You might never lose the feeling that you don’t fit in... and stop dicking about with frosted lilac lipstick.

Hello you

I’m going to start by telling you that I’m really proud of you.

You’re passionate about the things that you love (and also the things you hate.) You’re politically engaged enough that you’ll spend a Saturday afternoon marching for a good cause but also because you really enjoy shouting “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!” with your whole chest.

When you’re not trying to smash the system, you go to art exhibitions and see French films at The Metro on Rupert Street in Soho and you buy too many magazines and rererererereread the same books and you let the music devour you.

I’ll tell you now that the good causes and the art and the film and the dog-eared Penguin Classics and the needle dropping down on the vinyl and that static hiss before the beat kicks in saves you again and again, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

See, if I’m writing a letter to you, the me that was, I don’t want to give too much away. What if I reveal too much and you try to alter your destiny and some awful rift opens up in the time space continuum?

What I will tell you is that there are good times ahead. There are also bad times. The bad times absolutely suck and you don’t always deal with them in the best way, but that’s why they’re called bad times.

But you get to do what you love. You write. I know how much that will blow your sixteen-year-old mind. Because when you were doing Journalism with A-levels at Barnet College and a guest lecturer told you that to be eligible to join the National Union of Journalists, half of your earnings had to come from journalism, you couldn’t imagine that such a thing would ever come to pass.

And when, a couple of years later, you read Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own (paid link), and she posits that in order to write a woman needs five thousand pounds a year and a room of one’s own, again, you refuse to believe that this could ever happen for you. But it will. It does.

I also want to warn you that you might never lose the feeling that you don’t fit in; that you’re not cool enough for the cool kids, and everyone else thinks you’re kind of odd but somehow you manage to build a career, a whole life, on connecting with people who feel the exact same way.

I know! Who’d have thought it?

So, without giving the game away, let me tell you five things that aren’t going to tear a massive hole in the fabric of time or whatever, but will give you a leg up on life.

Really, what are you thinking? Stick with the red. A bluey red. Clinique 100% Red, until MAC cosmetics are created and invent Ruby Woo. While we’re talking make-up, liquid eyeliner will go on much easier if you draw a line in eye pencil first, then the brush will glide over it. Also, foundation is meant to even out your skin tone, not completely cover it and give up on that green stick that’s meant to tone down your rosy cheeks. It makes you look like you’re from Mars.

You know that rail of 50’s summer dresses at Camden Lock market priced at a fiver each? Buy whichever ones you can get into. Buy the whole rail. Never take good cheap vintage clothes for granted. I can’t stress this enough.

I know our adolescence was blighted by not living near enough to a tube station. There was a lot of leaving gigs early to get the last bus or missing the last bus and having to walk from Edgware or, worse, Hendon, but the crappiest places that you’ll live in are the places you choose because they’re near to a tube station. One day you might even actually choose to live somewhere that doesn’t have a tube station. Buses are cool. Eventually they run all through the night, but I can see that’s not very helpful to you right now. (Also, one day you might write a novel about how your entire personality was shaped by not living near a tube station. Although I’m probably not meant to let slip about that or the many, many novels you will write. (paid link))

You currently think that smoking is absolutely the coolest thing but secretly you don’t understand what all the fuss is about because it doesn’t really do anything for you. Let’s try and keep it this way. You might as well stop your sporadic smoking now, before a man who you think you’re in love with (you’re not) teaches you to inhale and twenty years later, you’ll have spent THOUSANDS of English pounds on smokes. I’m not even going to try and tell you what damage you’re doing to your perfectly pink teenage lungs. THOUSANDS of pounds. Being cool is not worth that much.

You have to be braver. Please stop being so scared. Don’t listen to people telling you that you can’t and that you never will, but especially don’t listen to that voice inside your head that shouts it out the loudest.

So, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. You’ll be fine and when you’re not, as ever, the music and the books and all that beautiful stuff will pull you through. I promise.

Live on,

Sarra x

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.