Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

by Dolly Alderton

I wished away my life, unaware I was the proprietor of a material more valuable than gold: youth.

When a person’s yellow taxi light is off, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to convince them to switch it on.

But I worry that you are as addicted to the imagined rejection as you are the imagined longing. If that’s true, why? Is it possible that, just as you form made-up stories about men, you’ve also created one about yourself? Have you decided that you are someone who won’t ever find love? Are you trying to look for anecdotal evidence to fortify this theory so you can continue knowing you are undeserving of love?

Every time you become obsessed with these fantasy boys, you are falling in love with your own imagination. That’s not about connection and love. That’s not about anyone other than you.

I think you might be a romantic, which is a great thing, but it could also mean you overestimate or overanalyse a person’s characteristics in order to cast them in the self-penned future scenes of your life.

Our capacity to be humiliated and humbled by love is evergreen, and there’s something wild and extraordinary about that.

I don’t want to romanticize your pain, but I now understand exactly what she meant. Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive – it means we’re connecting and creating and caring. We’re participating. We’re making the most of this short go. We’re opening up and taking risks, we’re tangling ourselves in other lives.

Of all the people who have mistreated me over the years – who have said the cruellest, most inhibiting things – the one I most wish I could speak to is my younger self.

And those relationships will be so much better when you know you are choosing, rather than need, to be in them. Learn to be with yourself now. Your future self will thank you.