I decided to attend my 20th high school reunion. Something about the nostalgia of temporarily returning made me want to actively tap back into that specific variety of ache. I wanted my survival of the evening to serve as a catharsis, like honey. It was a snapshot of time when feelings were bigger than we were, not comparable in magic, but like when I became a mom. That explosion of the universe. Four years compacted into one of those space saving vacuum bags. The kind that shrinks winter coats and blankets down to one quarter of their size. When someone says high school, I’m immediately in it—the taste, the sound, the energy.

Even though I’m happily married, it was important I go alone. My husband wasn’t a part of that era, so his presence would disrupt the whole ecosystem. I needed to travel back to a place where it was only me as a singular entity and not yet as a wife and a mother, without any surrounding layers of protection. That’s essentially high school in a nutshell; 4 years as a defenseless open wound wading through a sea of potential contaminants.

My self-esteem back then depended on whatever scraps anyone would throw at my feet. I’d ask those in my proximity for their permission to exhale. I let others write so much of my story. With the depths of my feelings, I would listen to a song, and that song would become the song! The anthem for all the broken pieces. My teenage years marked the start of when I sought comfort in places outside of myself.

There was a dream-like quality of the evening, while we all simultaneously in unison asked a version of the exact same questions: Married? Kids? Where? Job? When, in reality, all everyone was thinking was didn’t I just see you at prom?

The gift of the event was to witness these people from my past as people. Like my parents, on the day I awoke and realized they too were mere mortals, human beings, and not exclusively there as co-stars in the one woman show of my life. In the 20-year afterglow, everyone had been whittled down to right-size. The playing field had been leveled.

What we couldn’t possibly comprehend during high school was that the things we swore in blood oaths, didn’t matter at all. We lived and some died because the cacophony of noise was always too loud to ever hear what it was that our classmates were really saying:

I am not enough.

And so that night I said and heard the things my high school-self was never brave enough to share or internalize. I told my high school crush, he was my crush. I made amends and forgiveness was granted. I accepted an unexpected apology. We recalled aloud memories that belonged only to the people in that room.

At midnight I arrived home to my beautiful family and my hard-earned life in recognition that the positioning of our hamster wheels within the context of high school or otherwise holds no bearing on our humanity whatsoever. The relationships I formed in my childhood were significant and foundational in the person I am still becoming. The noise while loud and unharmonious all echoed the same message across every ear:

I am exactly enough.

Sometimes we need to go back and visit the past to confidently continue to move forward.