Recently a friend posted pictures on Facebook from his 40th class reunion. He commented on how changed everyone was and that if not for the name tags he would not have known many of them. In the years since graduation, he had only kept in touch with a few and now via the wonders of the internet has reconnected with a few others.
This got me thinking back to my high school days. Days when everything about you, your clothes, your music, the people you hung out with, were all influenced by a desire to be part of that group. There were very few who made the decision at that age to simply be themselves.
I was one of those lucky enough to be able to move from one group to another but even then I was conscious of how I wanted to be seen by each of those groups. As the fifth member of my family to attend the school, I was met with a preconceived image of who I was and for the most part went along with this image. It was during one year spent away at a different school that I dared to really be me and let some of this show when I returned for my final year at the school.
It was not until I went away to college that I truly let myself free and did not weight every decision on how I thought it would be accepted or rejected by the "IN" kids.
Many of us based our opinion of who we were on the opinions of others. People who no longer matter in our lives. It made me wonder if I would have been a different person had I had the courage back then to simply be me.
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