When I was your age, I didn't have the words. I felt things – the tightness, the flatness, the sense that I was somehow getting it wrong while everyone else seemed fine – but I couldn't name any of it. So I did what you do when you don't have the language: I decided the problem was me. I was too much, and not enough. I just needed to try harder, be better, get it together. I carried that for years.
What changed wasn't that life got easier. It was that, eventually, I went looking for the words – not for a class, not for a test, but because I needed to change how I was feeling about myself, and I'd run out of other options. I found out there was a whole language for what I'd been carrying. That the way I spoke to myself was a habit, not a fact. That self-care wasn't the bubble-bath version I'd been sold – it was something quieter, more honest and far more useful. It took me a long time to find that language. You're holding a version of it now.
In the years since, this became the work of my life – though it started long before I'd have called it that. I trained as a teacher. I worked in the arts: putting cameras in young people's hands and watching them notice things about the world, and about themselves, that they couldn't yet put into words; working alongside them in cultural organisations and at community festivals, making things, taking risks, turning up for each other.
Later I trained as a positive psychology practitioner – the formal way of saying I went and got the science to sit beside what the arts had already shown me. Putting the two together changed how I see. I notice connections most people walk straight past: between making something and feeling okay, between one small moment and a much bigger shift, between how we treat ourselves and what we're then able to offer everyone else. These days that's the whole job – using those connections to help people learn to understand how they're really doing, and to look after the people around them too.
Some people call me a self-care researcher. I'll take it – though really what I've been doing is trying to pull 'self-care' back from the bubble baths and the price tags, and hand it back to us as something real, everyday and within reach. That's the reframe. It's a big reason this book exists. I've spent years in classrooms and in projects with people your age, and I've seen the same two things sitting side by side: how capable, creative and switched-on young people are – and how quietly, relentlessly hard so many of them are on themselves when they think no one's watching. The same way I once was.
So, I'm not writing to you as an expert at a safe distance. I'm writing to you as someone who has spent a working life beside people your age, and who was once a person your age who needed this book and didn't have it. The longer I do this work, the more sure I am of one thing: the people who most need this language tend to get handed it last – usually long after they could have used it.
I also see what you're carrying. You're the first generation to grow up with an algorithm deciding what the world looks like, to use AI before anyone's worked out what it means, to figure out who you are while a thousand filtered versions of who you could be scroll past you every day. That is a genuinely hard thing to be asked to do, and most of the advice out there wasn't written for it.
So, before you start, here's the rest of it. I'm not going to tell you how to feel, or add one more thing to the list of things you're supposedly failing at, or pretend any of this is simple. I don't think you need fixing – and I haven't got myself perfectly sorted, either; nobody has. What I can offer is small, on purpose. Twenty moments. One question. Three to six minutes at a time. The grand version of self-care – the spa day, the perfect morning routine – was never going to fit a life like yours. This will. It fits in the gaps: between the bell and the next class, between the bus and the front door, between waking up and reaching for your phone.
You don't have to believe me yet. You just have to be honest with yourself for 60 seconds at a time.
The rest builds from there.
Go gently,
Narelle
Buy your copy of Dr Narelle Lemon's Hey, How Are You, Actually? here
