Reflections on times long past

Over the past few weeks, I've received a few "friend requests" and messages on my Facebook page from people I used to know in high school. Often, I reluctantly accept their "invitations" because I feel it's the polite thing to do, only to delete them a month or six months or a year later because I'm just not interested in them being a part of my world. It's been years since any contact, and sometimes the contact wasn't wonderful to begin with. I've always faced this with some ambivalence, because it's hard to decide why I am reluctant or why I feel like I need to politely accept such invites when I don't have any common ground with these people and don't plan to be in their vicinity anytime soon.

The other problems lies within my mediocre (read: horrendous) memory. I've had friend requests from people, and I cannot even remember what they look like or in what way we interacted. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Other times, I'll encounter people when I return to my hometown and I get them confused with others. I do it unintentionally, but my life has been pretty detached from southern Alberta for a long while now. After graduation, I made a whole group of new friends who continue to be in my circle now. There are probably fewer than 15 people who I contact who I went to high school with and still attempt to see when I go back home. And even the number of 15 is a stretch. I see maybe 4 or 5 and then leave.

My ten-year high school reunion is coming up this summer, and although I think I'd attend if I am in Canada at the time, I'm just not sure what's there for me. I was pretty involved in life at the school, but my friend group was always fairly close and fairly small. Sure, I knew tonnes of people, but I only considered some friends who I'd actually trust in any way. I just feel like many were just extras in the drama of my life. I'm positive this presents as arrogant, but that is my last intention. It was a time in my life where I was often looking for an intense connection and deep level of trust with these friends, and if I found that, they remained in my life. If not, I didn't go out of my way to make them a part of my life. Part of this was because of my lack of cool (I was never running with the super popular kids... I was mid-range at best).

I seem to still seek that connection. I need to find that comfort... that trust level. I'll be the first to admit this seems to happen with women more often than men. I'm not sure why, but I'm often much more guarded around guys than I am around girls. Maybe it's because I always felt (and still feel) threatened by other guys and it takes me a lot of time to let down that wall whereas I find it easier with women. Even though I'm perfectly capable of maintaining friendships with guys, it takes me a lot more work.

I look in the mirror and wonder what these people of my past will see. What does my university/work/life resume say about me? In what kind of box will I be placed by those who arrive at this reunion to reminisce? Will I be chastised by my failings? (I could be a real jerk to people I didn't like. I dread the image some people have of me if it's still based on my middle/high school persona.)

And I look in the mirror and wonder how I see myself. Sometimes the glimpse I get is not the glimpse of the man I used to know. It's not a bad sense that I receive... just an unfamiliar one. Needless to say it's related to the past eighteen months of soul searching. But what of it? Why all the questions about this question of identity? Is the "unexamined" life "worth living"?

Whatever the answer to these million questions, I remain.

T