When I was younger, I feared not getting into college. This was before I had toured any campuses or collected any brochures, but after I had heard half a dozen counselor lectures on the importance of perking up grades and plumping up resumés.

I had good grades. Great grades, actually. But I had nothing else. My resumé was a wasteland.

Certainly, I could polish up my future college applications the same way everyone did—by joining as many clubs as possible, as soon as possible—but what I really wanted was bigger than that.

It seemed that everyone else had discovered their One True Passion during childhood. They’d traded diapers for soccer cleats or tutus, and that was that. By high school, so many years later, they knew who they were without much soul-searching: soccer players and ballerinas.

My little brother, for example, has always been a baseball player. My little sister takes more dance classes than days in the week. And I have ended up in a lot of bleachers and theatre seats, watching them perform their talents.

I always wanted what they had.

I did dance for a while as a kid. When that proved to be a poor fit, I took an art class, a sewing class, and piano lessons. By the time I got to high school, I had burnt through a long list of possible callings. I was mildly artistic and mildly musical, but not enough that it mattered to anyone—most of all me.

Whatever I was, it couldn’t be boiled down into one word, conveniently distilled into a bullet point on an application.

In a school of overachievers, we all had stratospheric GPAs. And so it had been drilled into us that we would need to be more than stellar academic specimens in order to entice colleges. Colleges wanted “well-rounded,” we were told. They wanted to ensure we could thrive outside of the school environment. They wanted to see the best of the best be the best in as many areas as possible. They wanted depth.

So I was afraid. No one was handing out scholarships for crash-landing into hobbies and then abandoning them before they could become lifestyles.

But if I had a time machine, here is what I would tell my sophomore self: In first grade, you endured a scolding because every day, instead of circulating through the different recreation stations, you planted yourself at the one where you could staple printer paper together and make your own books.

You wrote twenty or thirty pages of a novel when you were ten, and when you were twelve, some of those pages were published in an anthology.

Talk about passions that fall into their owners’ laps on silver platters. I have been telling inquisitive adults about my future writing career since right after I found out where my chapter books came from.

And yet I never considered that relevant—for constructing either college applications or my high school identity. Writing wasn’t a school-sponsored activity or even a group one. It had no annual showcases, recitals, or tournaments. I was a novelist, sure, but I had yet to finish a novel, so did it really count?

Without a completed book, I had no more concrete proof that I was a writer than whatever pretty phrasing I could squeeze into a Common App essay.

Here’s something else I would tell my younger self (and any current high schoolers): Some of your most meaningful, life-changing, soul-defining activities might not be recognized by audiences or in applications, and that’s okay.

You are more than what you list on your college applications. You are more than what you do after school. You are more than the ways you earn—or don’t earn—applause.

You are already well-rounded; you’re a living, breathing human being.