You can’t fast-forward to twenty-five and skip the parts that make someone twenty-five.

Age is not an arrival, it is an accumulation, and what you want about being older is made out of the years themselves. The steadiness you are impatient for came from somebody making a mess of things at seventeen and learning from it. Skipping the middle would not get you there sooner. It would leave the person unbuilt.

Stop treating this year as a waiting room. Pick one thing that only makes sense to do now, at this age, with the time you have. Do it badly and keep the memory, because that is what the later version of you is made of.