Healing

Something crazy happened at church yesterday. I was sitting in the service next to my husband. (Henry is sick and had stayed home with my mom.) We had just sat down after the first round of singing when I spotted him. My heart dropped to my knees when I recognized his face.

It was my old high school crush from my private Christian school. I had pined over this boy since the first day of high school. In the tiny fish bowl of my little private school, he was a big, big fish. He had a cool haircut while the other guys were still sporting the Mo Stooge look. He played the guitar. He broke my poor little naive heart.

Not that he actually did anything. It was more like I was so shy and awkward that I was afraid to even speak to this kid. Like almost everywhere else in this world, I did not fit in in high school. I was poor, like, really really poor. Thank goodness we wore uniforms, because I owned one pair of jeans. One. I had friends, for sure, but I maintained my social status by remaining aloof. No one really knew me well, except maybe a couple of teachers. Even had I been popular, I doubt that I would have actually dated anyone in high school. But the feeling of inadequacy that kept me from making friends with this cool kid became so intertwined with my personality that to this day I view myself as a misanthrope. Perhaps if I had stayed at that school I would have grown up, gotten over it, talked to this boy, and realized that, however cool someone else looks, when it comes right down to it, I am the shiz.

But I didn't stay. Mid-way through my junior year, I transferred to public school. In my new school I had instant cache. My mom was the coolest teacher, and everyone wanted to see what her daughter was like. I had a job by then and was able to dress the part. I was invited to the cool table the very first day. When I had a party a couple of months after I arrived, everyone I invited came. Not only did I make friends easily, but the teachers were delighted instead of annoyed by my precociousness, and I soon gained a reputation for being smart. The confidence this inspired allowed me to go on to college and law school, and to hold my own there.

However, all my carefully constructed self-esteem dropped on the floor when I saw this boy again. He looked the same, hipster clothes, cool hair. I tried to think of what I would say to him, and all of my childhood insecurities came rolling back over me. He wouldn't even remember me, I thought. He'll just stare at me blankly like he's never seen me before.

I sat in the service and tried to quell the anxiety that I felt. I started to listen to the sermon. It was about the Future Hope. The preacher said that what we were looking forward to was so incomparable to the suffering of today that it was not even worth comparing. At one point he asked everyone to think of their suffering. Now, I am the first to admit that I've had a pretty easy life. So what came to mind was pretty trivial. I thought about all of the times I'd cried myself to sleep in high school. I thought about the anxiety of all of those social situations where I felt out of place. I thought about the times when I had felt totally alone, when I felt like I was a jerk, when I felt like I was just plain boring. And most importantly, I thought of how afraid I was to talk to this guy.

In high school he never really did anything mean to me in particular, but I had come to see him through the lens of the stereotypical cool kid from high school dramas, and I resented him. I resented that we could not be easy friends, that he was rarely interested in me while I was always interested in him. I resented that, even now, with my hottie husband by my side, I felt inadequate around him.

This was my particular brand of suffering that I focused on during the sermon. And when I isolated these feelings, I was able to set them aside, and sort of say, "so what?" So I can't talk to this guy. And that was that. I didn't feel the need to track him down and flaunt all of my achievements. I was just... fine. It wasn't that I felt cool all of a sudden, it was more like that I felt ok with not being cool.

It turned out that after the service while I was talking to another friend, this guy came up to me. Not only did he remember me, he ran up and gave me a hug. After I introduced my husband and told him about my son, he gushed about how much he wanted to settle down and how lucky we were. He was unemployed, living at home, had never finished college. I say this not because it made me happy, surprisingly. It was more that I glimpsed a different life for myself, and it made me very happy that I have the life that I do. But the most interesting part about it was that this guy was really nice. All of the little slights that I had imagined as a girl were likely just that. I felt relief that I hadn't wasted my time pining over some jerk, and I felt relief that I was too shy to talk to him!

As we talked about old teachers and where our classmates are now, I realized something. I had always been cool enough, I just never knew it until now.