Last night, CS and I attended my 20 year high school reunion. I had two close friends in high school, and I still keep in touch with them. For our 15 year reunion, they both went and I passed. This time, they were both going again and I felt I owed it to them to go.

To be honest, I have a hard time recollecting memories from high school. One of my girlfriends brought all of our old dance pictures. I barely remember my dates for most of those dances and could not remember the actual evenings. As a matter of fact, my girlfriends were the ones that remembered the names of my dates (as most of them were friends of theirs). It was weird–like I sleepwalked through those four years.

I didn’t “find myself,” I’d say, until some five years later in law school. And I was a pretty good kid back in high school. My parents thought that as a teenager, I was a delight. To them, I became a terror in law school–when I began to experience true independent thought. But back in high school, I didn’t push many envelopes or test boundaries. I DID go to a few bars (let’s remember that I did grow up in New Orleans!) before I was 18, and I DID lie to my parents about it, but that was rare and usually not very eventful to me.

I also didn’t date a lot in high school. I was pretty shy and went to an all-girl high school so I just didn’t know or meet a lot of young guys. I was a senior when I had my first boyfriend, and oh was that a disaster. Too bad I tend to recall most of that fiasco.

So I really had no interest in going to this reunion. Except for maybe five people (including my two girlfriends), I really don’t even remember my former classmates and have no real interest in what became of them.

But I went thinking I was being a stick in the mud and once I got there I’d have a good time. Well, I DID enjoy seeing my two girlfriends. That’s about where the enjoyment ended. The person I was 20 years ago stepped right back into my body. I became shy and kept to myself. I didn’t remember names or faces of most of the people, and honestly, didn’t care what had become of them. Nor did I care to show them the “real me.” I had nothing to prove to anyone. And no one seemed to really care what had become of me.

I was the first to leave, and that happened over three (long) hours in. I just couldn’t make small talk anymore with strangers. And the three other people I was interested in catching up with didn’t show. Of the 133 grads, only about 25 showed up; the restaurant was only so-so (in a city where you can throw a rock and have an amazing meal); liquor was not included; and there was a DJ for the dancing they had planned (thankfully, I got out before the dancing started).

So I didn’t really enjoy myself. That’s not a crime. I didn’t cause a scene or anything. And we got home early. But this morning I woke up sad and realized that I had allowed myself to revert back to my former shy self last night and that bugged me. I look back at my younger self and barely recognize anything about her as being a part of me today. Except I am still shy in situations where I don’t know people. I am terrible at “working a room.”

So really, this was a reunion of the current me with the former me. And revisiting with my old flawed self just made me marvel that I’ve managed to figure out so much about myself and grow as much as I have–I had a very long way to go. But the former me was certainly not the best of me nor do my high school days represents the proverbial “best days of my life,” and I didn’t need a lame reunion to make me realize how far I’ve come or how well I am doing now.

Sometimes its good to go back and sometimes there really is no point to it. I am pretty sure I’ll be a no-show for my future high school reunions.