When I was eighteen and a freshman in college, I had a roommate who would call home to ask his mother if the food in his fridge had gone bad. I did laundry for the first time, as I had just moved away from home. We both turned into self-sufficient adults, but there was a learning curve to doing so; it didn't happen overnight on our eighteenth birthdays.

Now, when I teach students of the same age, they send me emails all the time along the lines of "Am I doing this assignment right?" and seek affirmation and other kinds of hand-holding because the freedoms of college and adulthood are a lot to take in all at once. My colleague reminded me of something telling: their prom was three months ago.

I don't know how relevant this all is to the topic at hand, or even where I stand on it, but I'm glad I didn't make any decisions that would be costly to my career, digitally archived forever, or call my integrity (for lack of a better word) into question at an age when I was still being carded to buy certain video games.