All my bags are packed, (I think) I am ready to go… to my reunion. I am probably giving away my age right now, but that is OK. I am – heaven knows how high from earth – approximately 1500km away from my hometown on my way to my high school reunion. Yay!
Or nay.
A decade ago we left school to enter the wild-wild world of adulthood and bills and jobs and cars and having to make sure there is always toilet paper. We had dreams. Aspirations about who we would become. Or perhaps we had an imaginary world we were hoping to reach before the 10 year reunion. Why? Because we care what we become? Yes, of course we care what we become, but does that matter to anyone you just happen to knew ten years ago?
We are all familiar with the stereotypes…The plastics, the nerds, the first-team-rugby-heroes, the goody-two-shoes, the goths (nowadays the emo kids), the freaks…the list goes on and on and I find it extremely sad that we were so comfortable to just package people in certain boxes and brand them with a label: FREAK. Stamp. GEEK. Stamp. BITCH. Stamp…and then we were sent off to The Wild…
Now what? Now, after I realised that The Wild was even wilder than I thought it would be. After I became comfortable being me when I realised there are a whole lot of people with similar interests. Now that it is perfectly normal to belong to a writers club and not watch rugby.
All of a sudden toilet paper is higher on my priority list than box wine. I realised that the people you knew back then does not necessarily feature in your life right now and the people you used to hate are forgiven…finally. There are people we keep and treasure, there are people we would rather avoid. Then there are the people you just randomly wonder about one sunny morning when you are chopping spring onions for an afternoon’s salad.
“So why go?” you might ask. “Why not?” I would answer. I am on this aeroplane because I would love to see the people I kept in my heart (and their precious new-born babies). I want to see the people I wonder about over spring onions. I want to be enlightened by the people who jumped out of their branded boxes and became the people they should be.
The lovely thing about growing up is that we do not need to tolerate this branded-crap anymore. We can all just sit back and be comfortable around the people we like. And those who decided to stay in their boxes and keep us Jacks-out-of-the-box in our discarded ones…they should be shipped to a place far-far away.