Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

by Dolly Alderton

What I learnt from sharing my most private pain with a semi-professional problem-solver was that the mere act of asking for help was, in itself, healing. It was as if I had crept down to the docks under the cover of darkness and floated a message out in a bottle, imagining how it might be received. By writing it I was acknowledging that someone might care about me; that they’d be able to say the right thing without knowing me. Because I was feeling something other people had felt and therefore I wasn’t, as I’d suspected, the loneliest and strangest woman in the world.

Because here’s who it really sucks for – it doesn’t suck for us, the long-legged legends who can always see everything at a gig. It sucks for them. Because if a man has a problem with being with a woman who is taller than him, it’s not that he thinks she’s too big, it’s because he thinks he’s too small.

A final home truth from someone who has been there: there is absolutely nothing you can do to change this striking, unusual, beautiful thing about your body. This is the only vehicle you have to take you right through to the end of your life.

I want to prefix this advice with a plain-as-day fact: some of the most important relationships of your teenage life will take place in your head.

intimacy means being seen and loved for all you are, while seeing and loving someone for all they are.

You have to know yourself before you can allow someone else to know you too.

You obviously have a lot of love to give and one day you’ll find someone who really deserves to receive it. He’ll be real and here and you can love the hell out of him. You’ll know the map of his freckles. You’ll always have his favourite cereal in your cupboard. Every Lionel Richie lyric will finally make sense. All that frantic, horny, obsessive, beautiful, gentle love will have somewhere to go. So don’t spend too much time in your head. You might miss him.

then you should be honest with her. Do this kindly – describe the changes you’ve noticed in your friendship, rather than the flaws you see in her.

When someone talks about something all the time – whether it concerns them or not – it means it is a topic that terrorizes them to some degree.

Instead of looking at your life and seeing the lack, look for the abundance.

Any time you feel jealous of your friends, make a promise to yourself to turn it into an act of love and it will neutralize any feelings of bitterness.

Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another. That, I’ve learnt, is one of life’s only guarantees.

But to briefly borrow schoolteacher speak: you don’t want to punish the whole class because of the few who misbehaved and ruined it for everyone.

Romantic partners should be aware of each other’s insecurities and be sensitive to them. But it’s not their job to solve them.

but we are in charge of our own decisions when it comes to love.

Heartbreak often leads to an entire abandonment of self – we do things to stay close to the person we love, regardless of whether it is damaging for us. We spend time with them even if it hurts, and we obsess over them.

In our first lecture she told us of when she once visited a friend who had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked. ‘It’s not as bad as heartbreak,’ her friend replied.

It is a beautiful, terrifying fact: just as our vulnerability to heartbreak never changes, neither does our vulnerability to fall in love.

My tears collected in a wine glass and I told her that I wanted to sleep until it was over. She held me by the shoulders and said: ‘One day you’ll look back on this and you will think, I was never more alive.’

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.

Anyone who has hated themselves and tried to fix it with an extreme diet or an expensive dress will tell you the same thing: the thoughts remain. They might quieten for a while, but they return – editing the surface only acts as a short-term fix. The true transformation of self-esteem, the ‘you-won’t-believe-the-before-and-after’ makeover, does not come from perfecting appearance. It comes from forming character.