u/Acceptable_Ad_7373

Hi everyone, something has been bothering me a lot lately. I am 19F in college. When I was 17 in high school, I worked on a ‘passion project’ that literally changed my life. It was the most fulfilling and rewarding thing I’ve ever done and has shaped me in so many ways. Through it, I also met an incredibly inspiring mentor (a practicing attorney 20+ years older than me) who I really admire and would love to stay in touch with. She was extremely supportive of my work and praised me to the moon when I was working on this project. She literally endorsed me to state news reporters.

Two years have passed since I completed that passion project, and naturally, with me going to college, our relationship has changed.

There are very few people in my life who have given me as much support as she has, and that is why i feel so connected and want to keep her in my life.

Timeline:
- August 2025 met with her for coffee in person before i left for college
- December 2025 saw her briefly at a conference but her interactions with me were very short (i get it, an attorney probably doesn’t want to be hanging with a 19yo in front of all her colleagues)
-March 2026, I texted her happy birthday and wished her a great year, to which she responded : thank you so much!!
- May 2026, I texted her I thought of her during the internship i am doing this summer, to which she hearted my imessage

I wanted to reach out again in late July and ask to meet up for coffee again in August (it would’ve been a year then since I last saw her in person).

I actually do have substantive updates to tell her (Im actually transferring colleges to a way more prestigious one, how my internships went (related to her field), etc.) but I’m starting to wonder if I should continue reaching out and i’m not able to tell yet if she wants to now distance herself from me. i will say, it’s always been really hard for me to let go of people, especially people i once were very close with, i just have a very hard time with it since i have so few of those type of people to begin with.

should i reach out in two months for the coffee chat?

and i will say just overall i have been really grieving and struggling with missing that time and chapter of my life two years ago, working on that project, having something fulfilling that woke me up every day. any advice is appreciated, ive just been feeling very down lately.

Can't move on from a high school passion project — anyone else dealt with this?

I’m currently a sophomore at Duke University, but thought i’d post this here to get some perspective from other high achieving students.

When I was a junior in high school, I worked on a major passion project in a social impact field. It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life — I created real resources for a vulnerable population, got media coverage, was published in a prestigious academic journal, and connected with incredibly inspiring professionals who mentored me through the whole thing. It genuinely shaped who I am.
That was two years ago. I'm now in college and I still can't fully move on from it.

A few things are tangling together for me:
One of my mentors from that project has grown distant. During the project she praised my work publicly and was deeply invested, but since I started college she's become sparse and low effort in communication, and has brushed me off at professional events. I know intellectually that mentorships change and people drift, and she hasn't done anything wrong. I know she probably doesn’t think anything less of me now, but it still hurts to not have the kind of mentorship relationship we used to.

More broadly, I genuinely grieve that chapter of my life almost every day. I've tried staying connected to the field through coffee chats and two internships, one paid, at relevant agencies. But it doesn't feel the same. And lately I've been questioning whether I'm pursuing this field because I love it, or because it's the only thread still connecting me to a time in my life I miss deeply.

Edit: The space and people I was impacted was also amazing to see and they genuinely impacted me too. I have a personal connection to this type of advocacy and was one of the reasons i got involved in it in the first place. It has been life changing to me to understand this kind of advocacy and space exist and I’ve loved it and it has informed my path to go to law school and continue making an impact in this field.

I even have an idea for a new project in a different area, but I'm honest enough with myself to know that about 99% of the reason I want to do it is to recreate that feeling — not because the idea itself is driving me. So I've held off. During my first year of college, I tried a lot of things to explore, I even did an internship in a completely different field, but every day of that internship I felt sad and was grieving my high school experience and passion project, grieving that i could never find mentors as good as the ones i had.

Has anyone else dealt with this — peaking early, grieving a chapter, not knowing how to move forward? Especially other high achieving students who had something formative end and didn't know what to do next. How did you get through it?