Next year is my 10th high school reunion. Looking at people I went to high school with, I’m stupidly surprised by how normal they are. I guess I had never internalized what normal people are or where they come from. Consulting Facebook: the prettiest girl in school cut her hair short and married an unphotogenic fat man. The track star is fat and unemployed. This one kid I could’ve sworn would be a CEO has a baby and is obsessed with golf of all things. I guess we’re all still young and maybe people take another 10 years to really get going, but I’m still… disappointed. How is everyone so freaking comfortable? Was I the only one who watched Fight Club 100 times when skipping school?
A thought flashes through my mind: what a fool I am for trying so hard, for being discontent. I should have some babies, learn to cook. Everyone else is doing it and they’re happy. Why can’t I be normal, make my dad happy? Why do I want to rule the world when it’s so much easier to just do what you’re supposed to do? Marry a nice boy from a nice family, buy a house.
My personality has changed a lot in the past 10 years. These days I can’t understand why anyone without a family would be risk averse or unambitious. Literally nothing bad can happen to us, so why not shoot for the stars? Worst case, we go get mindless corporate jobs. Absolute WORST case, we go live with our parents like the Italian or Japanese youth.
Looking at my attitude now, you would’ve expected childhood me to have been hacking into FBI databases (well, maybe I did and was never caught!) and selling powdered milk to my obliging neighbors. But I wasn’t an entrepreneurial kid. I didn’t work that hard because everything was easy. I applied to stuff and got into selective programs of my own volition- my parents had no idea what the SATs were or anything about the USA school system and probably thought most kids were out helping on the farm during the summer- because I’ve always had the instinct to try to get into whatever the most exclusive program was. I probably got that from centuries of Chinese breeding, along with the lack of inclination to bend the rules or start something up.
I wish I’d taken more risks as a kid, especially since kids can’t go to jail or get sued. I think regret is part of why I feel so drawn to risk now. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and wish I’d taken more chances back when I didn’t have 3 kids. But I wonder, Would I be happier if I were less ambitious? Not to suggest I’m not happy. But I have so much work all the time. Normal people do not work that much towards something with such a high chance of failure. Why am I making things so hard for myself? Do I really think that one day I’ll achieve even a fraction of what I’ve dreamed? Ambition: virtue or folly?
I think I want to prove that I’m getting better. That this passage of time isn’t a waste of time. That at reunions I’m always a different and better person. High school Nancy was an idiot, especially senior year because that was a total waste of time. I’m glad I’m not her anymore.
High school and Pittsburgh are the same tangled knot of neurons. Senior year I was late > 30% of the time (you were late if you arrived before 4th period, anything after was absent) and missed 20% of my school days. I forged my notes and ignored a summons to a truancy hearing (nothing ever happened). At home no one spoke to me and I spoke to no one, taking my meals alone in my room. There were 4 chairs at the dinner table- not enough for me and I wasn’t about to go get one. My mail was dropped at my closed door. I wish I could say I occupied myself building an industry-transforming technology like Sean Parker, or even systematically devouring the collected works of Shakespeare, but I wasn’t. I was useless and watched movies on cable. School was wretchedly easy and I shamelessly did my homework during class, garnering the resentment of the nerds who actually tried and took everything seriously. I never talked to my mom, who had abandoned me to travel the world, telling me, “Now is my time,” to which I ungratefully replied, “Good, I don’t need you.” This was true to my feelings- I didn’t think I needed her. I was going to college soon, plus my dad bought a new house in which I occupied the entire wing of the first floor. When I left for MIT, my dad, stepmother, and stepbrother promptly moved in, shoving all my junk upstairs. Everyone was sick of me. First my mom had gotten sick of me, then everyone in Pittsburgh, and I was sick of Mt. Lebanon too- chicken and egg.
I hadn’t told my parents what colleges I was applying to. To my mom, I said, “I got into MIT but I’m probably going to Princeton because of my boyfriend.” He was my first boyfriend. Who isn’t completely fucked up by their first relationship? Who doesn’t fuck up their first relationship? Anyway, I told the same thing to the Princeton admissions people, including the part about always wanting to go to MIT, and didn’t get in. Funnily, my mother had moved to Princeton, “to be close to you, Nancy.” I’m not sure how accurate that is. She was tired of globe hopping and probably realized Princeton was the most homey, non-cosmopolitan place she could imagine.
At MIT, my high school friends kept messaging me but I forsook all things Pittsburgh. My dad, stepmother, stepbrother, and all my high school best friends were still in Pittsburgh; I was the one that had left. When I came back, we had all diverged. Now that there actually was drama, my best friends and I no longer knew the dramas of each other’s lives, we who had spent hours on the phone together, hours whispering in the darkness at sleepovers. It’s still a shock to realize they are now people who go to clubs and party and drink. I’ll always imagine us frozen in time, girls in shorts on the grass in our backyards wondering about the world.
When I go back to my dad’s house now, I devolve into my senior year self, eating in bed and reading Robin McKinley and getting crushes on stupid underage boys who I don’t even know. To get out of the house, I try to channel my pre-senior year self, who spent all her weekends at the library taking out 20 books at a time and sneaking the rest through the security system, ate at Lulu’s noodles in Oakland, sketched dinosaur bones at the Carnegie Museum, saw inscrutable movies at the Denis theatre, drank Izzys at Uptown Coffee in Mt. Lebanon, laughed so hard with her friends our abs would be sore, inhaled my friends’ parents’ ethnic cooking, went swing dancing downtown. All those happy times in Pittsburgh- I have to dig for them, whereas the sad stuff bubbles up unbidden.
Beyond my circle, I barely knew my classmates, aghast whenever Anjani would casually mention so-and-so’s eating disorder and so-and-so’s boyfriend. I had no idea who was dating or eating what. I always felt separate and different, which I was in a lot of ways but I should’ve been able to get to the places where we were the same. I got asked to 4 or 5 different proms (but I only went to the Fox Chapel prom in addition to my own) and could make friends easily in certain settings, but during senior year the desire to relate to others drained from me. Having befriended the seniors who were the previous keepers of the photography club clique, upon their graduation I became the new photography club president, but I didn’t go much, didn’t amass a new clique. Mentally, I had already left Pittsburgh. Moral: don’t stick around bodily if you’ve already mentally checked out- you can ruin years of good memories that way. But who ever learns from the moral of any story?