Graduation season is in full swing. Take a step back to where it all began; age 15 embarking on those dastardly GCSEs.

Dear 15-year-old Meg,

Things are about to get a whole lot more important.

How are the braces holding up? Terrible? Yeah, I know all too well. BUT they will come off sooner than you think and they’re not as bad as you think they are either; nobody notices!

Everything that you do from this point onwards will be a stepping stone and not a destination. Make sure you get your 5 A*-Cs and you’re all good.

The next 5/6 years will be some of the toughest on a whole multitude of levels. You will experience things that you could never imagine happening right now but you have no idea how strong that will make you. Never let anybody call you closed in a negative way because being private isn’t negative. I mean you’ll still be emotionally challenged at 21 so who cares!

You may think that you have years ahead of you – of course that is true but metaphorically NO. You are old before your time and you have got to go and have your fun. Go and do what you WANT to do not what you NEED to do. Be selfish, be spontaneous, be you.

Boys will be mean until you are a pensioner so don’t sweat it. One day a man will make you sweat for all the right reasons.

Lambrini must stop being your drink of choice. Seriously have some decorum, Reading gal. Quickly snap out of your emo phase, it never worked for you kid. Geek chic was always much better and COOLER.

Cool is so badly defined at school. Cool is getting kick ass grades, cool is building an amazing future, cool is not doing drugs, cool is whatever you want it to be and not what people ask it to be. You will still not know if you’ll ever be cool when you’re grey.

I’m not going to tell you what happens for future Meg because that’s stupid. We can’t predict the future for a reason, it’s ever-changing and that’s what’s exciting about it.

All I will say is for God’s sake go and make some mistakes. Not huge, catastrophic ones but go and play, learn from them and don’t go for the safe option. You’ll have more than enough time for that later on in life.

See you in a few years.

Meg aged 21