September 7th: The Threat of "Awkward"

I graduated high school with close to 1,200 other students. I have about that many friends on Facebook, and only about 300 of them are from my graduating class. To be honest, that’s because I wasn’t all that close with very many people during my time in high school. I was incredibly involved in youth group, which meant my friends were spread out across the Chicago area and the country as a whole, so I didn’t feel the need to connect to the people with whom I shared the halls of Stevenson High School.

High school was, for me, a lot of what it is for so many people. High school was stressful. We weren’t all that nice to one another. We didn’t really care about the personal struggles of another person; we were still trying to figure out what kind of people we wanted to be, let alone who someone else was trying to be.

The past few weeks, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about my high school classmates. This is the year that we graduated from college. We’re going to grad school, starting jobs, starting careers. We have a pretty good idea about who we are, at least for now, and, I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t have time for the pettiness of my high school years. My “friends” are posting their life moments on Facebook and I’m realizing that they are more strangers than anything else.

One moment from the last few weeks stood out to me. A Facebook friend who I had very little interaction with in high school and none at all since got a job working for a company I’m fairly familiar with. It was a really cool job, and I happen to know someone in that industry who might be a good name for that person to know. I thought long and hard about sending the person a message, congratulating them on their success and offering to help in any way that I could. But I didn’t. I let my silly high school mentality get the best of me, letting me pass up an opportunity to be kind to someone for fear that it may be awkward, or make me look ridiculous.

But why do I need to feel awkward? Why do I need to worry about what someone will think that I haven’t spoken to in five years and who, if things went badly, I wouldn’t miss for the next five? I want to be able to celebrate the successes of those around me, to be there to offer support for those who are going through a hard time, to listen to the amazing story of classmates who have gone out into the world and turned into some pretty decent human beings.

I am a very different person than I was at 16 years old at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. I don’t want to be judged for the person I was back then; I want to be judged for the person I’ve become, by the values I have discovered for myself, and the accomplishments I have worked so hard to attain. I’m going to assume that my classmates have done the same.

The world is full of some pretty nasty stuff. We have an opportunity to be kind to one another, to look out for one another, and to make things just a little bit easier. Let’s not let that dreaded threat of “awkwardness” get in the way of being the person we want to be.

If you enjoy the work of the Zoot Perspective, please visit my GoFundMe page, to help support me on my journey. Thank you very much.

For more content from ZPMedia, visit www.zootperspective.com.