My friends and I are having a hard time.

Some of the problems are everyday growing pains, while others run deeper: questions of philosophy, morality, and chemistry. It would be inaccurate to say these problems are new. We’ve always been dealing with issues great and small. The difference is that back then, when we all first met and started to form these friendships that are now a decade old, the most earth-shattering, all-encompassing threats have now been reduced to silly inconveniences: fights over prom dates and class rank have barely survived our journeys into young adulthood. At best, they are hazy memories of annoyance.

Everything in context, of course. When your whole world consists of your family and the windowless building where you spend nearly every waking moment, it’s understandable that these events would become consuming. It was all we had, and so we blew everything out of proportion. We let these burdens take up so much space that nothing worse could possibly fit itself in to our fledgling lives.

Given the issues we endure now, ranging anywhere from whether we’re ready to get married to whether there’s a God, I’d gladly help plan hundreds of more proms.

In the face of these vapid concerns of classrooms and popularity, I was determined to get a move on, away from these people and their trite tribulations. My desires were selfish, as they have been for the greater part of my life. I wanted something real, to experience anything that felt like it actually mattered. And mattered not just in the little world we’d created together, but the world out there – the one that was expanding infinitely with every trip we completed around the sun.

I’ve been in this new world now, the one we were all longing for or fearful of. We’re lifelong citizens, unable to return to the carefully crafted home that we’d jointly built. We spent so much time running towards the second quarter of our lives that we forgot to appreciate the spring we were born in, where everything was new and bright. Where everything was in bloom.

It’s quickly becoming summer. The blossoms are at full intensity and instead of inspiring us, they’re making us desperate. We now know how quickly the seasons change, and how easy it is for us to barely notice. How soon will the fields we’ve been cultivating peak, and when will the harvest come? Will the fruits of our lives be bountiful, or will we have spent so much time racing forward without regard to our legacies, that winter will only be barren?

We’re here for a moment, and as we age, we’re learning just how short that moment is.

Despite all of this change and the inevitable progression of time, I look back at our mythology and marvel at those versions of ourselves that we’re losing with the seasons. Those problems that seem idiotic now may very well have just been microcosms of the situations in which we now find ourselves. Prophecies, if you will, of what we would encounter and who we all would become.

I look at the evidence: compare and contrast, and wonder if at 25, we’re really any different than we were at 17. For the first time in a long time, I find myself visiting with the teenage version of myself. Talking to her to figure out if she’d be proud of who I’ve become. If any of us should be proud.

In a lot of ways, I think we treat each other just as badly as we always have. But there are also stark differences: The irreversible lines on our faces, ghosts of furrowed brows and ringing laughter. How, at the end of the day we no longer go home to our parents, but have instead become other people’s parents. The world is different, and the seasons keep turning. So though we must have changed, the old wounds haven’t closed up. They’ve just scarred over and we’ve forgiven (or we haven’t), without ever really forgetting. Even as we reach the quarter milestone of our lives, in the back of our minds we’ve never stopped thinking about high school.

And how could we forget when the people we are now are inextricably linked to those teenagers? Regardless of change, of circumstance: we are the sum parts of everyone we’ve ever been, and of everyone who’s ever hurt us. So despite all the ways we blame each other – all the therapy we’ve needed but have never been able to afford – we owe ourselves to one another.

In the candy-colored past of our collective childhood, there is this understanding and longing of the notion that nothing will ever be as good as the very first people in our lives: the family we made not because of blood, but because of choice. And so sometimes, as we desperately try to reconcile who we’ve been with who we’re trying to become, it is necessary to go back to the place and the people who knew you before you were introduced to the rest of the world. This is not regression because you are not going backwards. Rather, you are looking at yourself and evaluating: what is working and what isn’t. Who is excelling at handling these problems, big or small – me at 17, or me at 25. Who better to help you answer these questions than the people who have known you through it all?

There is a careful balance that must be struck, for as well as we do know each other, there are pieces that will always remain a mystery. We have to do our best in the moments where we’re all together – drunk on alcohol or history or opportunity – to piece the glimpses we have of one another into a single, whole identity. It is our responsibility to one another to hold up a mirror and say, “I know who you’ve been and I know who you can be, and I will be here as you decide who you are.”

Both the problem and the beauty is in the guesswork: the places where we overwhelm the gaps with our own imaginings. Repeatedly, we may be disastrously wrong in the assumptions, and it’s a hard and dangerous thing to make decisions based on half-truths. But more innocently, and hopefully more often, all the places where we were filling in the blanks just look a lot like possibility. These fanciful musings let us return to that naive time before we grew up – where we could still see the potential of who a person might become if they are given the right support: the right love. If we don’t continue to love one another, what was the point of us sharing spring?

And so, in this second season of our lives where we are hurting ourselves and one another, I’m learning to accept that nostalgia is not the liar everyone makes it out to be. We look back and we know things were bad. We have been unkind or disloyal. We have rushed through time that we can never get back. We treated small inconveniences like big problems, and now we struggle to address conditions that really matter in the long run. The sad memories are symbiotic with the happy, because we cannot remember one without simultaneously acknowledging the other. We weren’t good to each other, but we were better than the world turned out to be. The things that happened then seem like nothing compared to everything that’s happened since, and everything that’s happening now. But we move forward as we must, hoping that each day we’re doing a little bit better both for ourselves, and for each other.

In spite of all these transitions, life is demonstrably more good than bad. It’s our duty to one another to be this constant reminder: to learn to enjoy the summer despite the heat, and live without fear of the coming winter.