9 Stories That Will Remind You To Be Kind To Yourself

Read these if you've ever worried about money, fell out with a friend, or yelled at your therapist.

On adulting:

1. Here's What It's Like To File Bankruptcy At 30 by Daniel Dylan Wray

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

"As the clatter of the letterbox echoed up from downstairs, I hurriedly made my way down to check the mail, knowing another card was due. “Great news, Dan, You’ve been accepted,” a confirmation email from a company that specialised in giving high-interest credit to people already in debt had told me a few days earlier.

A credit limit of up to £1,200 was advertised and I figured I’d be good for maybe £700 or thereabouts. But the letter revealed they’d given me the minimum £200 – not even enough to scrape by for another month."

Read the whole thing here.

2. 7 Things I Thought I'd Be By 37 by Lisa Williamson

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

"As a writer for young adults, I spend approximately five days a week in the head of a teenager. So it wasn't until I received a tweet from a reader expressing her dismay that, at 37, she was the same age as the mum in my latest novel All About Mia that it actually dawned on me how old I would be on my next birthday.

Yep. Thirty. Seven.

I've never been much of a planner. As an actor-turned-novelist, a tolerance for uncertainty has been compulsory my entire adult life. Equally, I've always resisted the pressure to hit certain milestones at predetermined points. Just to be clear, I'm not living some kind of drawn-out student existence; I bake my own granola, have multiple ISA accounts, flip my mattress on a monthly basis, and am generally regarded as "the sensible one" amongst my friends. However, I can't ignore the fact that turning 37 officially tips me into my "late thirties", forcing me to acknowledge that the usual markers of grown-up life have been conspicuously absent from my life so far."

Read the whole thing here.

On managing your mental health:

3. How My Relationships Helped Me Come To Terms With My Depression by Karl Mercer

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

"I am a liar and so are you and if you say you're not then you're lying. But believe me when I say that I don't condemn that, because there are some lies you can't avoid telling. After all, you can't answer every "How are you?" with unflinching honesty. For the most part, people just want a "Yeah, not bad, you?" not "I have a strong sense of impending doom."

Read the whole thing here.

4. Here's What I Learned About Myself After A Year In Therapy by Hayley Campbell

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed

"In an interview with a biographer, Donald Trump was asked to reflect on the meaning of life. He said, "No, I don't want to think about it. I don't like to analyse myself because I might not like what I see." Therapists should buy billboards, they should print T-shirts, they should hire planes to scrawl his words in the sky, because no one has ever given a more convincing argument in favour of therapy than Donald Trump avoiding himself. If you’re a person who isn’t strong enough to look in a mirror, you’re probably the one who needs to the most. What if you’re like Donald Trump?"

Read the whole thing here.

On breaking up:

5. How To Break Up With Someone Over Dinner by Laura Silver

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

"Ask me about the most important moments in my life, and I will tell you what we ate. For every low I can recall a soul-soothing dish, and it doesn’t have to be fancy. Remove cardboard sleeve, pierce film lid, and forget about everything might be the easiest first three steps towards mending a broken heart.

When memories of nights laughed away with best friends in beloved restaurants are sparked, the scent of steak charring on a grill tends to drift through my mind.

The first time I went on a date to a posh restaurant was actually by accident. I was 22 and had recently starting going out with someone. One Friday after work we met up at a pub in Notting Hill with the vague intention of finding somewhere cheap for dinner later. We were at that stage where you’re past the uncertainty of whether or not you’re into each other, while still being high on each other’s existence."

Read the whole thing here.

6. I'm Still Not Sure How I Lost My Best Friend by Chelsey Pippin

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

"Everybody knows what it feels like to stand in the shower and try to catch water in your hands. You don’t know why you do it, especially when you know how it works: You’re not a bowl, you’re a sieve made of waterproof flesh. It was never going to stay. You watch it pool and leak, pool and leak, until you get frustrated and you let your hands fall and decide it was stupid anyway.

That’s me and friendship.

I could blame my childhood: I was born an Air Force brat, and moved every three years or less until I was 11, managing to switch schools three more times even after my family settled down. On the one hand, it gave me a sense of independence and a passion for finding my own path, but on the other hand, it gave me an insurmountable need to regularly start over, and what a therapist once called “abandonment issues.” That’s a term that rarely gets applied to the people doing the leaving, but here I am, mourning my own exits."

Read the whole thing here.

On finding your people online:

7. How I Found My Didis On The Internet by Jasmin Nahar

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed

"I got a really bad emo haircut in 2007: shoulder length, with choppy layers somewhere around my ears. It was a style inspired by a girl in a Punkyfish Clothing ad, and it seemed like the perfect fit for me, considering my teenage interests revolved largely around listening to My Chemical Romance out loud on my phone while hanging out with fellow emos at my local town centre. But it was an ill-judged decision, and I’d failed to factor in the fact that as an Indian girl, I had a lot of thick hair that meant my new layers stuck up comically. I looked, as one friend put it, like a mushroom. And I could tell people, namely my parents, were disappointed with my decision. It was painfully visible on their faces. My hair, once the cause of my “Curly Sue” nickname, and later long and straight and down to my backside, had been chopped at and chopped at as soon as I was old enough to go to to the hairdressers myself, and it had culminated in this."

Read the whole thing here.

8. How Fandom Gave Me A Place To Call Home by Alwyn Hamilton

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

"When I was 3 and a half, my family – after years of being vaguely itinerant – moved permanently from my native Canada to a small town in France. I guess I’m an immigrant; I just don’t get called that because I am white, Anglo-Saxon, and middle-class, and I came from North America rather than to it.

Instead I get called an expat. Which is a way of saying I’m not visibly un-French, and as such get to bypass a thousand and one obstacles I would have faced if anything other than my passport marked me out as foreign. But even so, I have always felt awkward answering the question I have been asked over and over my whole life: “So do you feel more Canadian or French?” It took me a long time to figure out that the answer is neither. In the end, I am bicultural in some aspects and totally culturally disconnected in others. I also come from the generation that is the first to be internationally pop-culturally connected in a different way: online."

Read the whole thing here.

And finding your people IRL:

9. 7 Moments of Solidarity from Strangers by Mariam Ansar

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed

"I was a child when I was told not to call elders by their names, but by “uncle” and 'auntie' instead. And so it began. My adopted family arrived in the guise of strangers: a revolving door of smiling eyes and hands being affectionately placed upon my covered head. So far, they haven’t stopped.

There is a secret kind of happiness that comes with becoming a part of the family to would-be strangers. Bonded by an instinctive familiarity, and unprecedented strife, it feels full. It involves so much of what we can’t help but be."

Read the whole thing here.