My 20th (oh god) high school reunion is this summer, and I’m debating whether or not I should go.

A lot of people are wildly divided on reunions, and I’m not really sure where I fall. I didn’t have a bad time in high school – but I didn’t have a great time, either. School was just something I did between work and band practice, and I really don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or another. I suppose I’m lucky; I wasn’t bullied in high school. I wasn’t super popular, either – I was .. well, I wasn’t invisible. I had friends. I knew people and people knew me. And that’s about it, really.

Yeah, I have a lot of bad memories from that time in my life – but honestly, school has very little to do with any of them. 90% of the badness came from my mother (this was during the apex of her abuse) and all teen angst bullshit (sadly without a body count) I was going through: I broke up with my first boyfriend in grade 11 and it was devastating; any bullying I DID receive came from my home room teacher; I briefly got involved with a Bad Crowd, and I worked at McDonalds. School was where I went to get away from all of that: no more, no less.

Also, until very recently, I was convinced I didn’t actually go to high school at all and my entire life had been created in an autistic boy’s snow globe.

If I lived in the same city as my high school, I likely wouldn’t think twice about it. However, it’s in Victoria – so in addition to the cost of the weekend (there are three events priced per couple at $25, $20 and $100) I’d have to take the ferry over there and stay in my mom’s sauna in the dead of summer. It’s also over a long weekend, so the ferry will be insanely busy. All told, the weekend will cost me a few hundred dollars, and that’s money I could be saving for London.

Truthfully, I can come up with a thousand reasons to NOT go to the reunion (my overall feeling is “meh”, I wasn’t popular or loathed enough to make a romcom-style triumphant return, I don’t particularly have anything exciting to share, I don’t care about your eighteen children or who’s bald/fat/now identifying as a woman, anyone I would be excited to see either won’t be there and/or I’ve already been in contact with online elsewhere, I’m shy and would likely puss out at the last second anyway, Ed won’t want to go and I don’t want to go alone, it’s a trap). The reasons TO go are pretty small: there’s a few people I would like to see, maybe between now and August I will become wildly successful and/or actually graduate high school, there’s a slim chance I’ve repressed some awful high school drama that will come to the surface just in time to turn the trip into an epic tale of redemption and revenge – but is that enough to lay out the money and time? I am uncertain.

I’ve only been to one reunion before, and it wasn’t my own. I remember feeling really awkward around all these strangers, and I can’t help but feel it’ll be exactly the same at my own reunion. Yes, technically I know a lot of people .. but from an entire lifetime ago. In my final years of high school, I was already forging my identity elsewhere – my social circle mostly consisted of McDonald’s coworkers, and later, creepy perverts I met online. I had outgrown the high school scene long before my “graduation”, and revisiting it all doesn’t really move me one way or another. It makes me yawn, and my eyes water (although everything makes my eyes water; allergies are my FAVOURITE THING EVER).

Did you go to your reunion/would you go if it came up? Would you go at the $300 price tag I’m looking at? Tell me what to do, internet! I am undecided!

dot dot dot