I’ve never been nostalgic about high school.  I don’t, in general, look back fondly on those days.  I wasn’t all that good at being a teenager, and I remember trying desperately to fit in and feeling like I was always failing.  For me high school nostalgia has always been something to be avoided, simply because in my memory it wasn’t that great a time in my life.

What’s weird is that when I really start to examine those memories, I realize that high school wasn’t the problem.  During my high school years my parents were on course for the final crash that would derail their marriage during my freshman year in college and my family life wasn’t that great.   It was in high school that I was targeted and abused by a teacher whom I should have been able to trust.  My high school years were also the beginning of my long spiral into a depression that would derail my life for a year when I was in my early 20s.  None of those things specifically had to do with high school, but all those events have infected my memories of high school.

Oddly enough what started me thinking about all of this was making use of a Facebook account I’d started a while back but never really maintained.  Enough people whom I trust and listen to had told me that Facebook was fun and useful, so I decided to give it another try.  Several people with whom I went to high school had contacted me on Facebook, but I’d mostly ignored them, thinking that they would have the same memories of me in high school that I had.  As usual, I was being harder on myself than anyone else could be.

Reconnecting with some of the friends and acquaintances I had in high school has allowed me to see that time in my life and myself in a different light.  There was fun and laughter and friendship.  I wasn’t as much of a misfit as my memories tell me I was.  The connections that I formed during that time still hold, even after years of benign neglect.  It’s like being handed a different mirror that allows me to see a part of my life in a whole new way.

In the last few months I’ve had several experiences that have allowed me to see that what I thought about myself, or what others told me about myself and I accepted as truth might not be as truthful as I thought it was.  Having that realization is freeing and a little bit sad at the same time.  It’s freeing because that means I can drop some outdated ideas about who I am, and some of those ideas really need to be banished.  It’s sad because I’m now wondering what opportunities I missed because I believed something about myself that wasn’t necessarily true.   Since you can’t go back and change the past, I guess I have to let that one go.

One thing I know I won’t let go, at least not again, is the new connections I’ve made with my old high school friends through Facebook.  I fully intend to stay in touch with these people so we can share old memories and make some new ones.   I may never be big on high school nostalgia, but I’ll always be big on keeping in touch with old friends.