High School Reunion
“Those years – those high school years – really are the best years of our lives.”
A few different people have actually said this to me. Each time I resisted the urge to slap them. I wonder now if my restraint was a great disservice. I mean imagine if people went around actually believing that? I imagine there are two forces at play here. Firstly their subsequent lives must’ve really sucked, or they achieved a social status in the high school ecosystem they couldn’t replicate outside of it. Secondly, nostalgia and romance and selective memory recall skew and distort our experiences. At least this is my most educated guess.
It has been ten years since I graduated high school. There is talk of a reunion. I’ve been wondering if I would go to such an event. I solicited the opinions of those on Twitter and Facebook and got a whole spectrum of responses. Everything from, ‘God no, those people ruined my life,’ to ‘Sure, why not?’ to ‘You will regret not going.’ I think by far the most reasonable response was something to the effect of, ‘You will regret not going more than you will regret leaving early if it sucks.’
It is funny but ‘those people’ (as one person described them) are so problematic. Despite the feel good reworkings of history some of them will likely subject you (and me) to, you probably didn’t have much in common besides age, geographical location and circumstance. They saw you five days out of seven for many many years. They saw you at your best and your worst. They were probably witness to things you wish had never happened and hope will never be revealed. (Although if the initial nostalgia/excitement/hysteria of their Facebook friend requests are anything to go by, chances are they don’t remember those things either.)
Some people will tell you that high school is about ‘getting an education,’ fortunately you and I are much more enlightened. We understand that it is all about social structures and power plays. (Psychologists would be hard pressed to find better case studies than a high school.) And I guess that is what I wondered most… is this ‘reunion’ just a last ditch attempt to impose some social structure on a construct that hasn’t really existed in ten years? Are we all going to compare notes on whose lives have turned out to be most interesting and glamorous and whose lives serve as cautionary tales and joke fodder until the next reunion?
But an even more troubling question presents itself. Why do I even care what these people (most of whom I dislike) think of me? I have these moments in my head where I am so embarrassed with my life’s achievements (or lackthereof) that I start reliving that scene in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where they pretend to have invented Post-It Notes. I realise some of my contemporaries have a lot of interesting ’stuff’ in their lives. They’re studying for careers in law, or they’ve been working their way up corporate ladders. Some of them have been married, some of them have had children, some of them have been divorced. I just think sometimes I’ve been living under a rock by comparsion. I haven’t aspired to very much. I haven’t been successful enough. I went to university and got some qualifications that enriched my life considerably but didn’t lend themselves to any particularly obvious career arc. I had a 9-to-5 (well, 8-to-4, sometimes 8-6) dayjob that drove me to despair and that I abandoned, determined to find myself and my creativity and make something of myself that way. Somehow.
My life is not bad, but it is a work in progress. Ironically in high school I really prided myself on being weird, on being different. There was no greater compliment anyone could give me than to say I was eccentric. I lapped it up. But since then I’ve been taking cues from the culture, internalising fears projected onto me from other more responsible (boring) conservative adult types. It is as if I need to keep reminding myself that I made the choices I wanted to make because I wanted to make them. The trick I suppose will be owning them, expressing them unapologetically, without flinching, even as people interject with stories about their promotions, their mortgages, and their children. And there is nothing wrong with any of those things. If that is your path I wish you well. But it’s not mine and I need to acknowledge that and take pride in my decisions.
Hi, I am the sole who said “You will regret not going more than you will regret leaving early if it sucks”. I left my reunion after 1 hour, not because I felt inadequate about my achievements in comparison to my class mates but because it gave me that moment of realisation that I had moved on from the playground. I realised that I no longer needed validation of my choices/success/failures from these people and that I was an adult, a creation of my own choices, achievements and abundance of mistakes. I didn’t realise until I was at the reunion that I needed that moment of self actualisation. 10 year reunion, whether good or bad, is a milestone in our life which I feel should be experienced, even if for 15 minutes. If you had a nightmare time in high school, I can guarantee your bullies won’t remember doing it, and if they do, they probably feel guilty and will be overly nice to you. I was in no way popular at school and was shocked when a girl spoke to me about our high school times and said that I had completely dismissed her and made her feel unimportant – I had no idea and could not even place her face which proved her point. It is funny that as people we remember the bad things that happened to us, but rarely remember the bad things bestowed on us. Who cares in the end, you aren’t going to see them again for another 10 years right?
Correction on my post: “but rarely remember the bad things bestowed on us” should read “but rarely remember the bad things bestowed on others” — makes sense now, yes?
Let’s see…
I didn’t go to my 5 or 10 year reunion. Do I feel like I missed something? No. In the past 20 years, how many times have I looked at my Year Books? Zero. That’s right. Not a single time. In fact, it was that reason that lead me to throw out the Year Books when I cleaned out my house. They were taking up space and I honestly can say that I don’t see myself ever looking back at them.
Will I attend my 20 year reunion? No. I had two close friends in High School. Neither of which I keep in contact any more or want to. Fact of the matter is, I really don’t look back on that period of life.
Even when I graduated and went back to the school on a regular basis, it was to confer with my old teachers on various academic programs I was supervising. I am probably closer to the faculty members than to any student that ever graced the halls.
My year didn’t have much initiative, so I don’t know that anyone would organise a reunion, but I hope they do. I want to go. I want to go mostly to see what the few people I actually had a lot of respect for but wasn’t friends with are now up to – if I know them well enough though, they wouldn’t turn up, so I’d be relying on others knowing what they were now up to.
And I want to go to catch up with some of the teachers I also had a lot of respect for.
But I look back on high school and I did enjoy it. I remember the good stuff, like the good memories with friends, and the advice from teachers which I still hold dear. I don’t keep the bad memories so close to me.
Seeing some of the good teachers again would be a big plus for me as well, assuming any of them come, and I think they probably get a lot of satisfaction from meeting students and seeing them as adults.