastic doll to fuck up your perception of what it means to be female.
7. Allow Disney to trick you into believing that the only happy ending is in marrying a man.
8. Discover books, and allow the most insatiable sense of freedom and adventure to open up inside your mind.
9. Discover coffee in you late teens; & from the tasteless muddy looking water that only adults drink, it will become the greatest love of your life.
10. Allow shitty men to make you question your own self-worth, and who you should be.
11. Gain emotional baggage.
12. Go to college and learn all the things that won’t help you much in your adulthood.
13. Get a job and hate it.
14. Marry an abusive man and divorce him.
15. Have a wonderful child who will teach you everything you need to know about being a good human being.
16. Do your postgraduates to prove to everyone else that you are intelligent, even though you knew it all along.
17. Travel.
18. Turn from a fussy eater to a foodie who loves EVERYTHING.
19. Turn thirty, then turn thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four you get the picture..
20. While in your thirties obsess about how terrified you are of turning forty.
21. Obsess about weight, skin, and hair. Be superficial and vain.
22. Actually leave home and never return.
23. Paint beautiful pictures that might not generate revenue, but that feed your soul.
24. Write a memoir, try to get it published, and endure the agony of endless rejections.
25. Keep writing and painting (despite the knowledge that nothing may come of it).
26. Feel guilty about almost everything you’ve done in your life so far.
27. Be depressed and think about ending your life.
28. Be dramatic, slip in and out of love for life.
29. Follow your inner moonlight even when nobody else understands your choices or approves of them.
30. Let go of the illusion that things could have been different.
31. Meet yourself for the very first time, and absolutely love her.
32. Realize that aging has given you the greatest gift; the love of your own company more than anyone else’s.
33. Buy a pretty red vintage dress from Etsy, do the twirl, and feel fabulous.
34. Care less about what people think, a little bit less, a little bit less, a liiitttlllee bit less about what others think… Perfect.
Your life begins now.
