Chelsea Fagan

When these nights come along, you can’t fight them. I mean, technically you can stay home and sulk on the internet, but you know that you will end up hating yourself.

Work relentlessly on your sexual technique, but don’t be all slutty and gross about it. Practice on a banana or something. A banana with a condom on it.

Perhaps in a very distant future, you will be able to pick and choose the memories you want to keep, but for a very long time, one memory will always bleed into another.

I mean, I got ripped to shreds because people were upset that I went on Anderson and they felt that I didn’t do a good job explaining microaggressions and racism.

It provides no closure, gives you nothing tangible to work on, and doesn’t even make for good bouts of self-loathing. You just have to kind of absorb the blow and accept that sometimes things don’t work out even though you did everything right, and there is nothing you can do about it.

The amount of time you spend obsessing over your outfits in the mirror before you leave the door, and how many times you tell yourself that you look ugly/lumpy in everything you try on.

We like pretty people, we like young people, we like able-bodied people, we like thin people, we like white people.

Admit it, there is still at least a part of you that will leave clean, unfolded laundry on your couch/the end of your bed until it’s basically dirty again.

They will be angry. You will confront them, and they will hate it.

You can have any number of backgrounds, any number of degrees, and any degree of unpaid in your internship, and still find someone who loves you.

The truth is simply that as a woman, people are predisposed to listening less. They come into the conversation with a host of notions about what your sex (something shared with over half of the world’s population, mind you) is supposed to say about you.

Unless you are starting the night swigging some Smirnoff from the bottle and announcing how you are just trying to get “white girl wasted” and “grind on some randos,” there is no way you’re going to have a good time.

Be humiliated by them. Be out one night and get asked by a mutual acquaintance how long you have been together, only to be pre-empted by your lover saying, “Oh, we’re not.”

Few things are more overrated for you than having an active social life. You see all the people who are constantly going out to these parties and bars and Roman orgies and you’re like “Really? Haven’t they heard of Dr. Who?”

If you’re not making a lot of money, if you have a terrible breakup, if you get kicked out of your apartment for unforeseen circumstances — they still treat you like a good person, deserving of respect.

People tell you all the time that you are impatient. And you know you are. You know that you are filled with nothing but desire, and are often incapable of understanding the great privilege that is being you in this very moment.

She is embarrassed. She gathers the sheets around her chest and laughs nervously. “Wow, we really got carried away last night,” she says, eager for reassurance. “Yeah,” you reply, “we did.”

When you don’t love someone, you just don’t. And there is no way to soften that, or make it sound better, or provide any kind of runner-up consolation prize that isn’t a complete slap in the face.