What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

That regret is really the thing you have to worry about. When you are young you depend so much on the opinions of others and have so much fear of hurting their perception of you. In the end, people will come and go. What you are left with are the regrets of things not tried, decisions unfortunately made, and pretending to be something you are not only hurts you.

Do what you can live with, if you do not then regret will hang around you for the rest of your days. Long after friendships end, lovers leave, and the world moves on, you will still be there wondering what could have been.

Follow your passions. Open yourself to new experiences. Do not close yourself off to more friends. The world has so much to offer if you give it a chance.

Taking others’ advice is all well and good, but you have to be willing to live with the consequences of the decision whether it was your idea or not. Nothing is more aggravating than having something fall through because you listened to someone else over your own instincts.

Everyone around you only knows a version of you. The only one who truly knows who you are and what you are about is yourself. Be sure that your actions and words are something you can live with, no matter the consequences.

It is freeing to be true to yourself. The sooner you learn that, the easier living becomes. You do not have to measure up to anyone else’s ideas about you, live to your own standards. Letting go of other peoples’ hangups and prejudices to make your own decisions is beautiful. Be who you were meant to be.