25 years ago.....

This weekend is my 25 year high school reunion. I am looking forward to it, but dreading it also.

I went to boarding school, so it wasn't your typical high school experience. I say it was way, way, way better. I had a lot of experiences in high school that people don't have until college. And when college came around, I couldn't wait for it to be over. My brother had just graduated and I saw the "real life" - ie living in his own apartment, going out, all that fun stuff. Plus I met someone early on in college, who for 7 years I thought would be "the one" so I was eage to get college over with and on with my real life.

But high school was fantastic. I didn't live at home, there weren't cliques - and well if there were, I didn't care about them. My school was large - 1,200 kids but spread across 2 campuses, which were 5 miles apart. So a large number of kids in my class, I didn't have much interaction with. But that didn't matter. Unfortunately they have closed down my campus and consolidated the school into 1 school on the other campus, not "my school", so that is where reunion will be held and the majority of the people coming back for reunion lived on that campus. So that is the main reason I am not as excited, because not a lot of "my people" will be coming back. Can't reunion be mandatory?!

And of course the other main reason I am not excited is because I don't look anything like I did when I graduated. For our 5 and 10 year reunions I was probably 10-15 pounds less than I was on graduation day. Now I am 70 pounds heavier. But I am okay with that - I keep telling myself that there will be other people there that have gained weight in the past 25 years.

In preparing to go to reunion, I've been going through my scrapbooks and taking pictures (because I am too lazy to scan), as well as uploading pictures from the last 10+ years. I came across a couple of pictures taken at our 10 year reunion and I saw a picture of this one girl who I know is heavy now (or at least she is on FB) and I was surprised to see that she was heavy at 10 years. I hadn't remembered that. It must have been that I wasn't in that mindframe. It wasn't on my radar. But now I am so self-conscious of it, now I am totally fixated on it.

A year ago, the reunion committee posted on FB that reunion was a year away and "time to hit the gym" - At the time, I had zero desire to go. It didn't even phathom to me that in 52 weeks I could have lost most of the weight - I was in the middle of the move, my life was so up in the air, my weight was still on it's way up - I probably continued to gain another 15 lbs from June 1 until December 1 when I re-joined WW.

But here I am now, where I think I probably was on New Year's Day 2012, so I have thankfully wiped out the gains from 2012. Now to work on the gains from 2011!!! Goal is to be back at my "starting point" - ie where i was when I started to re-gain the weight - by New Year's Day 2014.

I am going to go and enjoy myself this weekend and will probably walk away after the 24 hours relieved that it is over and will feel like a HUGE weight is lifted from my shoulders and go back home enjoying my current life, because while I wish I wasn't almost 43, I don't want to be 16 again. I'd be okay with 28, but having the knowledge, the experiences, the money and the family that I did not have back then.