The metaphor: Last summer was my 20-year high school reunion. Coming face to face with old classmates also made me confront a new moment in life, turning ideal dreams for someday into practical plans for now. Or in other words, smoking whatever’s already in my stash.
The story:
I didn’t set out to start a Substack. What I wanted was an editor.
I wanted someone to support and guide me, like Richard Todd with Tracy Kidder, or Robert Gottlieb with Robert Caro. I’m not saying I could produce Mountains Beyond Mountains or The Power Broker. I’m just saying that Good Prose and Turn Every Page make it seem like, without their editors, Kidder and Caro might not have produced them, either. That was what I wanted: to find someone who cared about my writing and would push me to improve.
I told that to a journalist friend and he laughed. “Yeah, I mean…we all want that.”
I knew this friend from high school. We’d been out of touch until last summer, when our class had a 20-year reunion. It was a wild thing: about 80 of us walked into the same brewery at the designated time, put on nametags, and searched for words to ask about each other’s lives and explain our own. I’d been part of a class of maybe 300 kids in a district where most started together back in kindergarten and most graduated. There were people at the reunion who are still among my best friends and people who I spoke to for the first time.
Until a year or so ago, I’d had a sense that I’d known most people in my grade. Then the classmates who were planning the event shared a list of people whose emails they were missing. We graduated in 2004 from a public high school, so there was no central infrastructure to keep track of us. I opened the list with confidence and then scrolled though it with alarm. There were dozens of names I didn’t remember, couldn’t place in my memory of our middle school cafeteria. I wondered if I’d known them and forgotten or if I’d never known as many people as it felt like at the time.
One of my closest high school friends moved back to the area when I did and I’m often at her house, lounging together on the couch or playing with her kids on the floor. The night before the reunion, I went over with four other childhood friends in town for the event. We’d all stayed in touch, visiting each others’ apartments through our twenties and thirties, but this meetup felt different, tinged with anticipation for the next day. As we each arrived and set bottles of wine on the table, my sense of adulthood faltered, and suddenly my friend’s house felt strange. It was disorienting to not be at her parents’ house: to be here unsupervised. One friend brandished her yearbook. “I brought this so we can study!” We crowded around it together like notes before a final exam.
The next day, we went back, getting ready together like we had for prom twenty years earlier. My friend’s parents were there this time, planning to care for her kids while we were out, and it felt correct to have them. More moms came, dropping off our out-of-town friends, and they got out of the car and lingered a moment, everyone hugging each other and time-traveling through the decades. The scene devolved into prom-style photos, the nearly-forty-year-old reuniters and our circa-seventy-year-old parents posing together, there in my friend’s backyard.
As we got ready to call rides, one mom pointed out she’d come in a mini-van and could drive us all. None of us could resist the nostalgia and we threw ourselves into the bucket seats and way-back bench like it was swim team carpool, twenty five years before. The comfort of old memories and discomfort of reunion anxiety mixed together in my stomach. It was hard to say what I was nervous for, but I knew I wasn’t the only one. Earlier, a friend from the field hockey team had texted. “Are you going to the reunion? I’m not sure I can handle it. I keep going back and forth.”
“Yes! I’ll be there, and you should come! I think it’ll be fun. And weird. And worth it.”
She did – and it was. It was striking, standing there with all those yearbook faces come to life, to feel the sheer weight of our mutual experiences: the amount of shared context I had in common with even with those people whose names I couldn’t remember. 18 years of lived reference points: will I ever make that with another person again? Probably not: they say elder millennials change careers more often than our parents changed jobs. It was just these people here, in this room, who could understand the backdrop of my upbringing with no explanation.
My friends and I fanned out across the room. We had a dinner reservation after, and we planned to each talk with as many people as we could, then report back. For most people there, I could conjure up associated memories, but they didn’t always have to do with me. I still knew what couples had dated in high school, who had been good at sports or math, who had thrown up on the bus in first grade and had to go home early. I knew that even about kids I’d never been friends with, kids whose mental files had closed in my mind on graduation day: I still had so much data saved, other people’s milestones so vivid that knowing about them became milestones for me.
It was my first high school reunion, so I can’t compare it to other events, but I was surprised by the general warmth and enthusiasm. Even knowing everyone there had opted into going, I expected an undercurrent of judgment, competition. That’s how I’d felt at the time of the five and ten year reunions, wondering how I’d stack up against others’ looks and accomplishments. Just the brief experience of thinking that way had made me glad I wasn’t in town to attend them. It was a relief now to feel that edge had dulled in me and to be free of the sense that others were sizing me up.
Partly, I think, we’ve changed with our environment, as the hustle-culture aughts and teens have given way to the more vulnerable, mental health-aware, post-pandemic present. And of course, we’ve changed with time: a room full of people on their way to 40, many of whom have kids of their own. Still, I was moved by the sense of care and even wonder in how people greeted each other: a feeling of not taking each other for granted that I think was rooted in having been humbled ourselves. Like at 20 years out from high school, we knew we’d all been through something hard, and we were just doing a collective survey to find out whose hard time was currently underway. How are you holding up?
My journalist friend wasn’t there, but I reached out to him afterwards, and about a dozen other people. Post reunion, I felt electric with the unearthed connections: memories kept flooding back. Normally, I’d smile for a moment and move on, but this moment gave me the reason and energy to reach out and tell old friends they were on my mind. I had also dug up my own yearbook, the day after the event, to look back at the messages from friends. Many were filled inside jokes that no longer made sense to me, little time capsules whose locks no longer opened. Still, I was surprised that many of them said things about me that still felt relevant to who I am now.
Some of them even referenced my writing, which stunned me. I’d thought of that as a hobby I honed in college – how did they even know? And they spoke authoritatively about it. “You are such a gifted writer,” one wrote. “I will always admire your writing skills,” said another. Others gave direct commands: “Please keep writing,” and, from the future journalist, “Write. It doesn’t have to be to me or to anyone, just write.”
I wasn’t sure how I’d earned their confidence, but I was pleased to be fulfilling their wishes. I’d been writing again for a few years, taking Gotham classes and starting up a writing group. I was thinking about what goals to set for my writing that fall, and I liked the idea of starting to share what I’d written with other people. I was stumped about how to pursue publishing, though – so reading that two-decade-old encouragement, I called the journalist.
I asked him if I could have an editor and he explained that I could not. No one could: he knew dozens of unemployed journalists, he told me, and only one who’d gotten a job in the past year.
“Start a Substack,” he said. “Be your own publisher. That’s what people are doing.”
Other people had suggested this, and I repeated what I’d said to them. I didn’t know if I could post regularly enough to sustain my own platform, and I aspired to reach more people than those I already knew. Plus, I wanted my work to be better than if I just wrote it by myself and put it up. I wanted an editor.
“Gwen,” he told me, “we just had our 20 year reunion. We’re middle aged. In this period of life, you gotta smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”
I grinned in two types of recognition. One was how very like his high school self this sounded, even though his point was about our new stage of life. The other was the message, which echoed what another high school friend had been proclaiming for months. “Life is now!” She’d say, buying postpartum pants that fit her, rather than waiting to see if her size would keep changing. “Life is now!” She’d insist, ordering a second cocktail on a night she had a babysitter. “Life is now!”
This message felt different than its thrill-seeking high school version, YOLO. “You only live once” is an admonition to push the limits, rack up new experiences, discover new ways to feel. I think back on this era of camp and college, then happy hours and house parties, and I will admit to you a cringy thing: I often thought on those nights of the Dave Matthews Band line, “Stay up and make some memories.” I remember the hunger of being younger, wanting to fill myself up with as many ways of being as possible.
The mania for newness had given way to the desire for deliberateness. Later in my twenties, I’d been bowled over by the Annie Dillard quote, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” This shifted the emphasis from breadth of experience to purposeful choices: of all the experiences you could be having, is this the one you want? This was also the era when Mary Oliver kept skewering me with her javelin lines: “Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?” and “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Now, in my thirties, the focus is shifting again: the imperative for deliberateness is no longer about wanting to do it right but about ensuring I’ll have time to do it at all. I’d been racing over the preceding line from A Summer’s Day, and suddenly, it started to hit hard: “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?” That’s the real edge to “Life is now”: not that I might be adulting wrong, but that the fallacy of deferring something I want until later is clearer than ever. That time is not guaranteed. Life is now. If we don’t smoke what’s in our stash, there’s a chance we’ll leave it on the table.
That sounds dark, and maybe it is when I’m alone – but what I’m saying is, it turns out I’m not alone. It turns out that this is a shared feeling across the group of people I started out life with, both those I’ve stayed close with and those I haven’t. It feels true and developmentally appropriate. Moreover, realizing it while there’s time to act differently feels clarifying and empowering. It helps me adjust what I’m looking for and inform what I do.
So please, step inside my Substack. Let’s hotbox the place.
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Let’s hotbox the place!!!
This was one of my faves yet ☺️