I'm a highschool dropout, but I did a decent job of attending most of the way through anyway cause all my friends weren't fuckups. I have a hard time imagining

I'm a highschool dropout, but I did a decent job of attending most of the way through anyway cause all my friends weren't fuckups. I have a hard time imagining what sort of person I'd be if I didn't have that growth with a cohort of friends. In terms of my success as a human who is part of society I don't think anything has been as helpful as the social skills that I learned in high school. I don't think it's the only way to learn these skills, but I certainly feel like my social-learning velocity was by far the highest in high school. Ultimately how other people perceive me influences my quality of life more than any other thing. I don't think as a "smart kid" skipping high school would have helped me, I think it would have hurt me a lot. I feel like my life opened up immensely when I accepted that being smart and correct and having a deep understanding of the problem at hand matters so much less than being able to get along with people.