Over the years, I’ve met a few people who claim that they’d love to go back to high school and do it all over again. When I meet these people, I wonder (sometimes aloud) whether they’re mentally ill.

Because honestly, except for the couple of people at the top of the pecking order (and perhaps not even for them), high school, as a social environment, sucked pretty hard. For most of us, it was a malodorous morass of hormones, insecurity, sociopathy, and general unpleasantness, broken up with occasional bits of respite in the form of fun activities with friends and, if you’re lucky, a couple of lightbulb moments in class that help you see the world from another perspective. Still though, pretty much a pile of crap with a few sprinkles on it; not something I’d voluntarily repeat, and if someone says they would, I’m immediately suspect.

Here’s my reasoning: Whether they’re looking to re-live their “glory days” or are operating under the “if I knew then what I know now” fallacy, it’s a case of wanting to move backwards, and life doesn’t and shouldn’t work that way. Time, at least the way beings like us are able to perceive it, only moves in one direction, and it waits for no one. And, it’s the process of living and learning and growing as time marches on that shapes who we are as people.

A serious desire to want to go back and get a cosmic do-over* indicates a lack of self-worth on the part of the individual, and an unwillingness to do something about their perceived problems in the here and now, where it might actually make a difference.

Not that I don’t understand the feeling; some days, I’d like nothing more than to hijack a TARDIS, go back to 1990, find my fifteen year old self, kick his ass for being so narrow minded, tell him that none of this crap is going to matter in a couple of years anyway, and to back away from the hair metal and maybe get to know the cute bookish girl in english class who listens to a whole lot of R.E.M. a little better.

But, I recognize this as a fleeting fantasy, and nothing more.

I sometimes entertain this fantasy because, really, when I was fifteen, I was kind of a milquetoast dork with low self-esteem, awful taste, way too little perspective, and way to many NiceGuy™ tendencies.

Looking back, I kind of hate** teenage me.

But then, as an adult, I kind of think I’m supposed to hate him at little bit.

However, at the same time, I recognize his importance and relevance to the formation of the person I am today. His issues, bad choices, and failures eventually led to my becoming, well, Me, and for that reason, I have to at least respect him as an embarassing necessity.

It’s because he tried and failed at all kinds of things that I’m able to take today’s setbacks in stride. It’s because he missed a few school assignments and suffered the consequences that I learned to manage my time more effectively. It’s because he was so inept at teenage romance that I learned some lessons about what not to do and eventually ended up in a healthy and fulfilling relationship. It’s because of his finding a couple of things that he enjoyed and was good at that I eventually let go of a lot of self-doubt and developed the assertiveness and confidence to pursue further education and a career that is, more often than not, lucrative and rewarding.

It’s because that unpleasant teenage me managed to live through the high school experience and learn something from it, then moved on from it out into the larger, much cooler world to have more experiences to learn from that I ended up being the person I am today, a person I’m actually somewhat happy being.

This isn’t to say that the person I am at thirty-five doesn’t still have issues; in the twenty years since that bundle of insecurity and bad taste walked the earth, I’ve had more than that person’s lifetime to amass a whole bunch of new ones, as well as a lot more experiences, providing both successes and challenges, which I continue to deal with. Life is, like most things, a process; if you’re doing it right, you’re not finished growing and developing until your biological functions cease***; there’s always something new to see, learn, or experience. I can’t fathom the idea that somebody would seriously wish to go back, or simply decide that they’re done learning and experiencing, and just let life pass them by for the rest of their alotted time****.

So, in 20 years, will fifty-five year old me look back at the thirty-five year old who’s writing this and do one of those sympathetic head shakes and wonder “what the hell was I thinking?” If he’s still around, Probably. But at the same time, I suspect that while he might consider me naive, provincial, and posessed of embarassingly bad taste, he, like me, will not regret having those experiences, because they helped to shape the man he’s become.

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* those never work anyway; paradoxes always unravel themselves in the end, at least according to Novikov

** If teenage me were around today, he’d totally dig Nickleback and Kid Rock, and such things cannot stand.

*** And nobody truly knows what, if anything, comes after that, so there’s no use worrying about it when there’s so much LIFE out there to concern yourself with.

**** I’ve met some of those cases of arrested development; people who are, for the most part, exactly the same person in their thirties as they were when I knew them as a teenager. And boy, are those people tedious to be around*****

***** Amost as tedious as those people who decide that they know all they need to know, and scoff at anyone who tries to continue to learn more about the world around them well into adulthood. Also: am I actually allowed to footnote a footnote?******

****** What the hell, I’m going to do it again anyway, in order to make the point about how frustrating I find it that many people also expect me to be the same person I was at a given point in the past, and then get angry with me for having the temerity to grow, change, and evolve. A lot of those people are the same people covered in the last two footnotes.