High school run ins

[Vikarious]

Tonight at the gym, I saw one of the Ms. Perfect, straight A, star athlete girls I graduated from HS with......10 years ago.


I HATE running into people from HS. Hate it. Mostly because I feel like the biggest loser, like everyone else has evolved and my life has gone no where. (Its not entirely true, but you know...)


How do you deal with it? Avoid them? What if you get sucked into conversation with them?

I wouldn't and don't mind running into some people, but others...oh man.

[Krishna]

How do you deal with it? Avoid them? What if you get sucked into conversation with them?

You be polite. You ask a couple general bland questions "what are you up to these days," etc. Then you politely excuse yourself.

[and1grad]

Tonight at the gym, I saw one of the Ms. Perfect, straight A, star athlete girls I graduated from HS with......10 years ago.


I HATE running into people from HS. Hate it. Mostly because I feel like the biggest loser, like everyone else has evolved and my life has gone no where. (Its not entirely true, but you know...)


How do you deal with it? Avoid them? What if you get sucked into conversation with them?

I wouldn't and don't mind running into some people, but others...oh man.
Also agree with Krishna...and I thought the bolded stuff was amusing.

[Ciderhillnh]

Its all relative as to how you view your life vs. theirs.
Everyone makes different choices to get them to where they currently are…..that doesn’t make any one person better than another.

It might seem like someone has everything, but they could be feeling sad, lonely and lacking, but might have a very sunny exterior and hide it well.

I hate running into people from high school as well, but if they recognize me, Im pleasant and ask them a ton about what they are doing (since most times they don’t ask the same questions back because they are rude people)
Even if it makes me cringe a bit about what accomplishments they have or how happy they seem, in the back of my head I tell myself that they might just be miserable….and honestly, Im happy for them and their accomplishments….because negative thoughts or feeling bad because I don’t have the same accomplishments, just brings me down.

Part of growing up, is being happy for others.

[and1grad]

HA! I think the last episode of the first season of The Biggest Loser is one of the last episodes of any reality tv I've watched. Ugh...stuff's horrible.

[pisces2473]

You be polite. You ask a couple general bland questions "what are you up to these days," etc. Then you politely excuse yourself.
I either do this...or I pretend I don't see them/don't know them. :evil:

I also tend to ask them a lot of questions, but not be asked anything really in return. Whatever.

[SmilesSoSweet]

How do you deal with it? Avoid them? What if you get sucked into conversation with them?

I avoided them by moving to a completely different state than where I went to high school.

But when I am home visiting, and I happen to run into someone I know from high school, I just do what Krishna suggested. Plain and simple.

[texasgirl]

Even though I'm happy with the way my life has ended up thus far, there are still certain people from high school that can make me feel like I'm wearing the wrong thing, have a bad haircut, and on and on. My hometown is very small and sort of cliquish, so I just brace myself before going anywhere -- since I'm bound to run into somebody I know. I just try to remind myself that -- no matter how lucky, beautiful, etc. these ppl are -- it shouldn't change my outlook on my own situation. Which, of course, is easier said than done :)

[wordsmith]

I left my (very small, very Mellencamp-song-ish) hometown at 18 for school, and then eventually moved back in my midtwenties for a job, a newspaper job where I am constantly out dealing with the community. Consequently, I see people from high school on a daily basis, really. And it's a small community with a small high school, so it's not like people don't know you/don't remember you. It's not a big deal to me at all, even though I was gone for the better part of a decade.

I'm not competing with anybody I went to high school with, and if I were, I'd consider myself as having fared better, for me, than most, anyhow. I don't have any desire to have elementary school aged children running around and a string of failed marriages by age 30, and that's none too unlikely for my classmates who are still in the area. 99% of the people who were hot shit/snotty in high school have lives these days that aren't exactly enviable, I've found.

[coll214]

I see people all the time at the gym too. If I liked them, I'll talk to them. If not, I wait and see if they recognize me (More often than not they don't :p; I was a late bloomer. LOL). There's been a few i'd rather not run into, but I guess that's life, and in a smallish town, you're gonna see people from time to time.

[redav]

I enjoy running into people from HS (but it hasn't happened in about forever). I don't think there is anyone I wouldn't want to talk to for at least a little while that I would recognize or would recognize me.

[rocket333d]

I felt that way too, since I was that "golden girl" until I graduated high school. One day after a really rough day at work, my boyfriend took me out to a casual restaurant. I saw a girl I knew from grade school and I just wanted to hide so she didn't find out what a loser I was.

Then it turned out she was our waiter. This made me feel better. We chatted and I found she was happy and doing pretty well for herself, even though the job was kind of a pain. My life was the opposite: loved my job, but circumstances could be better. She told me all about what people I knew were doing and a lot of them were in situations I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. We kinda both felt afraid about talking to each other, but I'm glad I did.

It seems like a lot of people go through rough times at this point, and the ones who succeed are never whom you expect.

[and1grad]

I noticed that the people I knew, and even ones I didnt know that well, havent changed that much since high school...which was surprising and, in some cases, disappointing to me. I also noticed that that was most often the case if they had stayed pretty local. Anybody else notice anything like that?

[aggiegrad05]

I noticed that the people I knew, and even ones I didnt know that well, havent changed that much since high school...which was surprising and, in some cases, disappointing to me. I also noticed that that was most often the case if they had stayed pretty local. Anybody else notice anything like that?
Yep, the ones who stayed in our hometown, went to the local community college and married young seem to be pretty much the same as they were in high school. Then again, that's just the way it appears to both myself and some of my other friends who moved away after high school graduation. Since I'm not friends with them now, there's really no way to know if they're actually the same or not.

[Ciderhillnh]

Yeah same in my town, people just havent changed, havent moved, havent done much with themselves.
These are also the same people who point to high school as the best years of their lives, and that statement to me is just SO sad.

[shadeofgreen]

I avoided them by moving to a completely different state than where I went to high school.
I live two towns over from the one where I grew up. I rarely run into people from high school, but a friend of mine who lives in NYC sees people we went to high school with fairly regularly.

Actually, one time I was on vacation in Palm Springs, California and met some guy who had gone to the same high school that I did, two years behind me. Seems like the chances of running into someone from my small Maine hometown in California would be negligible. Goes to show you that moving away doesn't even make you safe.

On the rare occasion I do see someone from my teenage years, I typically try to avoid them, or do the stupid, trite, "Hey! How's it going! What are you up to? Wow, that's great. Well, I gotta run. It was good seeing you." It's fairly painless.

[wordsmith]

It's a pretty even split, for me. I know people who stayed in town who are completely different now than they were in high school...people I was once friends with who have changed for the worse, and people I didn't know well or didn't care for, who I now find perfectly nice. A lot of people have grown up and changed, some haven't. I'm also slightly older than many of you, so it may just be growing up in general. I also think a big part of it is that you know people differently, and in different contexts, as an adult than you did when you were a child/teen, so in some cases, it can seem like they're oh so different, when really, they may not be, it's just that you didn't see that side to them when you were younger. I can think of one former friend, who may look at a glance to have changed a ton since we were teens, but if I really think about it, the things I don't like about her now were always really there, they just mattered to me less then than they do now.

I've also noticed via class reunions, and also via people who moved away who come back and visit, the same is true of them. Some have changed very minimally, regardless of where they've gone or what they've done (this can be both good and bad), and others are totally different.

[SmilesSoSweet]

I noticed that the people I knew, and even ones I didnt know that well, havent changed that much since high school...which was surprising and, in some cases, disappointing to me. I also noticed that that was most often the case if they had stayed pretty local. Anybody else notice anything like that?

I've noticed that too. I think there are just a few that left the hometown and the rest stayed local. I'm actually glad that I left, because every time I go home, I know I didn't miss out on anything. Nothing's really changed much either.

The running joke is that you're successful since high school if you "didn't become a part of a rumor." As in "did you hear about so and so?" LOL

[wordsmith]

I also have to say that the most personally annoying/absurd thing to me in the world is when, in my aforementioned very small town, where I generally run into former schoolmates in the course of doing my job, they act like they don't remember me from 13 years of school together in a very small school district. It's such a put-on. I get it, you wrote high school off, whatever. But give me a break.

I also feel like there's a really big stigma toward anybody who "stayed local." There's a myth that you can't do anything worthwhile in life unless you leave town. I both left town and came back, and I feel that I've done just as much with my life in either context.

[spokes]

generally speaking i would say that i am indifferent to people i went to school with - i don't really hang with anyone I went to school with, but to some degree that ti a product of moving long distance twice, and not really going back to the home planet.

i guess if it was someone i was good fiends with in school, i'd talk more, if it was someone i really did not converse much with in high school, then i'd keep it superficial.

i have givne up comparing my life to others, as who knows if what they are telling you is the truth, and also sometimes people's cirmstances change due to things beyond their control.......

[and1grad]

I think if you havent had any kind of change, at least of scenery, after high school, then you're probably just going to be the same person you were then. I dont think you can rule out something like a relocation when it comes to how a person develops into an adult. Personally, I think moving away and having to fend for myself is one of the more important challenges I've had to face in terms of "growing up."

[aggiegrad05]

I think if you havent had any kind of change, at least of scenery, after high school, then you're probably just going to be the same person you were then. I dont think you can rule out something like a relocation when it comes to how a person develops into an adult. Personally, I think moving away and having to fend for myself is one of the more important challenges I've had to face in terms of "growing up."
Well put. I completely agree.

[wordsmith]

I'm not so sure...I think any "life's events" can change who you are as a person, regardless of where you live. My best friend growing up didn't ever move out of our hometown...she got married to another hometown person, had a kid, and spent the next five years commuting as she could swing it to the nearest state university to put together her B.A., while working full time and parenting.

She's COMPLETELY different than she was as a teen...she was an abused child, and as a teen, she had some pretty severe emotional issues that manifested in self-mutiliation, substance abuse, and general delinquincy, she was very angry and anti-authority. She was in a psychiatric hospital a good chunk of our junior year of high school. She was on the verge of expulsion many, many times, and everyone figured her for a lost cause, thought she wouldn't graduate, nobody imagined she'd go on to school, and some probably figured she'd be dead, a statistic. Instead, she married a great guy, had a beautiful daughter, and made a complete life overhaul. She now teaches art...yep, very nearly didn't graduate high school, and now is a teacher, a freelance artist, and works in graphic design as a day job, as well as doing the mom thing. For her, changing as a person had nothing to do with where she was geographically located, or with starting a new life in a new place, but had to do with putting good people in her life, and edging out the bad.

For me, my most life-changing event, and probably the one that's shaped me the most as a person, had to do not with where I was, but what I was doing. It happened to be in Chicago, but it could have been anywhere...not tied to being somewhere other than where I'd grown up.

Does relocation teach you a lot about yourself, help you to grow a lot? Absolutely, I've done it many times myself. But so do many other milestone things in life.

[TinyDancer]

Interesting topic. . .

I have my 10-year reunion (AH!) in the near future so I'm thinkin about my classmates a lot these days.

I'm from a small farming community, and I moved far from home. . . but I'm definitely a rarity. I was one of those nerdy/popular/most likely to suceed types. . . and still am, I guess. There are a few people in my class that have somehow gotten the impression that I'm a snob. I'm not sure how they've come to that conclusion. I think that sometimes I get a cold shoulder for moving away. People somehow associate this with the fact that I think I'm better.

I really like running into people from high school. I would talk to anyone I ran into and would hate if someone didn't want to talk to me or wanted to pretend like they didn't know me because they felt like a loser. I think there's a reason you take one path or another. My sister chose to take a lower paying job and stay in our small town after graduation. My sis and I had a conversation about this one day. She's envious of me being "brave" and moving away and experiencing other parts of the country. I'm envious of her being closer to family and getting to spend time with them. I don't think of her as being any less successful than I.

[wordsmith]

I'm from a small farming community, and I moved far from home. . . but I'm definitely a rarity. I was one of those nerdy/popular/most likely to suceed types. . . and still am, I guess. There are a few people in my class that have somehow gotten the impression that I'm a snob. I'm not sure how they've come to that conclusion. I think that sometimes I get a cold shoulder for moving away. People somehow associate this with the fact that I think I'm better.

My brother stopped coming home, because he said he doesn't like feeling like people he used to know now look at him like he thinks he's better than them. I get a certain amount of this, too, living back here after having been gone, because people are insecure about their levels of education/world experience. I can't really shoulder the insecurity of others, though.

My sis and I had a conversation about this one day. She's envious of me being "brave" and moving away and experiencing other parts of the country.

One of my best friends tells me this all the time.

[dengeist]

That's funny, they were talking about that on the radio today: Kids that were Super-popular or Super-Smart that....didn't make it.

Most of my high school run ins have been in the supermarket or the gym and they've been pretty positive and short. But I do know my high school valedictorian is a security guard in an apartment building and the saludatorian is just getting her bachelor's degree and has four kids. It's weird to see and a little schadenfreude kicks in, and what's even funnier is I was never picked on or a member of an outcast group in high school.

[wordsmith]

Depends on what you consider "making it."

[arrow]

I hate that term "make it." When I moved to NYC, people always asked if I was going to try to "make it" there (here). I always said "if by 'make it' you mean feed myself and keep a roof over my head... then yes, I hope to make it." I left Michigan because I always wanted to know what it was like to live other places. It wasn't personal. Although I did always want to leave my hometown because it was getting pretty depressing what with all the laid-off GM auto workers.

Yeah I'm having my 10-year reunion this year and I hope I can go, although I don't know if I will be able to or not. There's a lot of people I'd love to see.

[Vikarious]

After thinking about it a bit, its not the running into her thing that bothered me. We were both in the pool and I just wanted to avoid a naked, awkward run in in the locker room!

Had it been the grocery store or treadmill - no problem. But yeah, most people I probably wouldn't mind seeing, but there are a few that I just want to avoid at all costs.

[blue27]

i used to feel like that a few years back, but I have been out of h.s. for almost ten years.. seeing them really has little to no affect.. most of the people I see either say hi cause we were somewhat cool, or they act like they don't know me or vice versa, either why doesn't really matter. I got my reunion coming up but I really don't have any desire to see anyone there..so running into them is no biggie. More importnantly I can't believe where the time has gone though..

[TinyDancer]

I got my reunion coming up but I really don't have any desire to see anyone there..so running into them is no biggie. More importnantly I can't believe where the time has gone though..
No kidding about where the time has gone. While H.S. does seem like a long time ago, it doesn't seem TEN YEARS ago!

Depends on what you consider "making it."
True. While I'm happy and have a good job, I am most likely not considered as one that has "made it" back home as I am not married with multiple children, and *gasp* am not even dating anyone seriously! :eek:

Eh, whatevs. I'm busy and happy living my life the way I am so I don't have time to focus on other people's goals for me. :)

[PenforPrez]

I've been seeing more old high school classmates myself recently. I simply put the best face forward I can when I see them. It takes no effort for me. We just catch up on where we're at; it's intriguing what's happened to some of my old friends.

Paul