A bit anxious about tonight’s Stuyvesant reunion.
Why the anxiety? I’m not sure I understand it all that well, to be honest. I definitely didn’t feel this way before the Pelham Memorial High School reunion.
Maybe it is because I’m not sure if anyone I know is going. Not really sure who remembers me from back then. Really haven’t seen most of my Stuy classmates since I was 16 or so.
And since I didn’t actually graduate from Stuy, I suppose there’s a chance I’m not even allowed to attend. Which, come to think of it, will make it a lot like high school: crashing a party where I won’t really know many people.
A huge part of it is my unresolved ambivalence about my own state of mind in my early teenage years. Was I actually insane? Demoralized by the insanity of my junior high school? Learning disabled? Or just stubborn? Why was I able to do so well in college and law school but nearly failed out of high school?
Did I seem happy back then? Angry? Or dark and depressed? I kind of have the impression that I probably seemed mostly happy.
Does everyone look back at their teenage years and feel like this? Maybe they do. But I did not feel this way about the Pelham reunion, so perhaps this anxiety really is related to something peculiar about how I feel about what I was like in those early high school years.
