A Thorny High School Reunion Question

It’s more complicated than just “do I go or not?”

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s question comes from D:

“Should I go to my 40th high school reunion even if it means having to see the d***heads on the lacrosse team who ruined my teen life? Most of them were born rich and good-looking, then inherited their family businesses, so they’re still rich. They’re pretty much doing better than me in every way.

If I DO suck it up and go, how can I get the last laugh?”

I gotta be honest, D: your question really stumped me for a while. I’ve known you since…what, 1986? While we haven’t seen each other in a minute, we’ve kept in touch. And you’ve always struck me as a basically happy person with a fruitful career, a loving marriage, and two well-adjusted kids.

So even accounting for the fact that competitive lacrosse players are—speaking anecdotally, because I’m too lazy to look up the survey data that I’m sure would prove this—one of the most nauseatingly self-satisfied demographic cohorts in American society, I was pretty shocked to find out those d***heads are still living rent-free in your head after all these years.

If it was your tenth reunion, I’d get it. Most of us are still emotional children well into our twenties. I remember looking around the room at my own tenth reunion and marveling at how perfectly we’d all recreated the seating chart from our high school cafeteria.

Even at a twentieth reunion, it’s understandable. I’m pretty sure I brought some neurotic adolescent baggage to that one myself.

But then I left it there. Because if memory serves, the twentieth was the reunion at which the social hierarchies started to crumble in earnest. So much so that by the time I went to my thirty-fifth reunion a while ago, I couldn’t even remember who the popular kids were. I did still have a lingering sense that I hadn’t been one of them, but the sting was gone.

probably not the popular kids, tbh

Now, it’s possible you just grew up in a much more rigidly caste-based community than I did. My hometown was so thoroughly middle class that we didn’t even know lacrosse existed. To us, it was just a town in Wisconsin you had to drive through to get to Minneapolis.

But even in the bougiest of suburbs, by your fortieth reunion, this kind of social-pecking-order-based resentment should’ve long since worked itself out. So I’m reluctantly forced to conclude that the problem isn’t the lacrosse d***heads.

It’s you.

If you’re pushing sixty, and your mental map of your social relationships still looks like a plausible outline for a John Hughes movie, you can’t blame that on the James Spader character.

seriously, it’s not this guy’s fault anymore

The James Spaders of the world moved on a long time ago. They haven’t had that haircut in ages. At this point, they might not even be d***heads.

Okay, some of them probably are. But who cares?

You do, obviously. And there’s a simple fix for that. Starting when you wake up tomorrow, spend a minute every morning sitting quietly while you make a list in your head of all the things you’re grateful for.

Start with the basics: you’re healthy. Your wife and kids are healthy. You all have enough food to eat. You have clothes to wear and a roof over your heads that’s almost certainly not about to get obliterated in a cruise missile strike.

This daily cultivation of gratitude for the fact that you (and me!) were lucky enough to be born into the most prosperous, materially abundant society in human history will make any lingering hangups you still have about your place in the adolescent pecking order seem laughably insignificant.

Or it would, if you were comfortable in your manhood.

You’re not, though.

Are you, D?

Deep down, you’re not sure you’re even a man.

I’m not talking about your gender identity. It’d be so much simpler if I was.

I’m talking about your failure—by your own standard of judgment, because it’s important to note that both this problem and its solution exist entirely between your ears and have nothing to do with the lacrosse d***heads or anybody else, it’s JUST YOU—to live up to the conception of manhood that prevailed from the dawn of human existence right up until around the time “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out, at which point people started to wonder if our default notions of masculinity might be a little self-limiting. Possibly to the point of being “toxic,” as I’ve discussed elsewhere.

Unfortunately, D, by the time this paradigm shift happened, your psycho-emotional cake was baked. So your self-conception was forged under a cultural regime soundtracked not by “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but “Eye of the Tiger.”

It’s possible this song was playing at the exact moment you sustained the psychic injury from which you’ve apparently never recovered.

You know the moment I’m talking about. I’m not sure when or where it happened to you. Could’ve been in the locker room after a seventh grade gym class. Or in the parking lot outside a high school dance.

But at some point during the peak of your adolescent neuroplasticity, you faced a test of manhood, administered by a lacrosse d***head, and you failed to pass it.

I’m assuming this happened in front of multiple witnesses.

And it has haunted you for decades. The wound never healed. On the landscape of your self-esteem, there’s a deep, dark chasm that can only be filled by one thing:

You’re going to have to fight one of these guys.

Ideally in front of the same people who saw you back down, or run away, or get swirlied, or whatever it was that created the gnawing sense of inadequacy you’ve been dragging around since ’83.

Forget about whether you “should” go to your reunion. For your own peace of mind, you HAVE to go. And you can’t leave without taking care of some unfinished business.

You don’t even have to win the fight to get closure on this. You just have to prove to yourself that you can stand in and take a punch.

It’ll be a lot better if you win, though.

So start training now. Find a mixed martial arts instructor and explain exactly what you need from him. It’ll be more efficient if you know in advance which specific lacrosse d***head you’re going to pick a fight with, because some of them will have aged more nimbly than others. Depending on how long their lacrosse careers were, most of them probably have rotator cuff issues. By now, there might even have been a joint replacement surgery or two.

The right MMA sensei can teach you how to exploit these vulnerabilities. If the first one you approach isn’t totally on board with your project, find a new one. Don’t let yourself get talked out of your personal redemption arc.

And don’t go telling yourself you started training too late, so you should put it off until your forty-fifth reunion.

THIS ENDS NOW, D.

One last thing: whatever you do, don’t tell your wife about this. She’ll say you’re out of your mind. Because she’s not a guy who was born prior to 1980, she’ll never understand how important this is to you.

So you’ll have to walk into that reunion alone. But you’re walking out a hero. Possibly just to yourself, and potentially in the context of a felony arrest and some very serious legal trouble.

But that’s just another test of manhood. This time, you’re going to pass it.

Good luck, brother.

And for anybody else who’s read this far: please ask me a question! I can’t keep this up without you.

Also, if you’re enjoying this column, PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS. I have a novel out on submission right now, and according to my agent, all I need to guarantee its publication is another 25,000 subscribers. Which sounds daunting, but if all of you tell five people to subscribe, and they tell five people to subscribe, we’re done! You don’t even have to read the novel.