balding angrily

Let me tell you something about the past, about bringing high school into the present. The past doesn’t change, and when we look at it too hard, we revert back. We assume the roles we played in it.

I was in a group that rewarded cleverness. We tried to out-do each other with our vocabularies. We talked about our favorite words like others talked about TV. We stressed words like eschew as a way to both let the others know we knew the word and let each other know how silly (but not really) we were for using it in conversation. Back then it made us insufferable, but that bent or weakness for cleverness or self-conscious irony continues in my writing and conversation. I’ve given up trying to not be clever or ironic. I love clever.

I was also not as smart as the other people in our group. This didn’t matter to them, but it mattered to me. I’m sickly competitive that way. I always felt like I had to prove to my friends that I could be as literate as them. When passing notes between classes, I felt inferior to them - that I didn’t put my words together as well as them - that I hadn’t been simple enough.

More than that, I yearned for their approval and seethed when I felt I didn’t get it. That also continues. Hopefully, I successfully masquerade that as shtick.

Getting in contact with those people has brought all that back, and I’m once again paranoid that the English major, the author, the one of us who read 5 books a week is judging me. Yes, I know she isn’t. Yes, I know she’s way moved on, that she has a life divorced from the past.

Fucking high school. I loved it, and it did a number on me - in a good way.