Fiftieth HS Reunion 2023: Confronting the Invisible Girl

I almost didn’t make it. Forty years ago, at the behest of my now-deceased acquaintance Kari, I joined the Conant High School graduating class for its tenth reunion in 1983. Despite my generally dependable memory, my high school years barely registered in my conscious mind. Had I even been there? I went to that reunion but worried I didn’t belong. And sure enough…

I’m not blaming anyone, but as I approached the group at the end of the evening for the Class of ‘73 photograph, a voice boomed from the microphone: “Graduates only!”

Which meant not me. Some former classmates tried to pull me back into frame, but by then I was so used to not being part of an extended family, groups, neighbors, peers, what have you, that it honestly wasn’t a bother.

During my junior-to-senior year, I’d had a baby girl and gotten married to someone a few years older. Even the doctor who delivered my daughter, now so grown, so successful, was clearly distressed that I was “just a kid.” He could barely hide his disgust behind his mask as kind nurses encouraged me. Just another no-confidence vote for a girl who’d just gone through twenty-four hours of terrified labor. Such memories were easy to recall.

An inauspicious beginning for a teenager with checked-out parents and a family of younger siblings. In seventh and eighth grade I’d been bullied. Alternating between states of boredom and circumstantial depression, I’d been overweight and bookish, with wild hair, glasses, and bad skin. I alternated between two or three outfits because they were all I (or any kid in my family) had. My shoes never fit my size ten feet. I bore the ironic and apparently endlessly amusing nickname, Twiggy, a name called out to me down the hallway as I scurried mouse-like from class to class. (For those unfamiliar, Twiggy was a famous model of the times noted for her extreme thinness). I bribed the worst of my tormenters in the hallways with sticks of gum, begging them to just…please…stop.

By my first year of high school, I’d starved myself to lose weight, thus becoming less visible. No longer could anyone say, “Put her in a white dress and we could see a movie on her!”

Still without provisions for wardrobes, dental exams, and nice-to-haves like lunches (no child in our family could count on such things), I wore boys’ T-shirts and found friends outside of school. I identified with the “hippie” outliers, who dressed as carelessly as I had to, while amazingly remaining smoke-and-drug-free myself.

I sought and found the more mature experience I craved, which had everything to do with belonging. I’d been wounded, but still able to put one foot in front of the other toward an indeterminate future. Not a bad life strategy. Occasionally an older friend remarked I had a good mind or a great vocabulary. Slowly I learned I wasn’t without coping mechanisms. My strength increased through time.

But that was long ago, and today I’d go through it all again to come to this life I love. At my 50^th Reunion gathering, a surprise awaited me. Former classmates had assembled binders of yearbook photos I’d not seen before, and sure enough, for three years of high school, there was the face and name that had once been mine. I owned no photos, had only the barest memories of those particular days, but there I was.

I spent considerable time with those books, looking at my face next to those of my classmates. There I was standing with the Latin Club during my freshman year, when I hoped all that weight loss would finally mean life would get easier (it didn’t). I looked up and around the room to see former high school classmates I’d known well in happier early-grade school days when we all played games en masse in the streets. We roller skated and played ball in front of our lined-up tract houses, miraculously surviving all our shenanigans.

So, this is why I’d felt compelled to attend this particular reunion—to find the last missing piece of myself, and to see my former classmates as if for the first time. That evening I enjoyed fleeting moments of memories and light.

I still don’t have many memories as a teenager, before the birth of my baby and the chance to create a life of my own choosing. Yet my old classmates had provided me with a little piece of my former self I hadn’t known I was seeking – namely the image of my own face, caught at a time when I felt invisible.

I learned I wasn’t. Someone remembered my locker was next to his, and that he’d liked me. He’d been shy, and I’d been lost in space.

I’ve known for some time now that presence alone is a powerful force, full of depth and mystery. Carl Jung described the self as akin to an artist’s creation through time. It’s largely upon the graces of others that any of us survives this business of being human. It’s a lesson every religion tries to teach, one that even atheism can affirm perhaps most heartily of all - but so many still miss the point.

We need one another to remind us of what we shouldn’t forget. There comes a time when what binds us becomes a greater force than anything that’s separated us in the past, particularly at an age when we begin to lose our grip upon that which we take for granted.

I only wish we were able to grasp the truth of this sooner rather than later.