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It's high school graduation season. Time to cheer the teenage achievers (especially the overachievers) and send them off to campus adventures and incipient adulthood. This year, though, I want to talk about the other graduates. The ones without honor society stoles or academic medals or college plans. The ones who still don't know what they could or should do, who taste a tinny dread when the band strikes up "Pomp and Circumstance."
I'm talking about students who flailed academically, never discovered any particular talent, drifted unnoticed in the halls. The kids who got into trouble and now think of trouble as their natural habitat. The poor kids, the dwellers in volatile homes, the abusers of substances. The college rejects and even the high school dropouts.
If I could give all those kids a graduation gift, it would be this plain but important truth: Everything can still be fine. Not easy, necessarily, but fine. That is almost certainly true, no matter what seemingly hopeless mess they have made of their affairs or bleak vision they've developed of their own abilities and future. Virtually every American 18-year-old has more options and more time than they've been led to believe. A teenager's biography (whether promising or ominous) should not be interpreted as dispositive proof of years to come.
That is clear to me now, having lived long enough to watch old friends rebound from seemingly ruined lives to happy, stable and prosperous adulthoods, and, on the other end, noticing that some of my most promising classmates fizzled out upon contact with the world beyond our little town. There are plenty of kids, of course, who turn out more or less the way you'd expect. But the whole process strikes me as infinitely less predictable than suggested by the mechanical churn and sort of the K-12 assembly line.
I'm not in denial. It's a tough world. Turning things around — changing one's trajectory — is difficult and daunting. Factors beyond our control, like economic class, race and lack of family support, can pile on extra disadvantages. Even the happiest endings are usually preceded by times when it all looks too hard and hopeless. And people do, tragically, fall through the cracks.
Still, young people should be told — and should believe — that their destiny is not shaped in high school. Their personalities are still coming together in the tissues of the brain; time is on their side and — say what you want about Americans — we like underdogs, cheer come-from-behind wins and are generous with second chances.
Even passing a general educational development test, or G.E.D., can provide a path to community college, where about a third of students end up transferring to a four-year university. Those averse to academia — on trend with a growing national discussion over whether college is really worth the cost and time (for the record, I'm pro-college) — fruitful careers can be reached through trade schools, entrepreneurship or the military. Juvenile criminal records often get expunged, and research has found that only about 10% of kids who commit serious crimes grow up to become chronic adult offenders.
In "Mad Men," Don Draper finds Peggy, his office protégée, curled in defeat and despair after giving up the secret baby she'd conceived by accident. His advice to her comes straight from the American id of survival, reinvention and faking it till you make it.
"Get out of here and move forward," Don tells Peggy. "This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened."
Here's the catch, though: While it's still possible for most 18-year-old Americans to drastically improve their material circumstances, the perception of self that forms during impressionable teenage years can inflate or cripple people into adulthood — and that part is much, much harder to change.
Scientists still don't fully understand the lifelong potency of the teenage years, but it seems to be rooted in the hyperbolic brain chemistry of adolescents, whose emotions carry an intensity unmatched during other stretches of life. The highs are higher, the pain cuts harder, and the experiences get stored deeper in the brain, an adolescent psychology expert, Laurence Steinberg, told me. In the end, the aftertaste of those years can cling for decades, and many people struggle to distinguish their adult selves from their adolescent perceptions and memories.
Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who has spent decades researching the adolescent psyche, suggested that messages from families, teachers and friends may be the decisive factor when it comes to rebounding from an unpromising high school career.
"If people in your life tell you, 'You're actually not very smart and you're not going to make much of yourself,' you start to internalize that," Steinberg said. "If they say, 'You can change. You were immature and made bad decisions, but you're going to grow up,' that's very important."
In my senior year, one of my friends got pregnant with her shambolic boyfriend and decided to have the baby. When I went off to college, she stayed behind in her parents' house in the next town, working in a coffee shop and, eventually, taking classes at community college. I visited her when I came home on breaks. She seemed the same — deep dimples and wry jokes — and I'd hold her baby awkwardly and pretend to think it was exciting that she was a mother. Secretly, I was horrified.
We'd been young together — sharing coffee and cigarettes in the doughnut shop, stealing through starless nights, laughing until we choked. Now she languished on a barren suburban street, cartoons squawking, coffee table sticky from leaking sippy cups. I couldn't believe she'd gotten trapped like that.
Skipping to the present day, that friend lives a few hours from the place where we grew up, in the kind of scenic New England town people visit to take pictures of fall leaves. Time unfolded well for her: She got her nursing degree, worked in hospitals, met a new man, had another baby. As we moved deeper into adulthood, Facebook started to suggest that our positions had reversed, that she now luxuriated in a freedom I had lost. As I slogged from the milky, sleepless mess of early motherhood to the chaos of toddlers and elementary school, she was launching her own kids into adulthood and taking up mountain biking. I had raggedy nails and new circles under my eyes; she had a golden retriever, a Tesla and spontaneous getaways with her husband.
She'd been a mother too young, I guess, but then again, I wish I'd had my kids a little earlier. It had been easy at 18 to mistake our relative positions as a lifelong condition, a decisive ascent or descent into an unacknowledged American caste. Now I realize how much of my own fatalism was rooted in illusion and a vast oversimplification of time and human affairs.
Nothing particularly bad happened to me in high school, but it was, nevertheless, a difficult time containing no hint of future adventure or achievement. I stumbled over algebra and floundered in science. I read voraciously but couldn't seem to communicate the overwhelming feelings and contradictory ideas provoked by the books. It seemed as if every teacher, sooner or later, marveled aloud that someone so dull-witted had emerged from the same gene pool as my brilliant older siblings.
So I did what kids do: I told myself I didn't care and stopped trying. I distracted myself from the low hum of underachievement by seeking out friends on the margins — burnouts and bohemians, unrepentant subversives. Their company was a relief; caring and falling short had been more bruising than I wanted to admit.
I did go to college, though — mostly thanks to standardized tests — and I eventually figured out how to use my own brain. Living inside my mind had for years been like being locked inside a car I didn't know how to drive. And then, in my sophomore year of college — I don't know how else to put this — everything, very suddenly, felt different. The obscure became obvious: how to study and memorize, retain raw information and, most crucially, trap and turn into words the complicated ideas that had previously drifted through my thoughts like clouds.
I don't recommend underachievement, let alone delinquency, for anybody. I hope my own children are able to thrive along traditional lines. It's obviously preferable to leave high school with the highest possible grades and minimum erosion of self-esteem. Stepping into adulthood burdened with a rap sheet, severe emotional trauma or addiction is not ideal.
But it doesn't have to be the end of the story, either.
By my own graduation day, kids I knew in high school had already gotten arrested or addicted, failed classes or stayed out all night because they couldn't stand to go home. It would have shocked me, back then, to realize how many of them would grow up and disappear into normal, healthy-looking lives. Not everyone got a college degree, but most everybody landed, eventually, on their feet.
Even the friend who went to prison is long since free and has become more educated than I will ever be. My friend whose anguish was the hardest to grasp, the one who'd insisted since we were 5 that he was really a boy — he's now a dad in a faraway city we never thought about, with a fascinating job we didn't know existed, living unobtrusively as a man, which we would've assumed was impossible.
You have no idea what's coming next, or after that, or after that. If high school was good for you, keep the memories close.
As for the rest of us?
It can shock you, after all, how much it never happened.
Megan K. Stack is a contributing New York Times Opinion writer and author.
