Annie Macmanus, or simply Annie Mac, is a well-known Irish DJ, broadcaster and author. 

Her debut novel, “Mother Mother,” became a New York Times best-seller, as her story explores an 18-year-old son who awakens one morning to find his mother is gone. 

He must deal with the uncertainly of this new life, finding light in dark places and examining the cost of unconditional love as he searches all over Belfast for his missing mother. The book is a gritty, affecting novel about family, grief addiction and motherhood. 

Through it all, Annie asks her readers a fundamental question: If you spend your life giving everything to the ones you love, do you risk losing yourself along the way?

Macmanus is 45 years old, a mother of two and last year published her life lessons. 

As we prepare for another year, these 19 life lessons are powerful, thoughtful and worth remembering:

1. Don’t exercise to be thin. Exercise to be strong.  

2. The best place for ideas is alone and on the move.

3. Start or end every day with writing about your life. There’s always something buried underneath the to-do list in your head, something you didn’t realize you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

4. Relationships are like weighing scales. You either bring your partner up, or weigh them down. The hope is that you are both evenly weighted enough of the time to balance the scales.

5. Sex in marriage is hard work. Not for the physicality of it, but for the labour of clearing your mind of every other domestic distraction, to allow yourself to relax enough to enjoy it.

6. Always consider a pet before having one more kid.

7. In your mid-40s, you will experience irrational weight gain. Out of nowhere, for no reason at all, a spare tire of flesh will arrive around your waist.

8. Sometimes in life, the best thing to do, is to buy a pair of bigger jeans.

9. You know you’re in a long-term relationship when alongside the empathy you have for your partner's sadness, you feel irritation. Because their sadness directly affects yours.

10. The small details of your day matter. Be it your first cup of coffee in the morning or the way you make your bed, or a walk through the park on the way to work. Life is year upon year of stacked up small joys like these. Take pleasure and pride in them.  

11. Allow friendships to come and go. Don’t cling onto friendships because they are old. Cling on to them because they bring you joy, comfort and laughter.

12. Yes, people are busy, but if you try to make an arrangement with someone three times and it doesn’t happen, then that person doesn’t want to be available to you.

13. It’s important to know when to walk away. Life’s too short to have someone else make you feel like shit about yourself.

14. Everyone should go on a course before becoming parents to find out exactly how their own parents traumatized them.

15. Change is good when it’s enforced by you. Take the reins of it. Push into it. Know as much as you can about where you’re going. You’ll never know everything, though, and that’s a good thing.

16. Stay curious. The kids in your life are good for that. Put your phone down and tune into their play. Even better, join in.

17. All kids ever want is you. Your full undivided attention. Even 20 minutes of that in a day is better than a whole afternoon of scrappy conversations and phone scrolling.

18. Put your phone down. Put your phone down. Put your phone down.

19. And if you pick it up. It’s always, always O.K. to leave a WhatsApp group. No guilt. No shame. Exit group. Goodbye.

Find one, two or 10 you can relate to — and use them effectively in your daily life. 

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