How to Survive Your High School Reunion
I don’t know about you, but I hated high school.
Haaaaaaated it.
And it’s odd because I wasn’t bullied, I wasn’t excluded, I wasn’t a bad student. I had friends, I had boyfriends, I was active in extracurriculars, I graduated with an almost perfect GPA, my teachers liked me. I was by no means popular, but the popular kids knew my name, talked to me, didn’t actively dislike me.
Despite all that though, high school felt like the longest four years of my life. So, when I got a Facebook message from my friend, saying he’d been invited to an “unofficial high school reunion” at a local bar and that we should go, I broke out in hives.
Literal hives. Raised red welts. All over my body.
A reaction to the extreme stress and anxiety of the mere thought of having to go to my high school reunion. Not even an official reunion either, just meeting up for drinks at a bar. But that was enough. Just the thought of seeing those people again, of reliving that time again, caused me such intense stress that my body physically revolted against me. It was enough.
It took me hours to calm down, to get my heart rate back to normal, to get my brain to stop churning out the impossible, improbable scenarios. My friend talked me into going, somehow, and that weekend we went.
Showed up. Got drinks. Hugged people we barely remembered. Smiled. Said our part and left.
The whole affair probably took less than thirty minutes.
Afterward, I felt like such an idiot for stressing over it so much. For all the shaking and crying and hives and unrealistic ‘worse case’ scenarios. Because it was fine. I was fine.
And you know why I was fine?
Because I’m not the same person I was in high school.
It’s been no easy feat, let me tell you, it is a constant uphill battle every day to work to improve myself, to be a better person, a more well-rounded, empathetic, and understanding person. I think back to who I was in high school and I cringe.
I was a kid, a teenager, and a mess. I desperately needed help during high school. I was emotionally abusive throughout my one long term relationship, I battled suicidal thoughts for the entirety of the four years in high school, I self-harmed, I lied to my friends, I pushed people away, verbally berated those trying to help me, and I was overall, not a good person.
It took me a long time to come to terms with that. No one ever wants to accept that they were antagonist in the story, that they were abusive, that they were in the wrong. But I was. My mental health during those years was a disaster, I remember crying in my car every single day before driving home, wearing long sleeves for weeks on end as I waiting for cuts to heal, the sheer panic that would seize me at the thought of the onslaught of university applications, SAT scores, final exams, the pressure of obtaining a perfect GPA, the crushing weight of realizing I had failed whenever I got a B.
My high school boyfriend, the boy I dated for three out of the four years of high school, the one I subjected to years of emotional abuse deserves an apology. For all that I put him through. But I also deserve one from him. Maybe more than one. The relationship was toxic in every sense of the word, and to this day, I still have nightmares about him. The things he would say, the things he would do. I always feel the urge to downplay the abuse that occurred during our relationship, knowing that compared to what some women have lived through, it was nothing. But it’s important not to give in to that urge, because what happened to me still happened. Still impacted me. Still hurt me.
He was just a kid too, a teenager, a mess. And I’m sure he’s grown too. I’m sure that he too, regrets what he said, what he did. Regardless of that, I never want to see him again. And that was where the fear came from, the one that caused such a strong case of anxiety that I broke out in hives.
It was the fear of going back to that person that I used to be. Of seeing all those people I used to know, and thinking that they would look at me now, and see the person I used to be.
The person I had worked so hard to change.
It was the fear of possibly seeing my abusive ex-boyfriend, of seeing his friends, the ones that took his side after our disastrous breakup and probably heard his stories about me and my behavior, of seeing the people who knew us both during that period of our lives and watched from the sidelines as we acted and behaved in a manner that was deplorable.
I didn’t want to be associated with the person I used to be. I didn’t want to be connected to them in any way, reminded of them.
I was afraid. Of who I used to be.
But the thing is, I am still that person. They are just me at fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, those versions of me that I am so embarrassed by, so ashamed of, so pained by. They’re still me. Without them, without the experiences I went through in high school, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. And there’s no way to rewrite history, to wipe my slate clean, no way to expunge those memories from my mind, no way to make a clean break from former toxic self.
I just have to accept it.
Accept that I was faulty, that I made mistakes, that I was abusive, that I was mentally ill, that I was a bad person. Accept it and move on. Keep fighting. Keep working on becoming better. A better person, a better human, a better partner, friend, daughter.
And I do.
Every single second, of every single day.
Walking into that bar, sheer terror coating my body like ice, and seeing the meager group of people from high school who had bothered to show up made me realize something —
It isn’t about how other people view me; it’s about how I view other people.
It’s about how I view myself.
They didn’t care about the things I had said in ninth grade, the boy I had dated and broke up with and got back together with over and over again. They barely seemed to remember my last name, what classes we had together, much less what they overheard when he and I would fight viciously in the hallway before class.
They were all there for their own selfish reasons. They had grown since high school too. They were unconcerned with how I acted in high school and more concerned with the weight I had lost and the degrees I had obtained and the drink I had ordered.
They cared about the person I am now. Today.
And that’s all I’m concerned about too.
