I hate to admit this. Alot. I am a chickenshit. I am. Go figure. I am shallow, immature, pretentious and a scaredy-cat. I hope my children never discover that their mother is the biggest wuss of all time. And this past weekend? I confirmed my status as a lilly-livered phony. I thought I'd gotten past 'high school' years ago. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out fear and self-esteem issues tend to rise up when you least expect them.

I got an invitation to a baby shower. The mommy-to-be actually attended my very first birthday party. And my second. And my third. Later, we attended junior high together. And high school. Our mothers were friends when THEY were in high school. I graduated from high school 19 years ago. NINETEEN. I have not laid eyes on this girl since. I have not laid eyes on the various other ladies she'd invited in at least that long, as well. When she went to the trouble of tracking me down and begging me to attend her shower, I should have made the effort to go. I wanted to make the effort. For about five minutes, I was really excited about being there. But, then my insecurities started to bubble up.

I was cute AND skinny in high school. Now? I could stand to lose a few pounds. I don't rock my jeans the way I did in high school. I think I've developed a double-ish chin. I haven't bothered to get highlights in my hair in almost a year. I didn't have a thing to wear and I didn't feel comfortable spending money on an outfit I would use simply to 'impress' and feel 'friend-worthy'. I thought I was so over the petty bullshit that made high school so hard in the first place. Yet, my fear of discovering that everyone else had flourished, leaving the cute skinny girl in the dust was more than I could bear.

High school was an incredibly difficult, painful and traumatizing experience for me. I'd felt ridiculed and rejected, criticized and critiqued. My only armour against it was to be the skinniest, wear the nicest clothes, drive the best car. It was all I had to insulate myself. It was something I could blame if a person didn't like me. It was much easier to allow myself to think, "She doesn't like me because she's jealous." Rather than admit that 'she' just outright hated my guts and I didn't know why. It was much less painful to blame it on the physical, than it would have been to say that a person didn't like me because they didn't like who I was as a person. Rejection is cruel.

Don't get me wrong, here. I was luckier than a lot of girls and I know it. Many of them didn't have the same resources to fall back on and had to look elsewhere for their armour. I hope they had some of the things I didn't have...like a special talent, charisma, likeability, focus, self-confidence. I had none of these. I was stupid enough to believe that if I wore the 'right' clothing and stayed skinny, people would like me. Instead, it gave them something else to pick on. Add to that my general inability to just keep my mouth closed and my opinions to myself, and it was a recipe for disaster. I had a talent for making things worse than they needed to be and being oblivious to how it happened. Ultimately, my deep emotional sensitivity left me crushed.

Suffice to say, there were a lot of legitimate reasons why I didn't particularly 'thrive' in high school and it did leave a wound that I thought would never heal. Fortunately, it did heal but it must have left a hell of a scar, one that I never even recognized was there. When it came to the baby shower, I got stage fright. Massive fear of rejection. I avoided the entire situation and possibly hurt some feelings in the process. How ridiculous is that? I'm seriously disappointed in myself and wondering when old feelings won't overwhelm me and paralyze me. How in the world could nearly 20 years NOT have erased it all from my memory? Made me stronger? Something?