If teens weren't quite buying the It Gets Better anti-bullying campaign, one has to only look to the latest star-studded confessional for silver lining.
In a
new book called
Dear Me: More Letters to my Sixteen-Year-Old Self, 70 celebs dish the dirt on their formative years, a kind of
It Gets Better from those for whom life truly did get better, a hell of a lot better: the rich and uber-famous.
One example: a pimply Hugh Jackman of yore describing his heartbreak at age 16, having been dumped at a bus stop by a girl named Penny. (Guess who's kicking herself now!)
“You’ll see her in a couple of years and wonder why you cried every time you heard the Lionel Richie song Penny Lover.” Then again, Lionel Richie never fails to bring a tear to my eye, for an altogether different reason, but I digress...
You've got Stephen King telling his younger self to say no to drugs, and pop star Danni Minogue saying the same -- about white bobby socks.
For literary giant JK Rowling, bass players should be avoided at all costs, while for hard rocker Alice Cooper, suprisingly, it's "trashy girls."
While not exactly packed with deep or moving words of wisdom for the insecure teen, Dear Me's does suggest that the teenage years are often tumultuous and far from peachy for most of us, even future Wolverines. Strangely, I would tell my former self not to take life so seriously, and of course to party while you still can...
If you could, what advice would you give to your angst-ridden and insecure 16-year-old self? Or wouldn't you change a thing, assuming the sum of your past experiences made you who you are today?
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