It’s interesting to me when you run into a friend-acquaintance from high school who you haven’t seen in years – you know, those people who you called your friends but you never actually hung out much. It’s always a pleasant surprise, accompanied by an “Oh my gosh! How have you been?” and the basic “what are you doing now” spiel. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is the fact that although we are usually pleased to see said person, we usually don’t care enough to delve any deeper. We do our basic Q&A and then wait for the perfect opportunity to exit the conversation and go back to our lives. It’s not that we’re rude or we don’t care, it’s just that it’s one of the most bizarre things to intermix your high school life with your post-grad one. Am I right or am I making this up? Crossing the two is confusing. It’s like you have two different personae – the one from high school and the one you became once you figured out what you hated about yourself in high school and figured out how to change it. Meeting a old friend causes the two identities to mix and form a weird mutant you, one that you can’t quite recognize. I find it goose-bumpy. It’s bothersome because you can’t control it and you can never seem to distinguish between the two during your miniature reunion. But the two separate the instant you leave the nostalgia-prone conversation.

This post may not matter to anyone else. Maybe you haven’t changed since high school or you’ve never had an awkward reunion. But one day, when you think you’re safe inside the identity you’ve built up for yourself, it will happen. And then you’ll think back to me and my pseudo-theories of post-graduation identity crisis and truly understand what I’m talking about.