You’re in the early chapters. Nobody judges a whole book by page forty.

Judging your life right now is like closing a book at page forty and deciding it was bad. The information is not in yet. A rough semester, a sport you quit, a friendship that fell apart: these feel like verdicts only because you cannot see what follows them. Early chapters are supposed to be unresolved.

When you catch yourself saying you are bad at something or that things never work out, add the words so far and see if the sentence still holds. Then pick the next small page: one practice, one assignment, one conversation. That is all a chapter ever is.