Read: Caitlin Moran’s Powerful Open Letter To Teenage Girls

Here at IMAGE, our love for?Caitlin Moran knows no bounds. The journalist, author, and unofficial Feminist spokesperson?is, quite simply, phenomenal. She has sold over a million books while still keeping up her (other) day job as a columnist at The Times, writing sitcoms and being a mum. Her writing is heartfelt and eloquent, her words powerful and unapologetic. This weekend, Moran spoke at literary event Letters Live and performed an open letter she wrote “to the teenage girls I meet at my book signings,” and her words will resonate and stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.

For you see, all of us have been that teenage girl. That tense, unsure adolescent who is simultaneously?trying to fit in while forming her own identity. The struggles, the anxiety, the fear that perhaps nothing will ever change during the Bad Years – we’ve all been there and worn the T-shirt. We’re older and wiser now, but we’ll never forget our teenage selves for they shaped us as we continued our journey to adulthood. Moran’s letter is dedicated to any young woman currently going through this emotional transition and finding it a struggle.

Read it, share it and spread her wonderful words to all the women in your life that need a boost.

Her letter in full, is below:

“I can tell instantly as when you step up, darling. I know. The posture, the sleeves over the hands, something in your eyes – you the girls who are struggling right now.

Some of you are hard and tense with overeating. Others, anorexic, feel like starving baby birds when I ?hug you – a handful of brittle bamboo canes. Maybe your arms are furious with criss-cross razor lines, or studs in your ear, your nose, your tongue, where you have tried to reclaim your bodies from something, or someone, with the snap of a piercing gun.

Sometimes your parents are there – standing in the background, nervous, their faces anxiously projecting, ?She likes you. Please make her feel better now. Oh Christ, don’t break her.?

Other times, your parents aren’t there, but still present – their carelessness or rejection as tangible as if they were standing a foot away, casting mile-long shadows.

What do I say to you girl – you beautiful girls? You girls who are having the Bad Year – the Bad Year where you cannot remember why you were happy aged 12, and cannot imagine being happy at 21? What can I say in one minute, two minutes, three minutes?

So many things. That panic and anxiety will lie to you – they are gonzo, malign commentators on the events of your life. Their counsel is wrong. You are as high, wired and badly advised by adrenaline as you would be by cocaine.

Panic and anxiety are mad, drugged fools. Do not listen to their grinding-toothed, sweaty bulls***.

Here is a promise, and a fact: you will never, in your life, ever have to deal with anything more than the next minute. However much it feels like you are approaching an event – an exam, a conversation, a decision, a kiss – where, if you screw it up, the entire future will just burn to hell in front of you and you will end, you are not.

Because what you must do right now, and for the rest of your life, is learn how to build a girl. You.

That will never happen. That is not what happens.

The minutes always come one at a time, inside hours that come one at a time, inside days that come one at a time – all orderly strung, like pearls on a necklace, suspended in a graceful line. You will never, ever have to deal with more than the next 60 seconds.

Do the calm, right thing that needs to be done in that minute. The work, or the breathing, or the smile. You can do that, for just one minute. And if you can do a minute, you can do the next.

Pretend you are your own baby. You would never cut that baby, or starve it, or overfeed it until it cried in pain, or tell it it was worthless. Sometimes, girls have to be mothers to themselves. Your body wants to live – that’s all and everything it was born to do. Let it do that, in the safety you provide it. Protect it. That is your biggest job. To protect your skin, and heart.

Buy flowers – or if you are poor, steal one from someone’s garden; the world owes you that much at least: blossom – and put them at the end of the bed. When you wake, look at it, and tell yourself you are the kind of person who wakes up and sees flowers. This stops your first thought being, ?I fear today. Today is the day maybe I cannot survive anymore,? which I know is what you would otherwise think. Thinking about blossom before you think about terror is what girls must always do, in the Bad Years.

And the most important thing? To know that you were not born like this. You were not born scared and self-loathing and overwhelmed. Things have been done – which means things can be undone. It is hard work. But you are not scared of hard work, compared with everything else you have dealt with. Because what you must do right now, and for the rest of your life, is learn how to build a girl. You.

Love, Caitlin.”

Via Stylist Magazine