Listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy on repeat for one afternoon or fifteen. Roll your eyes when someone tries to bring up Kanye's politics. Watch Fleabag, listen to This Feeling by Alabama Shakes. Follow __s____o on Instagram. Write every day. Read Ada or Ardor, read Reasons and Persons, read Monadology, read Pattern Language, read Meditations at Lagunitas. Reread smart women: Bluets, I Love Dick, Dept. of Speculation, Priestdaddy, Frantumaglia, Oryx and Crake, The Liars' Club, The Golden Notebook, every essay Joan Didion has ever written. Books are the best public secrets. The personal is the basis for the universal: never be embarrassed of your fixation with the personal. Remember that longing is the basis for all beauty in the beginning and tenderness the basis for all beauty in the end. Ugly cry your way through Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time when you're 15 and never again hear the word "Montauk" without your heart giving a pathetic melty little gasp. Watch the entirety of Sex and the City with your young hip college interviewer over Skype when you're 17 and realize during Season 2 as Carrie flounders in the face of Big's ineffable cool that you are obsessed with him. He will become your first serious boyfriend, the one who will introduce you to War Wong-Kai, Twin Peaks, Miyazaki, Knausgaard, Updike and Salter, the cocktail you ask for at every bar, the idea that the life of the mind could possibly be valuable (this takes you, a dumb teenager, a long time to catch onto; you are not the child of white people who went to Yale and studied Art History, were not raised in a context where anyone around you explained that life could be spent focused on thinking well. Your parents are Asian immigrants firmly grounded in capitalist realism). Later on you won't miss the relationship but you will kick yourself hard for deleting all of your messages with him impulsively after you break up during your first summer in San Francisco. You will think: why didn't I document everything exhaustively? How could have I understood as an experienced emotional reality that my life will never be so open again, that I will not be a teenager forever, that I will fall out of love, that I will try really hard to get into college and then promptly abandon it, that I will try and fail at many things, that people will want me, that I will want people, that I will be depressed and ecstatic and bored, that I will, for years after we break up (and probably always), rap along to the Kanye song we listened to when you were cooking in the kitchen and I was leaning against the counter, looking at you, believing my whole life was sautéing onions right in front of me? Today you still know nothing but now you know how to savor it. Make sure you eke everything out of everything: write down the richness and texture of the world as you feel your way punch-drunk through it, talking, laughing, being stupid, self-righteous, blase, funny, clever. Specificity is gorgeous. Look for people who are good being granular, good at being highly specific in how they think, arrive at elegant conclusions. Here are some facts: if Sex and the City were remade today, Miranda would be the starring character. Being a control freak is cool in 2019 in San Francisco. Being 22 feels so tenuous. What else? Try to ensure that everyone who loves you loves you very much. Aim for mental and emotional granularity—articulate everything you feel and think to yourself on paper, to people, out loud. Articulate things all the time and they will emerge from fog in your own mind. Explain the unruliness of your desires to people again and again, openly and in depth, so they can better understand your needs. Worry less about the individual tiny fluctuations within relationships and more about the quality of people you're with: good equilibriums have a powerful gravity and tend to establish themselves. Find the people who you can really talk to, proceed to talk to them all the time. Tend to your relationships until they bloom. Be terrified of the exposure and intensity of intimacy but search for it everywhere. Hold close the moments of being ashamed, feeling delicate in front of someone you like a lot. Love them for how gentle they are in response. Know that being seen, being held, being listened to with care is the blood of joy. Try to produce more than you consume. Fail. Okay, again. Watch other people make things well and document their processes. Observe yourself get better at specific genres of thinking over the course of two months, six months, one year, five. Wake up every morning beside someone who loves you. It's important to have someone in your life who holds your hand, who thinks you're precious, ungiveupable. Confess—happily, not penitently—what you're bad at, working hard on and trying to improve. Believe with perfect earnestness that you don't need permission for anything. The open world is waiting for you to move within it.
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