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.