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My name is Megan Stack, and I’m a writer for New York Times Opinion.

This is high school graduation season, and so there’s balloons on mailboxes, and all the kids who have done really well — their parents are celebrating, and we’re hearing about who’s going to what college and who won what award as they graduated, and that’s the dominant theme of the season. But for the many, many different kinds of kids who did not have a successful high school career, I want to give those kids a graduation gift.

I would just want them to believe and to really understand that there is still so much time and that their lives are still entirely able to be turned around and that things can be fine for them — actually, truly, really fine — because if I look at the people that I’ve known who were in that situation — and to some extent, I would include myself in this — the one thing that’s really hard is that when you are that 18-year-old who’s finishing high school with this great well of uncertainty and self-doubt and even self-loathing, you don’t really believe that everything’s going to be fine.

And looking back, I think a lot of us feel like, if I had only known how much this was going to turn out OK, I wouldn’t have had to go through all of that psychic suffering. I could have actually enjoyed the ride a little bit more.

I love the scene in “Mad Men” where Peggy Olson has just had a baby, and it was an accident. It’s an earlier time in America, when that was a very stigmatizing thing to have done, to have a baby out of wedlock. I think she’s had sort of a breakdown, and she’s scared.

Don Draper, who, as anyone knows who’s watched the show, is, himself, the master of reinvention, comes to her. And he tells her —

He asks her, what do they want you to do? And she says, I don’t know. And he says —

I think that is such a powerful line. We come from a long tradition, in America, of people who did come here to leave behind old lives and things that they didn’t want to live with, and I think we can embrace that. I think we can start fresh in a way that is liberating and powerful and doesn’t have to be ashamed or secretive. I think we can do that.

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A lot of times, if you have a teacher or parents around you who are saying things like, you’re never going to amount to anything, you’re not good at math, you are not very socially adept, whatever it may be, kids are very quick to internalize those ideas, and that can linger and stick into adulthood. There’s research about this. Laurence Steinberg, who is one of our nation’s foremost experts in the adolescent psyche, has done many, many studies looking into people’s brains and their emotional lives as adolescents, and he has lectured extensively on these topics.

In that adolescent teenage age range, whatever you feel, you’re feeling it much more strongly than you do at any other time of your life. So when good things happen to you and you’re feeling great, you feel more great than you will when you’re older. But, on the other side, when bad things happen and you’re feeling bad about yourself and you’re feeling sorrow or embarrassment or shame, those feelings are also much deeper, and the thought is that that gets stored in a deeper physical place in the brain.

And so, as you get older, in some ways, you are psychologically stuck a little bit in those years. And I think the trick is to realize that and to realize that maybe it’s a bit of an illusion that is created by your brain chemistry.

I think there’s a lot of fear drummed into kids with good intention, trying to keep them on track, trying to keep them on their studies. But the downside of that is that, for the kids who have fallen off, what they’ve heard is that that’s it. They’ve ruined their lives.

And I can’t overstate how much that has not been true for the people I’ve known. By the end of high school, I had definitely gone into a rebellious or subversive phase of my own, and so I was spending most of my time with kids who were really on the margins of high school society. Some of them had already dropped out. A lot of them were on a lot of drugs. There was somebody who I had last seen many years ago in a house that was one of the houses of one of the kids who was so neglected that we would just hang out there.

I had last seen this person passed out on the floor with a syringe next to their arm, and I assumed that that person would never really crawl out of that. And I saw that person a few years ago. They are doing fine. They have been to college. They have a professional life. They are not an addict. And they seemed really happy.

I want graduates to think there is not a set pattern of activities that comprise an adult life in America. Your whole life, you have to be ready to readjust. Your whole life, things will happen that you didn’t expect to have happen. I want them to feel like whatever happened is an asset, because I really think that if you had a great high school experience, that is an asset. And I think if you had a bad high school experience, that can also be a very rich asset. But you have to think about it the right way and not get trapped inside of it.