Terror of the 20 year reunion....

...in which I try to figure out the root of this anxiety & overcome it.

Tonight is the night. My 20 year HS reunion will take place in about 7 hours and I find myself increasingly anxious (if not outright terrorized.) Most of you did not know me in high school, but it wasn't exactly what you would call a pleasant experience for me. I do not have sequential memories of this period in my life, it is more like I remember particular scenes, like being called a faggot every day or this kid spitting on my face on the bus or finding notes in my locker telling me that I was gonna die from AIDS & not being able to tell anyone about any of it because I thought they all knew & approved & nobody thought I deserved any better or else somebody would have said something.

Intellectually, I know there were bright spots, I know that I had a few friends. I only got beaten up for being gay once, and that didn't happen at school, although the person who set it up was a classmate of mine. The police flat out told me that they wouldn't prosecute the guys who did it to me because they were part of a drug sting that would put the dudes in jail for longer than a simple battery charge. "Hate Crimes" weren't recognized then & honestly if they had been, I'm really not sure that anything would have happened anyway.

Oh but I was so angry and so scared & so unable to admit that I was angry even to myself & so I masked it, I hid it behind sassy comments & then once I was out of high school I was still so very angry & couldn't remember why & I did my damnedest to forget it all, to snort it or smoke it or mainline it all away & somehow, some way I lived thru it, & despite my own best efforts, I survived.

Just typing these few paragraphs is giving me butterflies in my stomach & got my hands shaking like the very last crackhead in America & I'll probably go thru a pack of cigs before I finish this but finish this I must. It's important.

My clearest memory from high school is actually from 3 days after I graduated. My parents took my sisters & me to...Biloxi? Mobile? IDK, someplace on the Gulf Coast for some biker event (my dad drove a Harley at the time) & when we got back, someone had spraypainted the words SUCK DICK FAG in big white letters on the blacktop street in front of my house & FAG on our mailbox. My parents & my grandfather told me it was my fault. If I hadn't acted like such a sissy, no one would say those things about me, I would have gotten a date to the prom, I would have had friends to go on Senior Trip with, and I certainly wouldn't have had to clean off the graffitti with  a scrub brush in the scorching South Louisiana heat a few days from my 18th birthday. I am not sure if you have ever tried to remove paint without any solvents, but I'm here to tell you, it's difficult, especially when you have to move out of the way of oncoming cars when all you want to do is lay down in front of them & just not have to fucking be hurt any more over the fact that you're not who other people tell you that you should be.

Oof. That was hard. Hard to live thru & hard to think about & hard to write about, but I know that if I don't get it all out I'm probably going to end up chain-smoking all day long & talk myself out of going to this party tonight.

I didn't go to my 10 year reunion. I was still really angry & to be honest, I didn't feel like I had anything to show for those 10 years besides track marks & a profoundly diminished sense of smell. I was scared & ashamed & felt incredibly inadequate at the idea of having to face people who gave me recurrent nightmares. I didn't give them a chance to reject me again. Instead, I rejected the idea of being in their company & cut myself off from a chance to understand and forgive and heal.

In the second decade since my 1st graduation, I've been the winner on a game show, gotten 2 BA degrees & an MA, become highly fluent in two foreign languages, travelled to Europe, won more scholarships than I can name offhand & so much more besides, but somehow that sense of inadequacy is still there, in the back of my mind & deep inside my heart, in a place that defies intellect and reason. But this time, I will not let the anxieties and fear hold me back. This time, I will use that nervous energy, channel it into some positive force that will permit me to overcome that Terrible Awful Anger and see that the other kids at school were just that-Kids.
They felt angry, they felt lost & had to take it out on someone & saw me as a fitting target because that's what they were taught. They didn't know better.

I know no one is going to do anything bad to me tonight. I know that we have all grown up & changed and (hopefully) become better people. I'm trying not to go into this with any expectations (more than 1 person has given me this advice) other than an open bar & some snacks for 3 hours.

My friend Sandi asked me the other day who I was hoping to see at this reunion. I really didn't have an immediate answer. A while later, I came up with a few names, but now that I've had a few days to kind of live with the question, the real answer is---Me. I'm hoping to see that Me that I used to be and be able to forgive him for being different, for daring not to conform, and love him because without him, I'd never be the Me that I am today.