Brianna Parkins: My dearest niece, here are all the mistakes I have made so you don’t have to

Dearest niece, it’s me, your favourite haphazard aunty. In keeping with family tradition, I am writing your birthday card after the actual date has come and gone. The balloons have been put away for another year, but my love for you remains up and blue-tacked to the walls 365 days of the year. Just remember, before you go off rolling your eyes, that I don’t have kids or a husband (or a fondness for either). I may become that weird, cranky-but-rich elderly aunt you suck up to so she leaves you everything in the will. You might think about getting a head start on that, instead of nicknaming me “Casper the Ghost” when I finally came back to Australia after being stuck in Ireland for two years during lockdown and my skin looked transparent. Although I did appreciate the joke, you could have at least waited until after we had scattered Grandad’s ashes. Or maybe that’s why it was so funny? Who am I to criticise art?

I am writing this instead of the usual poetic “happy birthday smelly bum” because you are entering the age of life known as the “Britney Spears paradox”, otherwise known as being “not a girl, not yet a woman”. The time where you’re not sure what you’re doing, what you want to be, how to love or be loved, what your sexuality is, who your friends really are, if your face suits a fringe, and all the other big questions. Mostly you can only find answers by trial and error. You will not emerge unscathed with your heart and hair strands unbroken.

[ Britney Spears was treated in a way that seems impossibly gross now. Could it happen again? ]

From my own experience, this period of spiritual, mental and emotional trench warfare lasts from the early teens to the early 30s. I wish I could step in for you and sort it out, that you could hand the video game controller to me like you used to when you got to a “hard bit” on a quest and needed me to take over for a while so I could get you past it with my grown-up knowledge and big thumbs. But life doesn’t work like that. All I can do is give you advice so that you learn from the mistakes I have already made so you don’t have to.

1. Buy good quality stockings and tights. The cheap “three for a fiver” pack will cost you so much more, in money and mornings spent furiously hopping up and down on one foot because they ripped when a fingernail looked in their direction.
2. Don’t obsess about being cool in high school. The people who were cool in high school or who made it their personality are not the coolest people at your 10-year reunion. The very things that people do at 16 to be cool (never going to school, smoking bongs down the back creek, getting their belly button pierced, bullying other kids) makes them sad as adults, especially if they don’t grow out of it.
3. Don’t waste your teens and 20s on boys (if that’s what you’re into). Those years are for your friends. For sleepovers and making up dances and filming silly videos. For hanging out in uni dorms, baking, hiking and surfing. For getting on minibuses for girls’ trips around wineries or southeast Asia. At some stage you and your friends will start getting sucked into the currents of your partners’ lives. It’s normal, but you’ll find women in particular feel required to give up more of their old lives in order to become a family unit. Then, just when you need that kind of friendship the most because being a mum is hard or pursuing a demanding career is tough or your parents are getting old, it’s the hardest to find. Invest in your friends, not those unfulfilling relationships we have in our 20s. Your grandad (my dad) once told me “men are no good in their 20s trust me”. They’re fighting their own battles figuring out who they are, and unfortunately some young blokes think masculinity is defined by how badly they treat women.
4. Try to de-centre men and their approval as the guiding star for your actions. It’s hard I know at this age, where social status is often gauged on inclusion from “the boys” on their terms. But you can waste your life trying to sand yourself down into a lesser version of yourself for people who only love you on the condition that you don’t be yourself. Don’t waste decades pretending jokes are funny for the sake of someone else’s ego.
5. You cannot make someone love or respect you. You cannot “nice” someone into treating you the way you deserve to be treated. All you can do is ask and then leave if they don’t. You shouldn’t have to “earn” kindness from the person who says they love you.
6. Drugs. Don’t. But you will never get in trouble for calling an ambulance or a grown-up when someone needs help. You will never get in trouble for potentially saving a life or needing a safe exit from a dangerous situation.
7. Try to be nicer to your mum. I promise when you turn 25 you’ll regret all the nasty things you said to her as a teenager, when you were convinced she drew her strength from making sure you never had any fun at all. You’ll realise mums are just doing their best, raising you with the broken instruction manual handed down by their mum. By trying to give you better than what they had, they might make new mistakes. Just as you will when you have kids of your own.

Lastly, remember that I love you, that you are smart, tough and thoughtful. And that the niece who is nicest to me will get the diamonds x.