Preparing for my 35th High School Reunion - am I nuts?

It's the strangest thing - tomorrow I'll take off for my 35th high school reunion to see people I haven't seen in at least 25 years, some more than that.  I've gotten reacquainted through the magic of FB.  I look forward to the trip with lots of excitement and a bit of trepidation - what'll we talk about?  what'll they think of me?  What will I think of them?  Will we like each other?  Will there be cliques?  Will I fit in?

I'm starting to remember what it was like when I first went to high school there - I'd been in another high school in Norfolk, VA from 7th - 10th grades and was about to transfer to Culver Girls Academy in Indiana because my father had a new job there.  In Norfolk, I was sadly at the bottom of the popularity rung due to a most unfortunate accident - I'd had the audacity to faint - and to fall on a girl!  One of the guys in the class, someone who was in my carpool - yikes! - decided that meant I was a fag.  I had no idea what a fag was, but the way he said it over and over again, to everyone else in the class, made me know it was bad, and I was it.  I began walking around with my shoulders drooped, my head down, afraid to make eye contact with anyone for fear they'd laugh at me for being a fag.  I instantly lost whatever social standing I had had and was relegated to the depths of our 80 person class.  Boys began snickering behind their hands when I walked by.  Sometimes I'd find them stuffing notes into my locker.  I don't even remember what the notes said.  The humiliation of seeing them do it and laugh is all that remains with me right now.

Braces, glasses, a poor haircut, and the moniker of fag were all I needed to know I was lost for good.  The rest of seventh, eighth, and ninth grades were a blur as I scurried around hoping I wouldn't be noticed and worked to excel academically.  Thankfully I was successful in the latter endeavor.  I also found a friend in eight grade - a new girl - Julie.  I saw her the first day of school and knew I wanted to be her friend.  I saw her looking around a bit awkwardly and decided to get over my shyness and to speak with her immediately, before anyone could tell her I was a fag and turn her, too, against me.  We hit if off right away.  We became best friends.  She rode the same bus I did so we would sit next to each other on the bus and talk all the way home.  As soon as I got home, I called her up to talk another hour or so.  I've never been so happy to have a friend in my life!  I don't think I ever told her about my reputation, and thankfully I don't think she suffered from knowing me and liking me.  She told me later that, as the years progressed, our classmates matured and all became very close, even so much as to invite everyone in the class to parties, not just a select few.  I remember doubting that I would have been included even then, but I was glad to hear it for the rest of the rejected ones.

That was the context within which I was getting ready to enter Culver the middle of my tenth grade year.  I was absolutely delighted when my father told us we'd be moving and going to a new school where he'd be the Chaplain.  I was crazy about my dad, so it didn't bother me at all to be a student where he was the minister - I'd already had plenty of experiences being called "Minister's Daughter" and it no longer galled me.  Dad and I were set to drive up in January, leaving the rest of my family behind until the house sold, and so the two younger kids could finish out the school year before moving north.

Dad and I packed up the hard-topped jeep with our most vital possessions and headed to Indiana in the middle of the winter.  Thankfully I was working on knitting a shawl - it was the only thing that kept me warm as the wind whipped through the poorly sealed doors, windows, and top.  Dad loved that rugged car, but I was less enamored.  Nonetheless...  as we drove through Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, then entered Indiana, I knitted and purled and had time to think about how I wanted the next two and a half years to be.  I decided that it couldn't be a repeat of the previous three and a half or I'd be utterly miserable.  I'd just gotten contacts to replace my glasses and had gotten a nice haircut so I was feeling prettier. As I kept up the steady stream of stitches, it occurred to me that I could change my life - no one at Culver knew me.  My reputation couldn't precede me.  I decided with complete conviction that I was going to take Culver by storm!  I was going to love it, and they were going to love me.  I'd get there and be friendly and make friends right away.  I'd smile at everyone I saw and would be nice no matter what.  I would join clubs and speak up and love being there!  It was a solid decision and one I acted on right away, the minute I stepped out of the car.  I walked around the campus smiling broadly, happy to see people, and enthusiastic to get to know them.  I had the advantage of being one of very few new students at the semester, so everyone wanted to see who I was, and they were curious to see and meet my dad. 

Me at Culver

Within a few hours of arriving, I'd already been asked out on a date by Dad's Aide to the Chaplain, a very nice person.  Considering that I'd never been on a date with anyone from my school in Norfolk, that made me ecstatic!  My plan was working!  The next two and a half years truly were some of the happiest of my life.

As I think back to the young person I was in Norfolk, I feel great compassion for how lonely I was, how segregated I felt, how confusing it was to be called a name I didn't understand.  It was a lonely existence, made better only when I met a girl who didn't know to dislike me by reputation and who would give me a chance.  Culver was the best thing that had ever happened to me at that point.  I did, in fact, make many friends.  I joined every club that interested me, and then some.  I partook in classes with gusto.  I found people with whom I could connect.  But most importantly,  I think, I learned that I was a likeable, normal person, not a social pariha.  Deciding I would love my life made it so.  That is a lesson I use still.

As I've gotten older, and since I've learned what a fag is, I've also come to feel complete compassion for gays and lesbians for the horrors they go through as people taunt them and treat them horribly simply because they are who they are.  I have become a strong advocate for anyone who is experiencing oppression.  A student asked me the other day how I became an activist.  I told him I didn't become an activist consciously - it was simply a matter of choosing to name what I see and to not be willing to put up with it silently.  I know how it feels to suffer at the hands of people who feel superior to me for whatever reason, and I am not interested in playing that game.  Plain, pure, and simple.

So now I'm preparing to get in the car tomorrow to take that very long drive again, to a place I haven't seen in 25 years.   My shyness and reserve are feeling in high gear.  I'm so used to being alone in the studio most of the time that it's sometimes difficult to change gears and to be around a lot of people for long periods of time.  But I'm going to decide to have a great time, to smile at everyone I meet, to put myself out there, to be my authentic self, and to love getting to know these classmates all over again!  Culver, get ready, here I come!

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, by Courtney E. Martin

The last couple of weeks I've been reading an outstanding book called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, by Courtney E. Martin.  It is an indictment of our culture today and how young women are caught in a vise of trying to please and to be perfect.  These young women give the impression of having their act together.  They excel in school, sports, and extra-curriculars, but at the same time they detest themselves for not being completely perfect, and they often take out that hatred on their bodies.  It isn't just an upper middle class white girl problem either.  Martin's research has shown her that unfortunately this issue is gender-wide, bridging economic and racial lines like few other problems.  And in fact, she is also seeing a huge rise in eating disorders in young men who are also starting to feel pressure to have perfect bodies - six-pack abs, calves the right size, pecs that are muscular as can be.

Here are some of the statistics Martin quotes and address in her book:

* Ten million Americans suffer from eating disorders.
* Seventy million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders.
* More than half of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would prefer to be run over by a truck or die young than be fat.
* More than two-thirds would rather be mean or stupid.
* Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychological disease.

Her take on the problem is that young women today were raised to believe they can be anything - unlike their mothers or grandmothers who were on the front lines of feminism and had to fight to break through the glass ceiling.  Apparently, according to Martin, this affirmation has been devastating to these young women.  She says, "In those affirmations, assurances, and assertions was a concealed pressure, an unintended message: You are special.  You are worth something.  But you need to be perfect to live up to that specialness."

Wow.  What a Catch-22.  I certainly want my daughter to feel like there are no doors closed to her, that she can, in fact, do whatever she wants to do, but I would hate it if at the same time I was somehow giving her the message that she had to be perfect  in order to be able to do that "anything" she set out to do.  What a painful bind.

Does this ring true to you in your experience?  Have you experienced this?  Or has your daughter? 

The world Courtney Martin describes is powerfully dysfunctional, with nary a woman able to have an intimate relationship with herself or with someone else because she's so worried that she looks too horrible to be worth loving.  And the men, too, are focused on but one thing - the woman's body and getting a piece of it.

Martin does ask young men what they look for in a woman - many respond from their hormonal place - big tits, tight ass (please excuse the crudeness of those descriptions - they're from the book) - but if they allow themselves to get under than shallow response, they usually are looking for a woman who likes herself, is confident, has a good sense of humor.  Martin posits that women would actually have an easier time finding a partner if they would take classes at the local comedy improv club than if they went to the gym every day for hours on end.  Authenticity and self-acceptance are the keys to filling in the inner void and finding love.

I was not caught up in the popularity thing in high school.  I didn't fit into that environment, and I knew it, so I didn't even try to play the game.  It wasn't about my body size - I just didn't have a clue how to play catty or do the girl compliment thing.  I wasn't really aware it was going on until my sister got into middle school.  I would hear her on the phone with her friends gossiping about another friend, saying what a &^*(_(*(& she was, then calling another person and gossiping about the person she'd just been talking to.  There was always drama in their circle, always someone mad at someone else.  It didn't make sense to me.  My friends and I sat around talking about religion or boys or the book we'd just read.  We liked each other and let each other know it.  We hung out together, had a nice time, but there wasn't social drama to speak of.  It was a different way of being, I realize now.

So this "mean girl" thing is unfamiliar to me.  I don't know how it works. But I certainly feel for the girls who are in it and do feel compelled to play by its rules.  It looks like it takes so much energy away from other things.