Reply #6: Let 'em live [View All]

A lot of those people will be pretty humbled by Real Life(tm) at this point and a good number will be pretty apologetic about how they treated you. The worst will still be bigots- but some number of them will have been incarcerated- yet living grinds most people down.

In a sense we all never leave high school- it was where all the initial status/class/ability sorting out took place for everyone, which was brutal and impersonal (really) and all about the accidents of birth and raising. No one really gets over that trauma of finding out that you are not what you hope you are, that you have to build your identity on a foundation you may never like or go to the trouble of destroying it an pouring a new one and thus falling behind on the rat race.

A lot depends on the dignity, anger, grace, and peaceableness you discover you can bring with you. This will always be the society you came from, by proxy. But your life as you made it is given to another set of people, to other measures. You live to an eternal order now, to Covenants rather than their neediness-driven behaviors of Back Then that reflected their own miserable adolescence and family lives. And don't forget that at your age most of the people there will know something of the shadow and maybe the sound of the footsteps of the Grim Reaper.

The real reason people go to high school reunions is to admit to the few that you loved that you were in love with them then. How ever vaguely. And the tacit expectation that everyone brings to a hometown reunion is that someone who sprang the coop brings back the bauble of importance- some kind of news or lived life that gives the rest reason for hope for a future better than what they have found theirs to be.

At least that's my experience, and my h.s. life was full of disgusting hostilities and vile people lashing out on measure with yours. (I went across very sensitive ethnic lines in my romantic life and wouldn't debase or compromise myself enough to join in any clique, those were the crimes I was convicted of.)

Take care and good luck....