And here’s where I became an asshole, or at least started my journey toward asshole-dom. I prized good grades over any meaningful relationships. I wanted to be the smartest. I didn’t like sharing my notes or even studying with other people. Group projects were my personal hell. (Seriously, fuck you if you ever asked me to cheat. Some girl tricked me into sharing my binder of meticulous notes, which I know for a fact she straight up photocopied before giving back to me.) Every time we took a test, I’d create an impenetrable tent out of my shoulders and arms so nobody could catch even a glance at my answers and steal my precious knowledge.

By the way, children, if you’re reading this, cheating is totally fine. Nobody cares. As long as you cheat together. Don’t give anybody your answers unless there’s something in it for you. The bargaining and socializing skills you’ll learn in these transactions will be far more useful to you in the future than any actual knowledge you’re losing by cheating. So go ahead.

Eventually, the grind broke me. I was constantly sarcastic, bitter, snappy, and worse, perpetually exhausted, which made me even more insufferable to be around. I went to the doctor for fatigue, and that’s when he first suggested that maybe I wasn’t just overworked but depressed, which not only makes your brain feel like it would constantly be better off with a nap, but also that you’re somehow not good enough.

Regardless of the source of my insufferableness, there’s nothing worse than a teenager who thinks he knows more than everybody else. My mother would ask me to clean up a pile of junk I’d left on the stairs and I’d dramatically shout back something like, “You know I could be a drug dealer, right?! I could be out on the streets doing all kinds of marijuana right now. But no. I’m wasting my time being an honors child.” It’s like she didn’t even appreciate the bumper sticker I got for her every semester.

Applying to college only made things worse. There’s nothing like cornering a child who’s already racked with hormones, acne, and itchy pubic hair and pressuring them into sacrificing their sanity for higher education. I mean, I was a teenager! I could barely be trusted to stay at home by myself without accidentally setting fire to a frozen pizza. And now colleges were like, “It’s no big deal. We just need you to figure out what you want to do with the next sixty-five years of your life.”