http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/news/a46590/ask-polly-heather-havrilesky-interview/

She argues that most of life's rewards are to be found in the very same overworked, frazzled, messy spaces others eschew. "Love yourself now," she asks of us, "exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you'll know exactly how big that is."

You often seem to draw on your own past, with you talking through yourself and to yourself, as if to say, 'Here's what I know now.' There was an era, when I first started writing the column, when I went back to my twenties over and over and over. I just loved reliving my past humiliations. My twenties were dramatically terrible, and lonely, and I drank too much, and I stepped on people's toes. I had this creepy sense that everyone thought I was crazy. People in their twenties have a habit of pathologizing each other's very mundane and common flaws. Everybody's trying to figure out where their boundaries are. Not many people have healthy boundaries. Some people never come out of that. They just shut down, say, 'I'll engage less, and I'll build my wall higher.' Then some inciting factor breaks down the wall, and all of a sudden they're sitting there in the rubble, and all of their feelings are there for the first time that they've bottled up for ten years.