Last weekend I drove down to Cheraw for an event of Great Import — my ten-year high school reunion. Back in the summer of 1994, I left that town in a hurry, and I honestly never thought I would ever see any of those people again. I was glad for it; I was always just a little bit outside of that world, never quite ostracized, but never quite welcome either. I never got beat up, but I wasn’t the prom king either. I was a little person, mostly invisible to the Big People, and when I was visible, my presence was tolerated, but never really welcomed.

I’m not going to bore you further with the particular details of my high school geekdom — you either lived through geekdom or you saw it in John Hughes movies. You were on one side or the other, and you know which side you were on. Nothing I can say here will change that, and I don’t really care to try.

Ten years later, just last weekend, I went back, and I’ll still not sure why. There was no one that I particularly want to see. No one that was on short list of people to say hello to. I didn’t even have a list. I guess I went back there partially to prove — to myself and others — that the Real World hadn’t eaten me alive. I went back there to boast. I went back there to show how much distance there was between the person they knew in 1994 and the person welcomed in 2004.

A strange thing happened. Those people, the people who I ran away from in summer of 1994 welcomed me back. They were glad to see me. I was shocked. I’m still shocked. And I was glad.

But I’m also thinking… were they glad to see me back in 1994? I wouldn’t have been glad to see me back then. I spend so much time in my teenage years trying to get away from people, trying to get away from that town that today — looking back — I realize that I never welcomed them in the way that they welcomed me. I thought that I was invisible. Maybe I was invisible, or nearly so.
but there were some people who were trying to see me back then, and they are still trying to see me now.

That’s good I think. That was a lesson worth waiting ten years to learn.