25 pieces of life advice

that have truly helped me.

Some of the best advice I’ve been given or worked out the hard way:

1. Do not marry the person you have the craziest, wildest, most exciting, addictive sex with. That person is insane.

2. If someone you’re trying to do business with says, “I’m not going to fuck you over,” rest assured that those words have rolled off their tongue for one reason and one reason only. They’re going to fuck you over.

3. My granny always said never let yourself become jealous of someone because something awful will happen to them. Not to you - to them. I loved the moral geography of this advice; it didn’t seem to come from a moralising place at all. Perhaps it was simply the evil eye. I think she was right.

4. A child having a tantrum wants to be heard. The contents of their tantrum tend to be nonsense so don’t try arguing the toss or presenting the factual inaccuracies in their newfound proposition that they hate Auntie Caroline. Instead, get close to them, look into their eyes, take them seriously and repeat their argument back to them. You hate Auntie Caroline! Hate Caroline! You really can’t stick the auld trollop at all!
   
   It’s startling how quickly they look up, both delighted to be taken so seriously, a small person in a world where all decisions are made so very much further from the floor, but also simultaneously alarmed by the news that, wow, they… hate Auntie Caroline? Did they… actually say that? Caroline with the good chocolates? Caroline with the dog who only bites if you pull his tail really hard? Caroline who always has the heating and the telly on now wait just one minute there could possibly have been a smol mistake here.

5. When paying off debts, and feeling overwhelmed by the number of them, it’s easy to become fixated on the biggest, scariest one. And then too overwhelmed to do anything about any of them. Actually, if you start with the smallest debt and pay that off first, it will give you a psychological boost to start tackling the rest. Baby steps. I have learned to cope with a lot of problems in my life by breaking them down into baby steps. Including having a baby.

6. Your children will survive in spite of you, not because of you.

7. Things feel a lot worse at night than they do in the morning. Don’t believe the night, the seductive night; it does something to the ruminating part of your brain that goes over and over things until there is no hope left. Don’t listen to it. Wait for the daylight to tell you something different.

8. When my daughter’s father returned to our lives, when she was six, (he left when she was a few months old and I didn’t know exactly where he had gone), I wrote in my diary, “If I had known that my sadness would not last forever, I would have been kinder to it.” I should add, I don’t mean coming back into our lives in any sort of romantic way, even though people always seem to wonder about this. I’m not insane.