Everything important I’ve learned up until the age of 22

I’m going to say something that will probably make a lot of people roll their eyes. But I’ll be honest, as I will be as much as I can in this extended essay – I got inspired to do this from a podcast, one I was listening to in the park while I sat by myself on the hottest day of the year so far, taking notes in my notebook. This is probably the most millennial sentence I’ve written, but that really was the ‘bing!’ that went off in my head, that kicked me into gear, and to write this stuff down.
The podcast is called Happy Place by Fearne Cotton – my childhood idol now makes podcasts about love, life, sex, heartbreak and happiness. Can you imagine! In this podcast she chats to another hero of mine, Dolly Alderton, who’s book really inspired me to look at my life differently and to understand that the seemingly awful shit we go through at this age is not the end of the world, and most importantly – that everybody else feels it too. You are not alone in your struggle, that nobody has a bloody clue what they’re doing at 22, even if they make it out to be. I won’t do this podcast justice by trying to summarise it here – I urge you to listen to it, if you’re a girl in your twenties. Or if you’re a boy; the struggles of your quarter-life crisis don’t discriminate based on sex. But in the end, the podcast finished and left me with one thing – our life is to learn from.

I realised that due to my sensitive over-thinking nature I’ve managed to do quite a lot of it in the past twenty-two years, some of it good, some of it bad. I’ve just finished my bachelor’s degree; learning a lot from other people, being told a lot of things that I may or may not agree with, trying to understand and apply this external knowledge in various ways. I’ve been raised by a family who are opinionated and curious, I’ve got friends who love nothing more than to debate and question each other. I’ve been told things about myself that I thought I agreed with, but now see differently. I’ve learned a lot about the former. I question these things all the time, wondering if they’re right or wrong, good or bad.
In this whole time, however, I realised that I never really sat down and thought about what I KNOW to be true, and what I know to be true about life, love and myself. What I know will carry me throughout my life, what I can rely on, what I know is concrete, inevitable, gospel – to me.
I strongly believe that as human beings we are engineered to take in as much knowledge as we can throughout our lives, which can be absolutely amazing and eye-opening and revolutionary, but it can also be a massive overload, something that can be impossible to navigate, to understand, which can leave us drowning in information and with no lifeboat to hoist us out.
But I want to talk about everything I know to be true up until the age of twenty-two. The good, the bad, the even shittier, the amazing, the hard, and the truth that I know for me.

I’m going to write some of these lessons I’ve learned down over the next few weeks. I hope you take the time to read them, if you feel like it!