You’re not the same person you were in ninth grade. Check in with yourself like you’d check in with a friend who moved away.

Change happens too slowly to notice from the inside, so most people carry an outdated file on themselves and keep making decisions out of it. You would never assume a friend who moved away two years ago still wants the same things; you would ask. That courtesy rarely gets extended inward, which is how somebody ends up loyal to a plan made by a version of them that no longer exists.

Sit down and ask yourself the questions you would ask that friend. What is different now, what got harder, what quietly stopped mattering. Answer honestly rather than consistently with last year.