1. Your 24-year-old metabolism has not become a glacier, it’s just a little harder to get it out of bed in the morning.

2. If you floss your teeth on the reg you get to be all, yea, I take care of my teeth, dentist, you’ve got nothing on me.

3. There comes a point in young adulthood when you need to stop smoking cigarettes. When you do, you’ll save your lungs, your wallet, and your conscience a lot of trouble.

4. Declining offered mini-loans and breaking away from your family’s phone plan will make your parents view you as an adult more than any master’s degree every could.

5. Sometimes, it’s ok to wear the same jeans throughout an entire work week. Fewer people will notice than you think. In fact, no one might.

6. Lovely people are all around you—the gangly tenor you sit next to in choir who silently loans you a pencil to mark your score, the bronzed, gum-smacking lady behind the Walgreens counter who genuinely cares how your day was.

7. Two of your dogs might die in one week, your foot could suddenly break because it was “stressed,” and your best friend may fall in love and disappear for six months. Life pulls that kind of shit sometimes.

8. It’s fine to enjoy a relationship that’s primarily about sex for awhile. Don’t let anyone shame you or tell you how unhealthy it is—they’re just jealous.

9. It’s not that weird to have cuddling dreams involving your boss when you’re overwhelmed at work. It’s still kind of weird.

10. If your only sister starts dating an uneducated, jobless loser who’s 17 years older than her and he drunkenly calls her a terrible word, it can be fun to throw his keys down an elevator shaft at a party across town from his apartment.

11. Online dating will not meet or exceed your expectations, it will only yield a series of obscene internet catcalls.

12. Protein powder doesn’t taste good, stop kidding yourself.

-Natalie Berkley