Tonight was a reunion of sorts with people from my former workplace - former as in “while I was in college”, circa 1996-2000. I was getting pretty tense and anxious about it; luckily, I had a little help from my friends.

Lesson learned this evening: that memories of the past are just that - memories. And that interacting with elements of the past doesn’t have to become a rehash of that time; rather, it’s a whole new interaction with the person you are today. That’s assuming you have grown and are an older/wiser/different person. Most people do undergo some sort of change over the course of 10 years. Some not as much.

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.- Isabelle Eberhardt

Another lesson: we may all be aware that our self-perceptions are quite different from the way other people perceive us, and that the things we fear people will think of when they remember us will be unpleasant, or just things we’d rather not be associated with (ending with a preposition. “This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.” Erroneously attributed to Churchill, apparently.)

One thing that brings this into sharp/stark contrast and focus is seeing people you haven’t seen in a long time and how they react to seeing you: with enthusiasm, with surprise, with indifference, with awkwardness, with warmth.

For someone like me (who has a disturbingly pessimistic view of other people’s perceptions of her) it’s a scary prospect; but the reality was not as bad as I imagined it. In some cases - pleasant. In some cases - just weird. But nothing bad. Things passed by without incident.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. - William Ralph Inge
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

I remember the past quite vividly; it’s a bit of a curse. Maybe I should’ve pursued the enjoyment of illicit substances at some point in my life so that a few brain cells would be lost, taking memories with them. Alas, I was a studious sort and now I think I’m too old for that to be very dignified - or for it to be a good idea when there are important things to accomplish. But I like to think that I’ve learned, grown and changed in ways that matter but, like Mr. Darcy, “in essentials, I believe, [am] very much what [I] ever was.”

So I can subtract at least one source of anxiety from my list. There are many more, but this one can be filed away someplace other than “tension-inducing situations that I will lose sleep over.” Of course, in true “me” fashion, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop (always) and am thinking about possible crap repercussions, but for tonight, I’ll try to let them go.

Aight. Gaslight arrived from Netflix, and I can’t keep Ingrid Bergman waiting.