High School Reunion: Or, Hell's Ante-Chamber

My parents were cleaning out their house and my sister put together a big pile of stuff for me.

In that pile of stuff was my senior year high school year book.

The husband ran across it the other day and started looking through it, reading things that people had written to me.

And I was seriously ready to knife him to make him stop.

I don't even know how to explain this - Thinking about high school, being reminded of it, of myself during that time - I can't handle it.  Not even a little bit.

There's just this visceral, white-hot wave of shame and embarrassment that floods me when I see pictures of myself or find notebooks or, as evidenced the other day, have my husband read all about it in my senior yearbook.

I was completely mortified and uncomfortable and ready to run out of the house or punch him in the junk to make him stop.

I did neither, because I'm a grown up and he's pretty fast on his feet, so I couldn't catch him.

I did, finally, ask him to stop reading it because it was so embarrassing. To his credit, he stopped, even though he couldn't understand why I would feel so . . . awful / horrible / mortified by him reading nice things that people had written to me.

I don't know that I can even explain it - I'll need years of therapy, for sure, to work through this, so I just kind of shunt it aside and ignore it.  Easier, right?

I wasn't all that different in high school than I am now, I guess.  Is anyone?

I was weird and smart and sarcastic.  I was thinner and had cooler hair [but not by much - my hair is glorious lately] and dressed way funkier.  I knew a lot of people, but wasn't close with many, or any, really.

Maybe that's what makes me so uncomfortable - the fact that I have changed so little.  The fact that my expectations of BEING SOMEONE and DOING SOMETHING have come to me living in my tiny house in my whitey-white suburb, married, with a kid, and being president of the PTA.

This was not the life I was expecting or wanting back then.  It's not the life I want sometimes right now.

That's hard to reconcile.  So it's just a lot easier to push it away and set it aside.  That's easier, since the angst only shows up on those rare occasions when my past plunges its way into my life and bites me in the ass.