Dear teenage Skin

You’re a hard-core tomboy until you hit puberty and your strict, religious, Jamaican mum tells you to start behaving like a young lady. It’s a strange time to be a teenager — yours is the first generation of British black teenagers, and you have lots of identity questions — so, deeply confused, you just go quiet (having three boisterous brothers doesn’t help). You should stop being such a goody two-shoes, but it won’t be until your mid-twenties that you break out.

You will eventually be bisexual, but puberty is all about fancying boys, even if you’re too shy to talk to them. You never think of yourself as attractive, but it’s a good thing you’ll wait — you are so naive, you’d probably get pregnant. (At 11, you thought you’d get pregnant if a boy put his knees near your nether region.) Being gay never occurs to you — you don’t know anyone who’s gay — and it takes a year-long crush on a woman in the university rugby club before you realise. You certainly don’t know you’re bisexual — back then, it was just one or the other.

You are the skinniest thing, and very self-conscious. Everyone says: “Eat more, you’re too skinny.” But you’re never hungry. You’re always the last person eating, with the teacher standing over you, pushing you to eat up. You stop eating if you’re stressed — and you’re quite the anxious teenager.

You think we’re all going to die! You’re starting to learn about the world and think we might have a nuclear war. With age, you’ll learn that there’ll always be drama, and it’s nothing to be scared of. You’ll learn to stop running away from your problems — sexuality, race — because otherwise, six months down the line, they become issues. Problems are good for you: when you solve them, you’ll become bigger, stronger, braver.

Dear adult Skin

You found your intuition and learnt how to listen to yourself. The answer was always inside of you.

Explore Celebrity

• People

Times recommends

• How to solve the big style questions
• Aids in Africa: ‘It is the staff who really inspire you’
• Video: How to do Beyonce's 'Single Ladies' dance