Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

“See you at the 10-year reunion”

That’s what one of my high school friends (Gretchen Wieners) wrote in another’s (Karen Smith) year 12 yearbook, I found out a couple of years ago. Now said reunion is coming up in less than a month, and I doubt either of them will turn up.

Back in high school, I always thought the 10-year reunion would be a rather Romy & Michelle-type affair, to which my best friend (Regina George) and I would show up in brightly-coloured, self-made outfits, dance to ‘Time After Time’ and finally (if begrudgingly) be recognised for our true quirky brilliance. If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m now more inclined to view my high school years as something on par with Mean Girls - and yes, that makes me Cady Herron (ultimately good intentioned, but not good intentioned enough not to do some not-so-nice things).

I didn’t go to my five-year reunion, for similar reasons it seems a lot of people won’t be going to the 10-year one (minus Facebook, which didn’t exist back then). All the people I wanted to keep in touch with, I still spoke to. Who I was at 12, or 14 - or 17 for that matter - was irrelevant to my 22-year-old self, and trying to communicate with people who only ever knew me in the vaguest of terms seemed both impossible and pointless.

As I wrote at the end of 2006:

I only ever hated high school in retrospect.

Sure, there were things I didn’t like about it while I was there – bitchy girls, insufferable teachers, the feeling of powerlessness about one’s own destiny – but for the most part, I think I thought it was quite okay. And I’m sure that if dug out my diaries from when I was 17, I’d find a sad, nostalgic throwaway line about how, now that’d I’d left high school, I’d never have fun again.

It was only after I left that I began to grow cynical about the curriculum geared more towards regurgitation than critical thinking, the idea that you had to walk from room to room whenever a bell rang and ask for permission to go to the toilet, and the idea of a dress code.

But I think the reason I dislike high school so much in retrospect is because everything that came after it was so much better. It was like being kept in prison for 6 years, not knowing anything else, and then finally being set free and realising what a crap situation you’d been putting up with for so long.  

All of which, if a tad melodramatic, is still true enough. And I totally “get” why some people don’t want to go.

But for me, the point of the reunion is not to play “fake nice” with people you have no intention of seeing for another 10 years, or to finally prove to people how awesome you are. The beauty of the 10-year reunion - and what makes it so different from the five-year one - is that enough time has passed and enough distance has been created that you can actually get to know your classmates as the individuals they actually are, rather than the blunt stereotypes you imagined each other to be.

As I wrote at the beginning of 2005:

there is this particular awkwardness between people who went to high school together, but who were never friends. There is this merge of distance and proximity – you know the person and you should say ‘hi’, but on the other hand you shouldn’t, because the only way in which you really ‘know each other’ is as a couple of ficticious “characters” which have nothing to do with who either of you actually are or ever were.

And of those people I wasn’t friends with in high school whose paths I’ve crossed with since, the surprise hasn’t been - as people always talk about - the schadenfreude of what losers they grew up to be, but of how interesting - and in most cases lovely - they turned out to be.

So while I have little desire to reminisce about days that didn’t hold a candle to the ten years that followed, I’m kind of looking forward to reconnecting. Or more accurately, connecting for the first time.