Who you are at sixteen isn’t who you’ll be at twenty-six. Hold your self-labels loosely.

Identity at sixteen is a photograph taken mid-movement. Taste, politics, confidence, even what you find funny will turn over at least once in the next ten years, so a firm label applied now is probably describing a stage rather than a person. Holding those labels loosely keeps you from defending a version of yourself that has already left.

Take one thing you say about yourself, bad at maths, not a people person, and add the word lately to it. Notice how differently it reads. Leave some room for the next version of you to disagree with this one.