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Notes -
My own "peaked in high school" anecdotes: a few years back I was waiting for a table at a Perkins with a couple buddies, and in the lobby I kept looking at this guy surreptitiously across the room. Because I couldn't decide if I knew him or not: he looked just like Johny Johnson the quarterback and star pitcher I went to high school with, but he was fat. Like, really fat. Like Johny ate himself. And I couldn't quite make up my mind to go say hello before we were seated, I wasn't sure if I knew him or not.
So I went home and found Johny Johnson on Facebook and, yup, that was him. He was a middle school teacher at a local school, and an assistant coach for their football team. And fat. Very fat.
And I'm not going to lie, there's an atavistic part of my brain that wants to buy into the revenge fantasy of the "peaked in high school" narrative. In high school he was a star and I couldn't make the baseball team, but now I'm in the best shape of my life and he is obese. In high school he made fun of me and got invited to the good parties, now I make twice what he does. It's an easy and appealing narrative for me. He made fun of me on occasion in high school for being a loser (I was), but now I will make fun of him for being a loser!
But if I'm honest, that's both cruel and pointless, and it's an attempt to impose a just-world meaning on events that are basically unconnected. Johny wasn't that mean to me, probably less mean than I deserved if I'm honest, the urge to get one-up on him is just retrospective jealousy. The "peaked in high school" narrative is an attempt to impose meaning: his success in high school destined him to be a middle school teacher, my nerdy loserdom destined me for success. My dateless suffering as a teenager lead me to read Tolstoy and Chomsky and built my mind for law school, while his easy athletic success stunted his growth. But that's not really true. I probably would have wound up pretty much the same if I had made the baseball team, and nothing about his college football career prevented him from joining my gym and staying in shape. My suboptimal talents and choices in high school didn't lead to optimal talents and choices as an adult, nor did Johny's more optimal talents and choices in high school lead to suboptimal outcomes as an adult. At any rate, middle school teacher is a noble profession and I hope Johnny is happy.
Two other kids from my graduating class illustrate the point.
There was another kid on the football team, an absolute brick shithouse of a running back. I was briefly madly in love with his ex girlfriend senior year, she and her family referred to him as "Hooked on Phonics" after a disastrous Scrabble game at her house. Hooked on Phonics would seem a prime candidate to peak in high school, a hulking jock who could barely spell, but last I heard of him he's a captain in the Army, I think in some kind of missile targeting role. Good for Captain Phonics! And frankly he looks like he'd still mog me in the power clean.
A close friend of mine from high school, Ben seemed like the classic kid who would blossom after graduation, he was a straight-A AP student who was majoring in STEM at a state honor's college on scholarship. And more than raw academic smarts, I never met anyone like Ben for competitive gaming, he was a genius, he once pioneered a strategy in competitive Pokemon so unbeatable that it was later banned, he was a wizard at texas hold'em and brilliant at any card or board game. He seemed like he had all the traits to succeed as an adult. Ben got into drugs, never graduated, got arrested a few times, and died a couple years back, probably a drug overdose.
The truth is that provided you graduate high school and go to college, there's not much that happened in high school that will really hold you back or matter for the rest of your life. If you don't get arrested, don't get a bunch of DUIs, or get yourself killed or addicted to drugs, a free man in America can probably turn himself around. In either direction.
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