Should I go?

A high school reunion is coming up this year, the twentieth year since my graduation. It's in October, and I'm not even sure I want to go.

In high school, I was athletic, participating in three sports and working just hard enough to stay near the top of my class academically. I grew up in a small town, and by small, I mean that my hometown, in its town limits, had fewer than two thousand people, and I think it was more like fifteen hundred. My graduating class was in the ballpark of a mere 150 students. I took the opportunity to be a reasonably big fish in a small, no, tiny, pond. So why not go? Why not go back and see all those people who were part of my past?

I'm not sure why not. Our class had a reunion before this one--seven years ago. Yes, we had a thirteen-year reunion. No one planned one at five or ten years, so when someone became interested in planning one, it was on the anniversary of our thirteenth year from graduation. I was pregnant with child #1 and feeling a bit odd about it. My belly was beginning to poke out, pants didn't fit, my shirt was a tad too short in front, and my feet were hurting from the boots I wore, so I wanted to sit down, eat dinner, and leave. People were having a good old time, drinking, smoking, and hanging out, none of which I was interested doing at that point. I also remember my back aching something fierce.

What's more is that I didn't go with my beloved husband; the man and his brother went on a long-planned canoe/camping trip, so in the spirit of going along, I took a girl friend. I wonder now if people thought we were a couple. Heh.

Anyway, I went. Revisiting that time in my life is complicated. My home life was pretty unhappy, but school gave me the opportunity to escape, be safe, be someone else, and feel important. Whether I was any of those things is questionable, but at the time, high school was better than home. Because I was trying to make school all these things, people saw me in certain ways, some of which I could only imagine years later. I must have been so bitchy, quick to be defensive and hard to be around. I know I was. I tried hard to be a good student and a good athlete, thinking that somehow those things would replace the constant reminder that I wasn't a good daughter. They never did, though, so I remember high school as a dichotomy, a place where I tried to stand out and a place where I worked hard to hide.

If I do, indeed, return to my high school reunion, I don't believe I have much to offer the curious and the interested. I'm not the person I was in high school, since that person really never existed anyway. It would almost be as if I were meeting these people for the first time. Do I care enough about them to go back? I'd say no. Am I curious enough to see who these people are now and open enough to show them who I am now? I don't know. Possibly.

I think that the only way I will go is if I can believe that people might see me for who I am now, not who I was then. I know change is hard, people don't really want to change, and they don't want to accept that others are different. Aren't reunions about judging the difference between how someone was in high school compared to how he or she is now? Shouldn't people naturally understand that we've ALL changed since high school?

What do you think? Should I go?