It is that time of year again. Christmas is around the corner. Families and friends are making plans to have a reunion of some sort. On your Facebook Messenger, there’s a thread there for your high school classmates. It kept on buzzing all day long because people are excited about a reunion next month. You have mixed feelings about attending a high school reunion mainly because you don’t know what to make of them.
Are high school reunions only fun for those who have succeeded? Are reunions for people who look better now because they have gone to an aesthetic clinic in Singapore and had their noses or droopy eyes “fixed”? What does it even mean to have a high school reunion? Why are people so adamant about having these get-togethers?
The Bad
People say that the years they spent in high school were some of the best in their lives. That is not always true. For many people, high school were the years when their insecurities are at the highest. They care about what other people thought of them. All their insecurities and anxieties were in full display. You might only have heard the phrase about high school being the best years of their lives from the popular clique. Otherwise, the rest of the class want to forget that those years happened.
Experts say that the reason people want to attend high school reunions is that they want to show off. This is true, especially for people who have succeeded in their careers. They want to see how poorly others have done with their own lives. They want their classmates to change their perspectives about them. They want them to see that they have done well in their lives despite not being achievers in high school. This goes to show that even the most successful people suffer from insecurities from their high school days.
For many people, high school reunions are a chance to show off that slimmer body and porcelain complexion. This is the time to “get back” at people who bullied you in high school and made you feel unwanted. This is the bad side of high school reunions. They trigger long-buried insecurities.
The Good
And then again, high school reunions can be great, too. They can remind you of the time in your life when you were immature. You can see how far you have gotten in your lives now that you have a career and a family. It will take you back to the time when other people’s opinions matter to you. It’s fun to see how immature you were as a teenager.
For others, it’s time to reconcile differences. You might have gotten into an altercation with a classmate before. Now is the chance, after so many years, to burn those ill feelings and apologize. You might have been the bully back then. You can use this time to admit your mistakes and reach out to the bullied.
You can also use reunions to renew old friendships and possibly build new ones with your other classmates. You will reconnect with friends who knew you before all your achievements. These are the same people you shared music, arts, angst, and history with. Isn’t it nice to get to know them better now that you’re all grown up?
A reunion can be cathartic if you are mature enough to understand what it aims to do: to reconnect people. But if you see it as a chance to boast about your achievements, it will only trigger all your insecurities from high school. Use it to get to know your friends better and reignite old friendships that have always been valuable to you.
