I attended my 40th high school reunion recently. I had no intention of going until my oldest friend said, “C’mon, let’s go. Even if we don’t have fun, we can say we did it.”
We were all born in 1965, either the last year of the baby boom, or the first year of Generation X, which meant we were not really part of either group. There weren’t many of us, and we went through school with many empty classrooms, as the boomers who came before us had filled them, then the universities, and finally, the job market.
I saw middle-aged men and women, who at heart, were just older versions of their teenage selves. We may now be grown-up professionals, but you never really lose that core of who you are at 19. If I could have somehow gone back to tell my high-school self, “Don’t worry, you will be fine. It gets better, and sometimes worse, but you will keep going,” maybe I would have spent less time in my life thinking other people had more fun, more sex, more money and focused more on enjoying what was happening in the here and now.