High School Reunion Dilemma: do I really want to use electronic tools to keep in touch?
By Veronica MacDonald Ditko
An Accidental Anthropologist
I’m a pretty busy person and never really thought it was important to set up a MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook account. I like my family and close friends, and I think they know it. I talk to them all the time.
But technology is trying to change that. A distant friend from high school contacted me recently and said lots of people were asking about me on Facebook. But not only that, they wanted to e-mail me. And a panic set in.
I thought I got over high school. I thought I was free. Why do these people want to relive it?
I know my brother and sister did not have the same high school experiences as I did; one class to another never does. I always thought of high school as a place where people of the same age are thrust together and forced to deal. That means you’ve got a lot of personalities in that mix. It’s like one big dysfunctional family, depending on the mix.
High school is also a place where people torture one another by pigeonholing them into some kind of slot, even they never fit into that slot. Because you’ve always got to have the cheerleader, the geek, and the weirdo in the trench coat, right?
I’m older and wiser now, and I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out why people acted the way they did. The really mean ones had no self-esteem. Other ones felt peer pressure. And some were just not nice people, period.
So what is the etiquette for dealing with these requests? The people who want to talk to me now are the same people who tortured me then. Why would I want to open Pandora’s box?
I haven’t really changed that much from high school. I still like to do the same things; I still have the same philosophies. I might have tons more knowledge about things like finance and relationships, but they don’t define me. And I have always known who I am. The only difference is that I am not so hard on myself anymore.
There definitely are people from high school I’d love to hear about, but they don’t seem to be on Facebook asking about me! Maybe they feel the same way I do. I don’t really want to make a spectacle of myself by posting my pictures and announcing every last thing I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Who cares?
I feel like there is so much more I’d rather do than spend time talking about myself. And I don’t feel like I have to pretend to be friends with people I happened to share classes with.
Then my mother said something that put me to shame. “They’re probably going to think you’re stuck up,” she said. And she’s right. But they never got me right anyway…
