Singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles has earned five Grammy nominations since shooting to fame with her mega hit "Love Song," and has a new book out called . But when she was 17, she was just your typical "boy crazy" teenage girl, struggling with body image, loneliness, and heartbreak. Here, she explains why she wouldn't change any of it — and the advice she'd give her 17-year-old self.

I have been thinking a lot about what I would say to my seventeen-year-old self. What gift would I give her to make things easier? What advice could I possibly impart to help soothe what is traumatic and treacherous about crossing over from childhood to adulthood? The answer did not come as easily as I thought it would.

At seventeen, I was boy crazy. Or more accurately, I was love crazy. I was absolutely ravenous about romantic love. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning and laced every minute of every day. I devoured media that told me stories about young romance and developed some pretty elaborate daydream fantasies about some mysterious hot boy (Leonardo DiCaprio) that showed up at my door because he moved in next door/was visiting family in town and got lost on his hike/was looking for his dog. Every scenario ended up with us making out on horseback somewhere. I was incessantly disappointed when this never happened.

Sara at 17 Courtesy of Sarah Bareilles

I balanced my daydreams about Leo with a relationship with a boy who was drop dead gorgeous and I felt inferior to. I pretended to be what I thought he wanted and made myself very small to fit inside our relationship. He was my first real love that I was convinced would be my last. I held his love up over me like a trophy, and although I spent the first year of our relationship stuck in low self-esteem, wondering why the f*ck he liked me. I happily handed him over the center of my universe. When he eventually handed it back, I was devastated.

I had good friends that I spent a lot of time with, but who I also felt very lonely around. I obsessed over my body and convinced myself I was fat and ugly. I thought that any and all of my problems — feeling dissatisfied, anxious, sad, needy, unfocused — all stemmed from my body issues, and if I could get skinny, I could be happy. I tore myself apart in the mirror all the time and hated the person looking back at me. I hid that from everyone because I also felt shameful for thinking those things.

I was messy. And emotional. Broken-hearted. Lonely. A goofball. Sensitive. Silly. Playful. A singer. An optimist. Fearful. Careful. Careless. A writer. A joker. And a million other things. I was seventeen.

So I think about talking to this girl. This Sara. This me.

What would I say? What could I tell her now that I know that this time in a person's life is supposed to feel impossible? It's out of this period that we brew up the deepest roots of our souls. The messy parts build empathy and compassion and humor and bravery, and those roots then begin to shoot upward and our whole lives get built on and around them. Life is so unbelievably and gloriously messy — it has to start somewhere. Nobody's seventeen-year-old brain is supposed to know or understand that, so they don't. It's all on purpose. She's not supposed to know better.

So I think I'd just tell her I love her.

That's all. I love her exactly as she is. And I'll continue to try and tell her that forever and ever until she learns to do it herself.

Sara's first book, , is out now.

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