What To Do When Your Teen Says ‘I’ve Wasted Two Years Of My Life’
I was folding the week’s laundry in my 17-year-old Liam’s room last March when he said it. He was slouched against his headboard, scrolling the Common App website on his laptop, the screen glowing blue against his half-asleep face. A half-empty blue Gatorade sweated on his desk next to a crumpled physics quiz and a stack of unfinished comic pages. “I feel like I’ve wasted two years of my life,” he mumbled, not looking up. “Need genuine help.”
I froze, my hand halfway around a paint-stained hoodie. My first instinct was to rush to reassure him: it was the pandemic, your asthma made you stay home, it’s not your fault, none of this matters anyway. But I’d said all that before, and it never stuck. He just sighed and rolled over, staring at the faded 2019 soccer camp poster taped to his wall, the one where all his friends are grinning with their medals. That was the last thing he did before we pulled him out of in-person hybrid classes to keep him from getting sick, back when we were still being careful with his severe asthma. Two years of mostly at-home learning, two years of skipping team practices and group hangouts, two years of half-done assignments because it was so hard to focus over spotty Zoom.
I made an appointment with his school counselor a week later. She was nice, but she kept repeating that gap years are a great option, which didn’t help. Liam didn’t want a gap year. He just wanted to stop feeling like he’d thrown away the only high school years he’d ever get. I called a friend whose son missed two years of high school with a mononucleosis complication a few years back, and she gave me the first tip that actually worked: don’t try to talk him out of the feeling first. Write it down, map it out.
We did that on a Saturday night, after pepperoni pizza. I grabbed a legal pad and a pen, set it on the coffee table, and said “Let’s make a list of everything you did those two years, no rules, no good or bad. Just everything.” He groaned, said this was stupid, but he sat down. For 10 minutes he just stared at the blank page, then he wrote “sourdough baking with Grandma” and “taught myself Premiere Pro.” Then it kept coming: he fixed the old bike he found on the side of the road, he read all 10 of the old Lord of the Rings books I had in the attic, he drew 12 issues of a dumb comic about our cat, he learned to change the oil in my car, he taught himself to play three Green Day songs on guitar. By the end the page was full. I didn’t say anything at first, just let him look at it. After a minute he said “I didn’t remember half of this.” That was the first crack in the shame he’d been carrying.
The next step was small and concrete, too. We went back to his guidance counselor, and instead of begging to cram in all the AP classes Liam had missed, we asked what we could swap to fit what he actually cares about. Liam’s always liked drawing and making videos, so we dropped the extra AP science he never needed for the major he wants anyway, and signed him up for a dual enrollment video production class at the local community college. It counts for both high school and college credit, and it’s something he shows up excited for every week. For his required volunteer hours, instead of the generic food bank shift all his friends do, we called the local animal shelter and asked if they needed someone to edit their adoption promotion videos. They said yes immediately. Now he goes there once a week, edits clips of dogs and cats for their Instagram, and already has all the hours he needs. He likes it more than any school-assigned volunteer work I’ve ever heard of.
We also made a tiny rule for the bad days: the 10-minute rule. If Liam starts spiraling about the two years, he can say every bad thing he’s feeling, complain as much as he wants, for 10 minutes. I set a timer on my phone. When the timer goes off, we either go for a walk around the block, grab gas station slushies, or he goes work on his comic or his shelter videos. No more ruminating after that. It doesn’t make the feeling go away forever, but it stops it from eating the whole day.
What I’ve realized, that I didn’t get at first, is that most of the time when a kid says they wasted time, they’re not asking for you to fix the past. They’re asking for help to stop letting the past ruin the present. We’re all so focused on checking all the boxes for high school, college, whatever, that we forget that time doesn’t only count if it fits the timeline we made. A weekend baking sourdough with your grandma isn’t going to show up on a college application, but it’s not wasted. Teaching yourself to edit videos in your room when you can’t go to school isn’t wasted, even if it doesn’t count for AP credit.
Last week, Liam came home from a college info night and slumped at the kitchen table while I was stirring spaghetti sauce, and he mumbled it again: “I still feel like I wasted those two years.” I didn’t grab the legal pad, I didn’t rush to reassure him. I just grabbed an extra plate and spooned some garlic bread onto it, pushed it across the table to him. I said “Yeah, I get that. Want extra parm?” He nodded. After we ate, he pulled out the community college course catalog and pointed to a digital illustration class he wants to take next semester.
He still has bad days. He’s still a few credits behind some of his friends. He might graduate a semester late, or do one full year of community college before transferring to a four-year school, and that’s fine. We didn’t get the two years back. We can’t get them back. But we don’t have to let them waste the rest.
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