In less than a month, I will be attending my High School 10 year reunion. I wasn’t going to, but I have paid for it now (electronically, my how the world has changed), so I guess I am committed. Not because I wouldn’t want to waste money, but because subconsciously I made a decision to go when I decided to pay.
A 10 year reunion seems to be a rite of passage and I am somewhat apprehensive. Which, in of itself, is not an emotion I am familiar with. I charge into most situations with reckless abandon, content to sort things out on the fly and deal with the consequences later. I am having trouble aligning my perception in that direction for this reunion. It frightens me. But it is not because I fear being jealous of others or feeling sorry for them or anything like that. I could care less what social achievements have been won and lost by my peers and I fight the auto-pilot reflex reaction that is social anxiety on a minute by minute basis.
What I fear is happening already. I have not thought about High School for a long time. I have never taken stock of what High School meant to me, what emotions I went through, what trials at which I succeed or failed. None of it. My tour of duty was a typical one, filled with challenges both academic and social. I have never had regrets about decisions made nor circumstances not fitting dreams, yet I have never stopped to take stock of the experience.
I don’t really know if I want to run into old friends long forgotten or ignored. 10 years ago I had a nice emotional wall built around myself that kept me distant from the confusion of teenage emotions. I have since ditched that wall. Do I really want to live the emotions again, perhaps for the first time in some cases? Will that even be the case, or will the banality that is 10 years of growth simply dispel any mental excursions into the past? Which would I prefer?
In the 10 years that have past, while most of me is the same, there have been changes. Changes in how I deal with and assimilate the world around me. Changes in how I deal with my internal state and emotions. Changes that mean I am better equipped to deal with difficult situations and awkward environments. These changes, however, are recent additions and may not be ready to deal with emotional states that will be triggered by the stimuli that are 10 years old. The inevitable regression that will occur, a temporary echo of a me past, will alter my psyche such that the new code may be uncallable. I don’t really want to be the teenager I was again, even for a short while, but that will be inevitable once the first “Chas, you haven’t changed a bit” is uttered by those bereft of anything original to say. My personality was wrought from the stone formed during my high school years, chipped away to reveal its nature in the ensuing years. It is still in rough form and in need of a lifetime of polish, but it has a shape now, which it didn’t 10 years ago.
Needless to say, this reunion has got me thinking. I don’t think I have ever been in such an acute mood of nostalgia as I have been in the last few weeks. There are sparks of emotion running through my subconscious that are eager to be felt. At the risk of sounding like a Freudian, pretentious wanker, I feel I never stopped to mourn the passing of my teen years. I have celebrated them and made friends with the teenage me, but they are gone and so is he. Perhaps this reunion is exactly what I need, perhaps that is why such a thing as a 10 year reunion exists. It is a rite of passage that allows us to celebrate and mourn a past lost to time. A necessary psychological threshold barrier that the crossing of which allows us to grow and start on the path to the next barrier. The Joseph Campbell growing up as myth theory told tall in our everyday lives. I wonder who my threshold guardian will be. I have an idea who it could be as the fear of this reunion only appeared when I realised this person would be going. It is not a bully or a rival or even a friend. It is a girl who will now be a woman. She chipped away the first of the excess stone when I first let a maelstrom of emotions through my defences.
I have not thought of her for 10 years. It was good that way.
2 comments:
So - did you end up casting your vote in the nude, or did you conform to conventional notions of Appropriate Apparel?
Nude all the way. It was the only way to stop the Christian Democrats from handing me how to vote cards. The Greens, on the otherhand, showed a touching display of solidarity and stripped off as well. Once the Libs dropped their pants cause they thought it was what the electorate wanted, I intervened and got dressed for the good of mankind.
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