I saw my dad as a 17-year-old for the first time this weekend, in a photo circulated through my family on WhatsApp. He had a shock of black hair and a jaw. He’s gentler now, his hair salt white with a sprinkling of pepper, a smile in his softened eyes. But in his youth, he was angular, ready to slice into life.

I was on one of those unplanned bonding trips with my dad, where he took a couple hours off of work to eat lunch with me. He whipped out his phone as we ate Indian fast food and began talking about his high school years.

And I realized that that was the first time that I’d thought of the infinite other paths he could have taken on the threshold of adulthood.

Seventeen is a weird age. I experienced my last day of 17-year-oldness yesterday, my last year of being legally dependent — today’s my eighteenth birthday. Like my dad in that photo, I’ve burst onto the scene of adulthood and identity. Today, the possibilities have become literally endless. Without legal qualms, I can leave home. I can sign up for a credit card and buy a ticket across the world. I could even get my license. Yesterday was my last day of using the excuse, “I’m too young to do what I want.”

The institutions that I’ve been surrounded by at this college-prep school seem to be melting away so quickly. I’m no longer bound by grades, nor by age, nor by the Olympic-level pole-vault that is the college applications process. Uncannily, my dad was going through the same emergence of constraints. He told me the photo was taken in the months after he took India’s college entrance exam, so his stressors had melted away too.

I always believed that his success came from a plan he had decided on at birth, that his pre-determined fate was to be a successful software engineer and entrepreneur. But that photo was a reality check to the vast amount of potential that he had held in that moment, the confrontation he had to make about what he wanted from life. I could see it in the grainy film, his belief in his ability but the uncertainty of his path.

I’m simultaneously scared and excited to explore what fraction of me is left after erasing my external motivations. This is the onus of senioritis. I’ve spent the last four years telling myself that the activities I’ve pursued aren’t because of college. I’ve arrived at the six-month period where I have to confront myself honestly about my interests, to pursue goals that I set up truly for myself.