Chinese Punishment of the Rack

I graduated from high school in 1993 and so my ten-year reunion would have been 2003. The twenty year is coming up in 2013. Either way, I can’t see myself actually engaging in any kind of reunion with those people. I regard that time of my life like everyone-who-wasn’t-in regards theirs, a daily trudge through some of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. I was different, I was an outsider, and from the very start I knew it was going to be four years spent where the most important aspect of my life was endurance. I just had to live through it. High school taught me lots of things, the school component of it wasn’t difficult and I did well academically, but the social and emotional aspects of it were vastly different. It’s been so many years and the experiences were so incredibly unpleasant that a giant majority of the time is lost to me. I simply do not remember it. I have redacted my own memories in order to protect myself. I left that situation and those people behind and out of six billion people on this planet high school helped me identify a certain set of people who I never ever want to see again for the rest of my life. The whole experience, from 9th to 12th grade in high school harbor the most unpleasant and painful memories that I have in my life. Like unwanted guests, I do everything I can to not think about them, that time in my life, and I am very happy that it has receded into the past. With each passing breath I am further and further away from it.

I don’t need a reunion with these people. On Facebook I friended those people who I actually were friends with but those connections didn’t get anywhere. Recently in a fit of piqué I decided to browse the web-of-friends that some of the people who I had established a connection with had with people I dimly remember from that time in my life and it was cathartic. What did I discover? What everyone discovers. That those who were in aged just as disastrously as everyone else, but what really struck me is how many people never got anywhere. I think that launching yourself somewhere very different is good for you in the long run and many of these people are stuck in their little lives in their little towns and they never see anything of the world. I have pity more than anything else for them. Perhaps it was all the unpleasantness that encouraged me to range so very far from where I started out, but I can say that I am better now than I was, I’m happier far away than close by, and if I never think about high school again I could die a happy man.