20 Things I Wish I Could Tell My Teenage Self

1. This is the worst your hair will ever look. Take some small comfort in the fact that it can now only get better.
2. That is still absolutely no excuse to cut your own hair, because you saw how to do layers on an episode of Ricki Lake.
3. Although you love Britpop, perhaps dressing like one of the Gallagher brothers for three entire years was not the best decision, sartorially speaking.
4. The show This Life is not a documentary.
5. It is also not a reason to deliberate doing a law degree.
6. The Truth Is Not Out There, so you may wish to remove that poster of the UFO from your bedroom wall.
7. Chasing the drummer from that band you love down Bourke St to ask him if he really is that drummer from that band you love is not very dignified, and is also a traffic hazard.
8. Don’t ever go on a date to McDonald’s with that boy you met at the school social doing the Macarena. It will result in being on the receiving end of some truly horrifying poetry.
9. Bargaining with other students to get the absence slips out of their school diary is advisable and should begin as close to the beginning of the school year as possible, as you will have forged your parents signature on your whole allotment by the middle of the first term.
10. Crawling on your hands and knees past the door of the class you’re supposed to be in order to sack off school early and bother the staff in HMV is a valid career choice.
11. Wearing a copy of Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress to the final year formal dance may be a decision that, in the future, you look back on slightly less favourably.
12. Wearing trainers with said dress, however, was and still is a great idea.
13. Despite what your teachers say, you can actually annoy your way into a job just by hanging around the shop long enough. You will go on to do this successfully twice, and are trying for a hat-trick.
14. Keeping all your videos of music filmclips that you carefully recorded, labelled and filed was probably one big waste of time as VHS is now an outdated format.
15. Keeping all the videos of the X Files that you carefully recorded, labelled and filed was definitely just one big waste of time as now you want to die of embarrassment when you even think about it.
16. Everyone telling you that school is the “best time of your life” WAS wrong. It was fucking horrific – you knew it then, and you still agree now.
17. University is not a whole lot better. In fact, in many ways, it’s worse.
18. That person who made your life a living hell for 12 years will have the balls to apologise for their behaviour three years after leaving school.
19. You’re still going to be pissed that they introduced you to everyone on the first day of high school as “stupid, fat, ugly Courtney Allardyce” though.
20. You have to forgive yourself for the dead goldfish. How were you to know they couldn’t survive in 38 degree heat?