on trying to drag love from those who won't give it

in careers, friendships, romance - it's tired, babes.

It’s my birthday today! 🌺❤️ 💝 💕 🌹 If you know anyone who might like this DreamBox/ spellbook/ shifting journal/ gem pile/ notebook/ place of dilemmas, uncut magic, tricky ideas and out-of-order inner thoughts, please gift it to them or yourself!

part one.

If you want to know about validation hunting - become a tall, dark, thirteen-year-old girl in the small town of Chorley, Northern England. The only other people around who look like you are your relatives in the house or at your grandma’s up the street.

You’ve only recently connected with your mother again (she came back for you last year). Now you’re living in her corner house with a worn pink bathroom, and you paint your bedroom lilac-frost. Result!

Your mother works nights, so for now, you run the house. For now, you’re all grown up. You admire your body in the mirror - for all it is growing to be. You’re free from a stifling religious sect and are ready to reinvent, which means TURNING YOURSELF INTO SOMETHING VERY ATTRACTIVE, possible romance and boys!!!

Still, you remain relatively invisible. There is school, and after school, aka downtown at night and alcohol…wooo! The way through it all is to be PLIABLE and LIKEABLE. The way to win in this town is by assimilation. So, when you’ve finally settled on how you like to look best,

and when you walk through town in the afternoon, Sunday sun blazing, braids fresh and long, someone who looks like your friend's father or might be your friend’s father whistles at you from his pickup truck. You think you did something remarkable. You think it’s proof of being special.

Without knowing it, you’re beginning your long journey, a quest for external validation that will lead you into early danger, unready sexual territory and a hunger for attention that no amount of praise will ever satisfy. Hidden within these experiences are vital lessons:

1. Nothing will matter until you understand that you, in fact, matter.

2. If you have to fold

   to fit in

   it ain’t right

3. True worth isn’t something to be extracted by those who can’t or won’t give it.

4. Your differences, which feel terrible now, will be the thing that delivers you in the end. But we’re too far away to know this now.

5. Your best acting school will not be the London theatre school in your twenties or the acting studio in Los Angeles in your thirties. Your best acting school will be high school itself. You are all set to graduate, at fourteen years old, from the Love Me, Accept Me Now Please See Me and Want Me class.

   With honours.