Nobody Told Us This Stuff

The adult disclaimers we deserved but never got.

I’ve been sitting with a quiet frustration lately. Not the kind that makes you want to flip a table, but the kind that shows up in the middle of a Tuesday when you catch yourself doing something you know isn’t good for you and think — why did nobody ever actually tell me not to do this?

Like really tell me. Not in a brochure. Not tucked inside a lesson about something else. Just someone sitting across from me going: hey!! this is how this works. These are the things that will quietly chip away at you if you don’t pay attention.

I’ve been calling them “adult disclaimers.” The things that should come standard with growing up but somehow never do.

I recorded a whole episode about it last week — it started as a note in my phone from April 7th that just said things you may need to be reminded of and kind of stayed there until I had enough to say. But I wanted to write through some of it here too, because some things need to be said in more than one place.

Your friends are not supposed to make you feel bad about yourself.

I know that sounds so obvious it almost shouldn’t need saying. But I’ve been witnessing the opposite more than I’d like lately, and it keeps striking me how normalized it’s become. There’s a version of it that’s subtle — the jokes that land just a little too sharp, the silence when something good happens for you, the energy in the room that makes you feel like you should be smaller.

And there’s a version that’s more internal — where other people’s wins start to feel like reminders of what you haven’t done yet. I’ve felt that too. I think most people have. But there’s a difference between sitting with that discomfort privately and turning it outward. The former is something to work through. The latter is something to pay attention to in the people around you.

Your friends’ success is not in competition with yours. It never was. And if someone in your life seems to believe otherwise, that’s information.

You have to be able to be alone with yourself.

Not in a dramatic, go live in the woods way. Just — if everyone in your life was unavailable for three days, could you be okay? Could you keep yourself company?

I think about this a lot because I genuinely believe that your relationship with yourself is the one that shapes everything else. How you fill quiet time. What you reach for when you’re uncomfortable. Whether you make decisions from a grounded place or a reactive one.

I’ve spent a lot of my twenties getting comfortable being alone — going to the coffee shop by myself, eating dinner out alone, taking the walk without waiting for someone to join me. And it’s probably been the best investment I’ve made. You learn a lot about what you actually want when you stop outsourcing your presence to other people.

Your body is the only one you have. Treat it like you know that.

This one sounds obvious too, until you realize how many of us are skipping meals to fit into something, or running on four hours of sleep like it’s a personality, or forgetting to drink water until 4pm. Not because we don’t care, but because we got busy and nobody ever made it feel urgent.

Taking care of yourself isn’t a reward for finishing everything on your list. It’s not something you get to do once you’ve been productive enough. It’s just — the baseline. The thing that makes everything else possible.

You don’t need a moment. You just need to start.

We’re so good at waiting. Waiting for January. Waiting for the new month, the new week, the feeling of being ready. And meanwhile the thing we want stays exactly where it was, except now we’ve also spent time feeling bad about not doing it yet.

If you want to make a change, tomorrow works. Tonight works. Right now works. The waiting is the thing that trains you to believe your own desires aren’t worth acting on immediately. And once that pattern sets in, it’s harder to shake than whatever the original thing was.

Be careful how you talk about yourself.

I don’t think we take this seriously enough. The way we speak about ourselves, especially out loud, especially in offhand moments, is doing omething. It’s not harmless venting. It’s repetition. And what we repeat becomes what we believe.

I’m not saying never complain, never be hard on yourself, never have a bad day. I’m saying pay attention to the through-line. What does your default language about yourself actually sound like? Because it shows up — in how you carry yourself, in what you ask for, in what you think you’re allowed to have.

These are things I needed to say out loud. Some of them I needed to hear again too — that’s usually how it works with this newsletter, I write my way back to something I already knew but had been moving too fast to hold onto.

Episode 30 goes deeper on all of this — it’s a solo episode, about 16 minutes, recorded from my pink bean bag next to my monstera. No frills. Just me thinking out loud. If any of this resonated, I think you’ll find something in it.

→ Listen to Ep 30: things you may need to be reminded of

And if there’s a disclaimer you wish someone had given you earlier — I’d genuinely love to know. Drop it in the comments.