The person once called promising still has an ordinary life to inhabit between other people’s expectations.

Being called promising early puts a claim on the years that follow. Other people’s expectations become a kind of weather you live in, and every ordinary week can start to feel like evidence for or against a prediction made when you were young. The prediction was never a contract, though it can take a long time to feel that.

Notice where a scoreboard has attached itself to something that does not need one. Ask whether the standard you are measured by belongs to you or to a teacher who meant well decades ago. An ordinary good life was always one of the permitted outcomes.