Your best years aren’t something that happened in high school. Don’t let a yearbook cap your future.

Treating one early period as the peak turns the rest of your life into a decline you are just waiting out. It is a strange thing to decide at eighteen, on limited evidence, and it holds up badly against what most people find, which is that the good years keep arriving and rarely look like the ones before.

If you catch yourself narrating the past as the best part, look at what made it good. Friendship, novelty, having time. Those are all still available, and they can be arranged on purpose now.