Is High School Ever Over?

As I was getting a ride from a friend from the car repair place the other day, I got a phone call out of the blue from someone I had gone to high school with who I havent talked to in a while. And apparently my ten year high school reunion is coming this summer. Since I will be back in the midwest for the summer, I can't quite use the excuse that I live on the other end of the country and it is time consuming and expensive to go back. I realized that avoidance of such events are amongst my reasons for living at another end of the country.

This gets me to ponder the last ten years of my life. And there is a part of me not really wanting to rehash my college career, and the time before I decided to go to college where I was serious about my high school boyfriend. I am kind of wanting to avoid questions about such things really. I realized that I have lived an eventful, full life since I graduated from high school. And I honestly have never had a huge desire to look back on that horrific point of life.

I realized in high school there was a sense that I didnt really fit into any of the sterotypes that people fall into even then. I really question how much people really do fit into those molds in general however that is a point of life where it is so much more significant. I didnt cleanly fit into any of those molds really. The truth is I still dont but for some reason it has been less of an issue post college in terms of meeting people and making friends then it really was before that.

And the other thing about such events is that it triggers how I feel like I am not at the place I feel I should be at at this point in life. Being single, living off loans and moving around quite a bit still was quite contrary to what I always expected I would accomplish at this point in life.

However the thing is people tend to exaggerate their successes at such events. Some how the idea of going to a high school reunion makes me think that I should have completed a phD and be filthy rich (although I doubt that such items rarely belong in the same sentence). It also makes me think that I should be happily married and won some kind of big award like the Pulitzer, having needed to make arrangments to make sure they dont fall on the same weekend.

In all of these thoughts, I wonder if high school is ever really over. Maybe things like degrees, houses, salaries, travel opportunities, marriages and children are the adult versions of the way we measured ourselves in highschool. Maybe political beleifs, religious beleifs, sexual orientation, sports loyalties, careers and hobbies are the way we put ourselves into the molds in adulthood. In this, I really do not think that anyone cleanly fits into any of these molds. And its clear to me that I have always have had different friends and different activites bring out certain aspects of myself but there is this message that one needs to be defined one way or the other. For some reason I never truly identified with one group in high school.

Maybe its interesting right now that a bunch of us from high school are friending each other on facebook, but honestly do I really want to look backward in my life or do I want to look forward? I would be bold enough to say that life seems to have always gotten a little better since high school. But are the wounds that were inflicted during that time ever really over?