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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

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.

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. Do it. Peggy, listen to me.

Get out of here and move forward.

This never happened.

It will shock you how much it never happened.

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.

I can remember things when I was 15 better than I can remember things that happened to me last week. And I’m not........

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