Freeboot

Go out and make lots of mistakes. They won't seem like mistakes at the time, but they will be, and that's a good thing. They will be the the most important growing experiences of your life, both joyous and painful.

Avoid the allure of being the person you see on pinterest, the girl eating noodles in her cute little apartment, the guy with the nice watch shaking hands the a smiling executive. These people are drugs; they will addict you and you will never be free. They will plant a seed of panic in your gut that will take years of digging and hacking to root out again, if you ever can.

Find something physical that makes you feel like magic and power swirled into one - dancing behind closed doors, running the block around your house at night and imagining you're a vigilante, learn to box by watching videos online. It doesn't matter what your body looks like, or will ever look like. Your body is NOT your avatar; your body is your SPACESHIP. Make sure it's fueled, in good repair, that hyperdrive can be enabled, if you need it. All spaceships have their limitations, their quirks, their character -- Millennium falcon, Firefly. Your physical body is how you move through their world, how you explore our earthly galaxy. Worry about the wiring, the booster charge. Don't worry about the paint job and paneling.

There is a youtube video for everything. There is a book for everything else. Everyone who knows anything about anything once knew nothing about it at all. Teachers don't find you -- you find teachers. I still don't know how to play chess because I've been waiting three decades for someone to offer to teach me. I feel safe not knowing because then no one can hold me accountable if I'm bad at it, and I hate that about myself.

Walls protect you but they also make it impossible to move forward.

If you're trying to find something, you need to make yourself able to be found by that thing, too. People, job, adventure.

Stop trying to do all your work at once: saving all the dishes to do at once, all your laundry at once, all the meal prep at once, achieve all your dreams at once. Some things are possible to do all at once, some are not, and you will set yourself up to fail if that's how you've trained yourself to think. Everything can be accomplished a little bit everyday, though.

Inspiration and motivation are the most dangerous words in the world. The only word that matters is work. And not big work, not wham-bam-kapow work. But small, daily work. It's not glamorous. It makes a terrible story. And you don't want to believe me because it flies in the face of the magic of artistry, that drug we're all so addicted to.

Work. A little bit everyday. No one wants to do this. And I promise you that the excuses you will invent to avoid working a little bit every day will end up keeping you quiet and anonymous for the rest of your life.

Scare yourself. Get a 9 - 5, McDonalds is fine. Freelance is a trap. Don't make creativity your work until you can do it on your terms. You need reliable income to survive in the world. You cannot hinge your happiness on windfalls. The world does not owe you windfalls, no matter how nice of a person you are.

The twenties are a strange, fetishized decade. People will try to tell you what to do, or not do (including me.) They will sarcastically commend you on 'growing up' and they will admonish you for still being 'too young.' ("Pshh, you're still a baby! Talk to me when you're thirty-five!" etc). They will ask you what you're doing with your life. They will tell you what to do with your life. They will expect you to 'be' something. They will expect you to be a finished person now.

Twenties don't matter. Thirties don't matter. None of these numbers mean anything, expect to those who need a yardstick by which to quantify their value against the value of others. They invent the standards, then hold you to them as if they are self evident. Some people are very weak inside. They need this to survive. You don't need to hate them for it, but neither do you need to entertain their self absorbed fantasy.

If anyone hands you a contract for what your age, you relationship status, your income level means, burn it. Marriage, kids, career ladder, savings account... the only value they have is the value you assign it. If you want it more than anything else, then chase it. Value it. But learn to untangle what you want and value from what society has brainwashed you to want and value.

Most importantly --

Your physical appearance is going to try to dictate and control your entire life. It overreaches in its assumed power. You cannot allow that. Shove it out of the way. Tie it to a chair. Slap it, if you have to. And now go do what you want to do, regardless. So easy to say, so hard to do, but there is nothing more important.

Do not choose to be safe and anonymous rather than explore the world at the risk of being judged by it. I will judge you for hiding. You will always be judged, everywhere, by everyone. Put your blinders on. You give power to what you acknowledge. In this one thing, you are allowed to be as ignorant as you like. Just like the news is mostly advertisements and political angles, so too are other's judgements. We judge ourselves and then fling the judgements at others to deflect them. People judge in others what they are most insecure about in themselves.

We are all flawed, primitive, fleshy blobs. And yet we can go to space, cure cancer, and rattle the bones of the universe. We are, each one of us, both of these things. Always, and at the same time.