This weekend my husband and I attended our high-school reunion. We were one of the few in our class who were high-school sweethearts and remained married. But that’s not what this blog is about. I didn’t expect to have such a strong reaction afterwards – and that’s where my title comes in.
As I wandered through the sea of unfamiliar faces, checking the handy tags that revealed the faces I would’ve seen in the halls and classrooms, I felt like I was taking a test. One I failed a time or two as my memory failed to remember old friendships. Then there were the familiar faces of those I envied, the popular kids. I realized something about them, most of them are extroverts. Who I wasn’t – popular or extroverted.
Then there were the athletes or jocks who also fall in with the popular and outgoing people. Who I wasn’t – athletic.
I wasn’t a bad student, but I wasn’t a straight-A’s-trying-to-get-into-a-good-college type of student either. I was proud of my B+ average. It was good enough for someone whose biggest aspiration was to get married and raise a family.
I was a gal on the edge of social groups, who loved to sing and write. I find that’s still true today.
When all the thoughts about high school, and what I was like, swirled me around for awhile, my thoughts turned in a downward spiral of who I’m not. I’m not comfortable in large groups. I’m not good at small talk. I’m not very accomplished or interesting.
The comparison game turned to my husband. Did he have more people talking to him? Where they more interested in his art than they were in my book? Would anyone even like my book if they read it. Have I accomplished enough in my life to be as interesting as he is? My unsubstantiated conclusion? I am not enough.
Isn’t that a lie of the devil? Why do we do that to ourselves?
Why do I crave these people’s attention and approval? Why does it matter if they like me or not? I felt like I was back in the awkwardness of high school.
It’s not like I don’t have good memories of high school, I liked school and there are some people I remain in contact with, mostly on Facebook, but none are close friends. Only my husband.
The next day, my daughter took us to her church for service. I don’t know how big a church needs to be to be called a mega church, but it was way bigger than our tiny rural church. It stirred this thought, whether in church or in high school, I can’t know everyone. I can’t maintain hundreds of close relationships. But I should maintain a few.
My life is not in competion with anyone else’s life. I need to make peace with myself. But peace is not stagnation. I’ll close with this:
I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.
Philippians 3:12-14 NLT
Grace & Peace,
Sandy
So true Sandy!
Sandy, I’m so glad you shared this. I wasn’t able to attend our 50th reunion, so I’ve been experiencing it a little through the reflections people have shared, but yours stopped me in my tracks.
There’s something about the passage of 50 years that makes you look back at the people we were then with such different eyes. We were just kids, really. We had no idea what life was going to bring us, who we would become, what we would lose, what we would discover, or how many times we would have to reinvent ourselves along the way.
I want to tell you something I don’t believe I ever told you in high school. Although we didn’t know each other particularly well, I always admired you. You were kind and quiet, and you had a gentleness about you that I noticed. I admired your writing and your music, and I remember thinking that you were talented and accomplished in ways that didn’t necessarily fit into the definition of “popular” or “successful” that seemed to matter so much in high school.
Reading your words now, I almost wish I could go back and tell that younger version of you what I see now.
You were enough.
You didn’t need to be one of the popular girls. You didn’t need to be athletic or have a long list of friends or get straight A’s. You didn’t need to be the loudest person in the room. You were a girl who loved to write and sing, who quietly carried her own gifts—and those things mattered. They still do.
Your words about looking around the reunion and falling into the comparison game really resonated with me. How interesting that after 50 years, we can still somehow find ourselves back in that high-school mindset, wondering who is more accomplished, more interesting, more liked, more successful. And then you reminded yourself that “I am not enough” is a lie.
I think perhaps one of the gifts of getting older is that we finally begin to understand that our lives were never supposed to be measured against one another.
At 18, we looked sideways.
At 30, 40, 50, 60 and beyond, hopefully we begin to look inward—and forward.
Fifty years gives us a lot of perspective. We have all lived through things that our 18-year-old selves could never have imagined. We’ve experienced love and loss, joy and disappointment, beginnings and endings. Some dreams came true, some didn’t, and some dreams changed completely along the way. We’ve learned that a life that looks ordinary from the outside can actually be incredibly rich and meaningful.
And perhaps the most important thing we learn is that there really is no finish line where we suddenly become “enough.” We are works in progress. We keep becoming.
I loved what you wrote about your daughter taking you to church and realizing that you can’t know everyone or maintain hundreds of close relationships, but that you can nurture a few meaningful ones. There is so much wisdom in that. At this stage of life, I think we become much more grateful for depth than numbers—for the people who truly know us, love us, and walk alongside us.
I’m sorry I missed our reunion. I would have loved to see you and so many of the people who shared that little chapter of our lives. But I’m grateful that 50 years later, you gave me the opportunity to tell you something I should have told you back then:
I saw you.
Maybe not as well as I wish I had, and certainly not as someone who knew you deeply, but I noticed you. I admired your kindness, your quiet spirit, your creativity, your writing and your music. And I’m not surprised at all that you became a writer.
So please don’t underestimate the girl you were or the woman you’ve become. Your life doesn’t have to compete with anyone else’s to be beautiful, meaningful or enough.
And maybe that’s one of the beautiful things about reaching this point in our lives—we finally have enough distance from the teenage version of ourselves to realize that she was never supposed to have all the answers.
She was just supposed to keep going.
And look at us.
Fifty years later, we’re still doing exactly that. ❤️
Grace and peace to you, Sandy.
Kellie (Moran) Wesley
Just so you know, I’m sitting hear crying at your words. Thank you. It amazes me how shortsighted we are as teenagers. We get tangled up in our wayward emotions trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in that we forget to just be. I’m glad to have connected with you in a small way as Facebook friends.
Oh Sandy… now you’ve got me crying. ❤️
I’m so glad I told you what I had been thinking all these years. Sometimes we carry little impressions of people from our younger lives without ever realizing that they might matter to them someday.
And I love what you said about being so tangled up in our wayward teenage emotions that we forget to just be. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. We spent so much time trying to figure out where we belonged, how we measured up, and who we were supposed to become. If only we could have given ourselves the grace then that we hopefully have for ourselves now.
Maybe that’s one of the unexpected gifts of getting older—the ability to look back at those young girls with a little more tenderness and realize they were doing the best they could with what they knew.
I’m grateful that after all these years, we’ve connected in this small way too. Facebook may have brought us back into each other’s orbit, but I think your beautiful, honest words gave us an opportunity to really see each other for a moment.
And I’m very glad for that.
Sending you a big hug from afar. ❤️