You don't know this yet, but the quiet you feel isn't emptiness. It's room. Room for a life you haven't built yet. Stop apologising for taking up space you were always allowed to have.

I know how much you hate being the last one picked, how you hover at the edge of conversations pretending you're not listening, how you sometimes take the long way home just to avoid running into people from school. You've become an expert at looking busy when you've got nowhere to be. You read the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast, count the cracks in the pavement, sit cross-legged on your bedroom floor pulling apart old cassette tapes and winding them back together with a pencil.

Nobody knows quite what to do with you, and some days you don't either. But there's something wonderful happening in all those hours you think you're wasting. You're developing your own tastes, your own peculiar sense of humour, your ability to notice things other people walk straight past. You're becoming someone, even when it feels like nothing is happening at all.

And I wish you'd stop measuring your life against the kids who seem to have everything worked out. Half of them are bluffing, and the other half will change their minds a dozen times before they're thirty. You're going to change yours too. About where you live, what you want, who you love, even what you call yourself. You'll make some spectacular mistakes, buy furniture that won't fit through the front door, fall for people who are completely wrong for you, and occasionally wonder how someone your age can still have absolutely no idea what they're doing. But you'll also discover the pleasure of coming home to a place that feels like yours, putting your favourite song on far too loud, leaving a book open on the kitchen table because nobody is going to tell you to put it away. And that quiet you used to dread? Some evenings you'll find yourself looking forward to it all day.