The winds of change:
High school’s Class of 1999 turns 30
By Rita C. Williamson
A mere look back at my yearbook makes me wistful in some ways, and in others, not. I find most ironic, though, that many of us have not lived to what we expected to be.
As we enter our third decade of life — “Over The Hill,” “The Big Three-Oh,” “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” — I pause to remember life as we knew it almost half a lifetime ago.
Friends change and grow apart, led by happenstance or simply slipping away into locations unknown. I always thought that I would keep in touch with the people I wanted to be close to, so there would be no point in attending a 10-year reunion. Besides, I was, after all, the different one. I was a kinda-senior, a full-fledged freshman and looking forward to going home to graduate with people I had known since the age of 10.
A friend eyes my graduation portrait and deadpans: “you look so young in this … so excited … so ready to go out there and go after the world.” In many ways I regret not having stayed on for the famous Senior Year. I did not have the perks that go with the status — the Senior Portraits, the Senior Polls, the Senior Prom. I often wonder, as I look at the lovely portrait belonging to my dear friend Jennifer, what my parents would have paid for as my mementos.
Those voted “best friends” (and also qualified as such in our minds) have drifted. Twins have moved to different cities, and those who harbored twin souls have slipped away. Best friends who conquered the world together have now become different people and hardly recognize each other and their lives. Chronically single men in high school are now married. Couples joined at the hip in school have had their relationships crack and then catastrophically terminate; members are now married, divorced, and married again. Individuals we may have trusted with our lives became subjects to be feared and avoided. And still, sometimes we wonder about the “one that got away” — and track him or her down with thoughts and fantasies of happily ever after.
The scientific minds have become students of the humanities; others have joined the military and now proudly show off their “dress whites” on Facebook. Quiet ones have become leaders and radicals; the loudest and most obnoxious have been tempered, taught that there are more important things in life than to just attract attention — they have borne children and their lives changed in the instants that the infants entered the world. Surnames have changed, some to unthinkable alternatives and others to predicted ones. And there are still some, such as myself, who remain single even after having acquired three diamond rings.
Daniel de Robles and I were voted “most likely to succeed” in my last year of high school. We were photographed with money pouring out of our persons, grinning, laughing, confident. I cry now as I lay prone on my bed, attacked by the ravages of disease no one could have predicted, and I wonder where all my confidence, and confidence others had in me, has disappeared. It takes strength to fight illness, perhaps more strength than I have at my disposal on some days.
I never, in all my days as “most likely to succeed,” imagined I would be subject to an autoimmune disorder. My body and mind have betrayed themselves, attacking the vessel that carries them with no respite. One simply has to learn, and accept, that this is who and what I am now, and this is what I must deal with even on the worst days.
I have felt for a long time a mythical clamp closing in around my neck as I near 30. I had always planned to be 1. superbly successful, perhaps as a lawyer, working for international human rights; 2. married to the fairy-tale prince of my childish fantasies; 3. a mother to young children, perhaps a girl and a boy, even twins; 4. the co-owner of a comfortable and attractive house; 5. driving a low-end BMW (what I designated as my “lawyer car”); and 6. the holder of an advanced degree of some sort.
After all, my parents were 32 when they were married, and they were considered on the older end of the spectrum when they did so. When my mother gave birth to me at 33, she was placed with the high-risk mothers, because she was considered almost geriatric. I do the calculations in my head, and I know that by the time my parents were 30, they had already communicated and were entertaining thoughts of a lifelong commitment. I am nearly the same age as they were at that time, and I have nothing of the sort.
My career stands on hold because of my disability; I have not dated — let alone kissed — anyone in years. I have not completed my intended advanced degree. I always felt that 30 was the deadline — if I hadn’t had it all together by the time I was 30, I wouldn’t have it at all. I have completed none of my goals, and I feel like a failure because of it. So much for “most likely to be successful.”
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at old pictures, memories that by now are more than half a lifetime away. We started high school half a lifetime ago. And here we are, half a lifetime later. We can choose to look back over those years with pleasure or pain, but most likely a little of both. Twenty-nine coming up on 30 is certainly far more different than 19 was coming up on 20. But I’ve also begun to believe … just a little … that time’s better spent looking forward than pining for the past. My deadlines are all self-imposed — that means I can just as easily change or extend them.
Cheers, my friends. Maybe life really does begin at 40.
An UMPI graduate of the Class of 2002, Williamson has lived in three time zones, five states, and seven cities. She currently lives in Presque Isle with her Maine coon cat, Savannah, and hopes to continue work in the human services field. She is 30 years old.
