Time is not always kind, especially to the beautiful people

Can I just say that sometimes I absolutely love Karma. Apparently Karma has been busy dishing out the good stuff lately. My sister is on the good side of Karma again. And I just saw the pictures from the high school reunion I didn’t attend last month. OMG! I so should have gone to that reunion.

In high school, I was the ‘new kid’. We moved to BFE when I was just starting 9th grade, so I was new just as our class was entering high school. These kids had a history, a past, a lifetime together, and I was the outsider. That truly was nothing new to me, I’d been changing schools all my life. But changing schools meant adjusting and acclimating to their style, clothes, talk, walk, habits, everything. That takes time. And when you’re 13/14 years old, you’re already a geek and being ‘different’ just made me stand out a little (LOT) more.

Sure I made friends, sure my clothes changed to their style, sure I learned their lingo, but I could never have the history with them that they had with each other. I would always be the outsider. Couple that with I was painfully shy, and incredibly insecure, and a total geek, nerd (Think Sarah Jessica Parker in Square Pegs and you get the idea) and you realize that I didn’t make a big impression on people in school. The beautiful people couldn’t be bothered to stop staring in the mirror long enough to notice me, and the popular people we always surrounded by their throngs of adoring fans. In fact, I am pretty sure when I graduated, most people wondered who I was.

Flash forward now 20 years. To some, (me) the years have been kind. To others, not so much. I still weigh, within 5 pounds, what I weighed in high school. The red poofy, frizzy hair has been replaced with tamer, calmer, bottle blonde. The Huge Owl-like glasses have gone by the wayside thanks to contacts. And thanks to some very hard life lessons and some therapy, the insecure wallflower has grown and blossomed into a beautiful confident, striking woman. Yeah, I could have gone to that reunion, no one would have known me. Not so much because they didn’t know me then, I am just a different person now.

The beautiful people have not aged gracefully. There is the cheerleader and the Prima Donna who have both doubled their weight and their chins. There is the Homecoming Queen who now looks a lot like Courtney Love on a good clean day. Then there is the Class Sweetheart (her, not him) who now just looks like a really bad country song personified.

I look at these pictures now and realize that Karma has a way of coming back around. They have lived their glory years, they’ve had their shinning moments, they’ve had the beauty and the ‘fame’ so to speak. But they had it all when they were too young to appreciate it. I may have been the ugly duckling wallflower in high school, but that’s ok. I have now, what they had (and I wanted) then. I’m older and wiser and appreciate it much more.