Lately when I am talking to people, I have been playing a game in my head: what was this person like in high school?

High school is such a funny time in our lives. 4 short years with about 20 years of repercussions (at least!) immediately to follow. In high school, everybody is broken down into cliques or types. It’s very one-dimensional, as if your entire personality can be summed up in one word: nerd, jock, goth, prep, whatever it is. But when you’re in high school, it also happens to be kind of true. You just don’t have all that much personality yet. In fact, in the name of belonging, your assigned label kind of becomes your defacto personality. You dress the part, pick up the speech mannerisms, start to like the same types of activities, etc. One might argue that in high school you don’t even have a personality yet, so in the meantime, you just use the one assigned to you.

But when you get to be adults, all of that sort of goes away (the personality thing goes away, not the deep psychological scars…or maybe that’s just me). I think a lot of it is just growing into your personality. It turns out that people aren’t so one-dimensional. Shy people find confidence, outgoing people learn there’s always someone cooler than you. Jocks find out they like computers, and nerds find out they like sports (ping pong is a sport, right?) Everybody kind of realizes we all have more in common than we thought. Adulthood is the great equalizer.

Nowadays, if I run into someone from my high school (virtually or otherwise), I’m just excited to have run into someone from my high school. Suddenly people who I never even spoke to in high school are like old friends. We can reminisce about our school or hometown, and I’m honestly interested to hear what they’re up to.

So lately as I’m talking to people, I start to wonder: is this person someone whom I would have talked to in high school? What were they like? Would we have gotten along back then?

It’s harder to guess than you would think. Nerds are probably the easiest to pick out, but it’s not a sure thing. Besides, haven’t you heard? These days it’s cool to be a “nerd” (as a true, not-in-quotes nerd who suffered for it, I take a little exception to that, but that’s another blog post).

It stands to reason that at least some of the people I talk to as adults wouldn’t have given me the time of day as high schoolers (it stands to reason, because at least some of the people I talk to as adults are girls).  Just playing the odds, some of you had to be cheerleaders, or captains of the football team, or drama dorks (Drama Queens? What’s the PC term for someone who haunted the drama department in high school? Phantoms of the Drama Department?), or even just band nerds, which were a whole separate breed of nerd that ran on a sort of parallel track, but didn’t cross over.

So what were you like in high school? Anybody find it particularly humorous to think back on how they were perceived back then vs. now? Any Mean Girls want to fess up and admit that they wouldn’t have talked to me back then?