Yearbook Angst

I found my senior year yearbook.  Up in the attic, while looking for a book for our oldest daughter, I came across that old 1994 record of my last year of high school.

Initially, I was excited because I hadn’t looked at it for a long time.  Just recently, someone from my class facebooked me about a 20 year reunion this summer.  Thinking about that and then flipping through the pages,though, I felt…weird. 

I have seen very few of my classmates since that balmy June graduation date.  As I flip through those yearbook pages, I find that all those teenage feelings are still frozen in time.  The awkwardness I felt about this person, the fun I had with that person, the judgment I felt from another, all of them are cryogenically locked in my memory. 

What surprised me most was the defensive reaction I still felt towards people who I thought saw themselves as better than me in high school.  But did they?  Or is there still some of that teen insecurity lurking inside the abandoned mines of my brain? 

Even more surprising was the judgment I felt towards some of those pictures on paper.  Could I not believe that people, like me, had grown up, changed, learned to love, learned to let go of silly school-age attitudes? 

And the funny part of it all, was that I really had a great high school experience overall.  Still, there is something so tender, so exciting, so frightful, so fragile about that time in life.  It is, for many of us, the beginnings of early adulthood, the first time you begin to think and act like your own person, when, of course, one has no idea who they are! 

Because of all this it feels like everything about high school is a judgment on your person, whether positive or negative.  Plus, that time of life is so filled with evaluations from grades, to graduation tests, to awards, to sports, to performances, to college applications, and, of course, the most direct evaluations: friendship circles and dating.

In my 38^th year, and as I remember my 18^th year, I dig down in my deepest essence and I see my soul.  It’s strangely troubled by all these conflicting emotions about a time so far away.  But the ancient words come to me now, words that, in college, first taught me how to weather all the judgments of life. 

“Why so downcast, O my soul?  Why so downcast within me? 

Put your hope in God.”

 

I can’t love, I can’t care, I can’t look beyond myself until my soul is safe. 

And I know it is.  I rest in love.  Father has wrought such beauty and joy in my life just by helping me know and rely on his never-breaking embrace.

So, I want to look back now through those same pictures and try to see other souls on a journey, like mine, not teenage caricatures frozen in some old, biased memory.  I hope I can visit with them this summer and truly care for and be curious about their lives and what life has taught them. 

Let it be.