The Opinions - The Good News About a Bad G.P.A.

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

The Opinion contributing writer Megan Stack has a gift for high school graduates who struggled academically or who feel like life is passing them by. In this audio essay, Stack lays out an optimistic vision for the late bloomers and poor performers, arguing that this stage of life doesn’t have to define a person’s future and that there are many paths to happiness and success.This episode originally aired on June 19, 2024. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Vishakha Darbha and Kristina Samulewski. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. 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 sort of 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 okay. I wouldn't have had to go through all of that psychic suffering. You know, I could have actually enjoyed the ride a little bit more. I love this scene in Madman 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 Weblock.

I think she's had a sort of a breakdown, and she's scared. Is that you? Are you really there? Yes, I am. Don Draper, who, as anyone knows who's watched the show, is himself, the master of reinvention, comes to her, and he tells her, I called your house, and your roommate gave me your mother's number. He asks her, what do they want you to do? And she says, I don't know.

And he says, yes, you do. Get out of here. Shock you. 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. 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, You know, 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. Lawrence 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. I can remember things when I was 15, better than I can remember things that happened to me last week. And I'm not unusual, it turns out. Psychologists have studied this. It turns out that almost everybody remembers adolescents better than any other period of time. In that adolescent teenage age range, whatever you feel, you're feeling it much more strongly than you do it any other time.

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 sort of 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, you know, 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. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Veshaka, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzik.

Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.