Judith Lucy, born and raised in Perth, is a comedian best known for her stand-up work. She’s also the bestselling author of two books and created two ABC series: Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey and Judith Lucy Is All Woman. Judith is also the 2015 winner of the Helpmann Award for Best Comedy Performer.

I know at the moment that things are pretty grim.

Your parents fight all the time, you’re still trying to work out what the hell sex is, you know nothing about boys, and your best friend is horrible. To add to this, a girl called Mandy, who is a year older, has started bullying you. Generally she just hassles you about having curly hair but you’re convinced that she wants to do some damage to you with a Bunsen burner. Every time you see her in the corridor you’re terrified. Lastly, you love performing, but everyone (especially your parents) tells you that while that might be a lovely hobby, you’ll never make a living out of it. Your father is very keen for you to be an accountant.

One of the worst things about being thirteen is that you’re so close to being an adult, you can almost taste it … but you’re not and sometimes it’s hard to imagine even making it to eighteen.

The good news is that I’m writing you this letter at forty-seven, so you survive it all. In fact, you’re pretty happy with yourself. The bad news is that you do a lot of stupid things before you get here. I would tell you more about that but I don’t want to take the fun out of being so drunk on a flight once that you and your best friend had no memory of getting off the plane apart from the fact that you knew it involved security guards and wheelchairs. Anyway … that’s all ahead of you and, like most people, you survive your twenties.

Let’s take your problems one at a time. Unfortunately, your parents will keep arguing, but, and I know this currently seems about as likely as a Kardashian becoming a philosopher, they ultimately make peace with each other and wind up being closer than you’ve ever seen them. They even go away on holidays together. (Which admittedly you and your brother resent because they never took you anywhere apart from the one time you all went away and never got out of the car. I mean NEVER. It was like the family was on a plane – that’s okay too, though, because this resentment actually leads you to write a few pretty good jokes about them.)

I’m not going to sugar-coat the next bit; it takes you years to work out sex and boys. You even wind up going home with a man who thinks that you’re a transvestite (yes, you most certainly do write a routine about this … have you guessed what you wind up doing for a living yet?) but you wind up with some very nice boyfriends and the one you have now is a real keeper.

You’re very close to finding a new best friend, Michelle, which is really good news. You’re still friends with her and her whole family thirty years later and some of your best memories from this time involve her. You have a bad patch in your twenties when one of her Communist friends urinates on your carpet, but the friendship endures.

As for Mandy, you bump into her years later in a mall and she acts like the two of you were always best friends … you feel sorry for her, especially because she still has blonde streaks and hair the size of a Shetland pony.

One of the most deeply, deeply irritating things about life is that clichés really are clichés because they’re true. You do learn from failure and time really does seem to heal a lot of wounds. Even more annoyingly, hard work does generally pay off. I wish I could tell you that you will learn everything you need to know and have every emotional scar patched up by watching Friday Night Lights (you haven’t seen this show about high school gridiron players yet but you will LOVE it) and that your dreams will come true if you just sit on the couch and eat a lot of sausage rolls, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.

What I’m trying to say is that you get over the anger that you have for your parents and wind up loving and understanding them so much more as you get older, you let go of the resentments you have about people treating you badly because you get better at treating yourself well and come to understand that the Mandys of this world can’t be having a very nice time either … and that it’s worse for them because they are stuck inside their own heads. And by working very hard at performing (and failing a lot – why do you go on stage wearing nothing but a garbage bag and pointy rubber ears one night?) you wind up becoming a professional comedian and making even Ann and Tony Lucy proud.

You actually start to work some of this stuff out around about now and, even though it might be hard to imagine, you’ll look back at this time fondly … at the very least, you’ll look back and laugh.