More important than anything in the world is to be mature- be naïve and easily persuaded, but try your hardest to stay mature. Listen to your friends when they whisper that they really want you to be happy. Hope they’re not lying when they say they want to help you find happiness through this “rebellious” young adulthood, even though you had absolutely no intention of finding it that way. Just promise me you wont think about what they’ll say when you start to find it. Don’t think. Act.

Never let your friends, or your short term boyfriend, Clyde, know how scared you are to find it this way. Don’t feel hurt when they act like they don’t understand. Maybe there’s one thing more important than being mature- and that is, don’t let them know how clean you’ve always been. Act like you knew all this, about everything “badass”, before they came around. Unless you do, they’ll lose respect for you. Although you know deep down that one day you’ll lose your newness to them, and your existence as a novelty will end- and you know that because you’re only teenagers, that that will make you unimportant to them. Even though you know deep down that next year they’ll have found someone different, stay with them. The last thing you want is for them to ignore you- forget you.

Ever since you were eight you wanted to find happiness, and while your definition involves legal trouble, and trading in choir practice and ballet recitals for drug testing and black jelly bracelets- you still wish you could be happy. At least your friends like this version of you. Why give that up? Why give them up?

The best course of action on your journey to happiness is not to be loud. Listen closely and make some jokes. Since you know some day your sense of humor will be old to them, and they’ll tell you “Shut up!” when you try to tell them a story- be as selective as possible. Be sure what you say is worth saying. I guess that goes back to being “mature”.

I hope you find happiness your own way- the only true way, and after you find it, simply send them home for a few years till they can truly help you find it. If you tell them now that you’d like to find it your own way, they’ll freak out and be immature, and a few of them will try to be as supportive as possible, they really will try.

But they probably won’t succeed.