Time For High School Reunion Hell
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: High School, Personal Development, Life Lessons, Self Improvement

Time For High School Reunion Hell

Or other tortures of late summer

The number on my hotel door, which faced the Florida sunset, had left a snail trail of goo as the intense heat caused it to melt, in a long, slow death, to the concrete walkway. My motel door had jammed on it. I nearly didn’t make the reception.

It was the third weekend of August. High school reunion week. Any damned fool — especially Florida natives — knows that this is the single worst time to be in the state. I am beyond understanding why reunions, especially after our kids have long left the nest, are still held in summer. Most of my high school peeps are retired, so it’s not like they still have jobs. Most of them are pining about island retreats. Rocking chairs. Air conditioning.

A few years ago I went to my 45th. The venue had shifted, not the dates. Not the food, not the aging band (which by the way, continues to improve, like fine wine, so should we all if we’re so lucky).

I remember sliding out of my rental into the brutal heat, my stilettos sinking into the soft asphalt of the golf club parking lot. The Florida sun hammered me in the face and sank its claws into my body. It was early evening. Still foully hot. I don’t know how people do it. No wonder I moved West.

A small group was already gathered. At this age, well past sixty, so many folks’ faces have begun to melt like that door goo and soften into folds. Its hard to reconfigure that mold into the kids we passed the hallways. That’s why we wear the deeply embarrassing name tags with photos of ourselves with Really Bad Haircuts.

THAT WAS YOU???

Yep. Shut the fuck up, already.

People are kind enough not to shriek WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?

For some of us, that’s a very good question. Which is of course why some folks never show up.

My handsome high school flame ended up morbidly obese. He and his wife are doing time for embezzlement. Not good optics. “So, how did it all turn out?” Would not be a good opener for these guys.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Mine’s a small town. Not a lot of us, and of that, because the years I attended were also the years of segregation, our numbers are never swelled by those classmates of color who were forced, often unwillingly, into seats and clubs and activities that had difficulty making them welcome.

In that regard, nothing has changed. Not a single Black classmate has ever shown up. They didn’t feel welcomed then. They don’t feel welcomed now.

I don’t either, but for very different reasons.

Since leaving home at 16, I put myself through school, joined the Army, hitched the country. I’ve run a bunch of businesses, done radical sports, traveled (and still do) to some of the world’s most remote and amazing places. Written two prize-winning books and working on another.

A bodybuilder for 45 years, my body-which was 64 at the last reunion-is tight. Hard. Sculpted. Still is. Wasn’t in high school. Not even close.

Never had kids. Had a brief, disastrous marriage. Carved out one hell of a career doing adventure travel in exchange for my storytelling skills.

In so many ways I am just now getting really started.

As Medium peep Shea McNaughton and I have discussed, there are times that you bring something very different back to those reunions, and it ain’t good memories.

It’s that your prime time is right NOW.

That kind of vivid show-up can be a real turn off for folks who would prefer to do a beer-stew and swim in long-past memories of god, wasn’t it great?

No. For some of us, it sucked. And frankly, because it sucked, certain folks (my hand is up) were highly motivated to get the hell out of Dodge before someone’s dick put a dent in in our dreams.

There is something magnificent about being chucked out of your home town into the wide world because of widespread rejection. Every single hero’s journey begins with some kind of shitstorm. Usually you and I don’t see that catapult as the opportunity it is until we present ourselves into an environment were little has changed. But sometimes we have. Radically.

People who contain some soupçon of our history, strained through the years and filtered through the lens of their own stories at the time, have something extraordinary to offer us. Shea found out that her peeps saw her as the “cool girl,” to which she said, who knew?

That’s a gift. It’s also a way for us to reconfigure the tenuous scaffolding onto which we layered and cemented the stories that launched us into the ether, to prove or disprove whatever we felt had unfairly defined us in our youth.

For my part, I was told that people saw me as the smart girl, at a time when I was convinced I was stupid, fat and ugly. Like Shea, I had no idea.

Even so, walking into a reception of folks still sorted by the ancient caste system of geeks, athletes, smart kids, etc., is a wonder. That’s particularly true if you have fundamentally remade yourself in some way.

Most thought I was someone’s arm candy until they saw my name tag. The double-take was almost worth the price of the flight.

The flame of my sophomore year, a blonde kid named Chris, had a mother who owned a weights studio in town. I remember when our local rag did a feature story on her, late in life, having just done a barbell snatch with 100 lbs. She made it look easy.

I wanted to be that woman. I am that woman, although I cannot do a 100-lb barbell snatch ( I scorched my rotator cuff and blew out my biceps tendon). In so many ways I am everything that woman was and more. Funny how things turn out that way. A childhood dream that I had forgotten. Box ticked off.

Who knew.

Now I do.

What a gift.

The sadness sinks in when you realize- particularly if you showed up in some kind of retribution mode- that people really do not want to know. If your new and improved threatens their story (you were fat, as one woman was, and she showed up bathing suit model slim and superbly fit which shocked the shit of everyone) or you were a total nerd, and now you’re the CEO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise(which also happened) this can be very uncomfortable. Or, at the least, your presence rattles the cage. Because you no longer fit inside the adolescent cubby hole into which you’d been stuffed. Into which you and I also stuff others (bully, asshole, class clown, queen…)

The nerd who became a judge. The gay kid who ended up as that CEO (yes he did). The shrinking violet who evolved into a best selling novelist. I love stories like this, if for no other reason than they pry open potentials for all of us, proving that who we are as adolescents isn’t a predictor of future failure or success.

Reunions are one of the few places where we can bookmark our progress, if that’s important. Sometimes it is, if for no other reason that to re-frame our personal history. As Shea and I did, write over the once-indelible script of loser.

Will I go back to another wicked-hot reunion where I will likely be left to stand on my own in a hallway while the rest of the group gets their photos taken together?

Look. If that still matters so much to me, that’s a bookmark for how far I have not come. It no longer bites. This is not, and never was, my tribe.

You were never one of us.

Indeed. That’s quite all right. I was never meant to be a Central Florida housewife. For I would never have had this life.

That doesn’t make me superior. It just makes me different. Sometimes being different is what it takes to force you to venture forth and become who you really were meant to be.

If you wonder at times, and we all do, whether the turn you took was the right one, sometimes a reunion can provide that very validation. Might have been rough at the time, but if it hadn’t been, you wouldn’t be who you are right now. You wouldn’t be in your prime.

That’s a pretty good motivation to show up.

Is your high school reunion a torture or a touchstone? It depends on what you bring to the party.