I didn't have the time or energy for all the self-important navel-gazing and petty crap that goes on in high school. I was too busy trying to survive in the real world. I didn't have loving parents or a stable home. I grew up with poverty and violence. I won't go into all the details of that, but my senior year was spent sleeping on someone's floor. I had no home. I was going to school and working, and my main concern was graduating with my class since some of the fallout of my non-stable home was missing the first half of my senior year and having to make it all up in the second half. Frankly, if not for the kindness of my principal and some teachers, I wouldn't have had a cap and gown to graduate in. They cost money. And I had neither parents nor money.

So forgive me if the head cheerleader making fun of my white-after-Labor-Day shoes or the class clown rhyming my name with something stupid and chanting it didn't "scar me for life." None of that nonsense was important to me, and it was all tuned out. So yeah, I have a very different idea of what constitutes life-affecting issues in high school. You all seem to think that I had some sort of privileged, prom-queen life in high school just because I've managed to move past it. No. I just prioritized things differently. "Mean Girls" may not be fun while you're going through it, but you shouldn't still be holding on to it when you're 45. It's NOTHING in the grand scheme of things.

When I said I was "popular," I didn't mean I was a cheerleader or class president or anything remotely like that! Geez! I didn't dance on any bodies, nor was I danced upon. I had a few friends I hung out with (some popular, some not), and did my best not make enemies. Most people liked me because I never gave them a reason not to. I simply took high school for what it was... four years of classes that I had to go to. I went to class, didn't bother with extracurricular activities or any of that... I didn't even go to my prom, and you guys are acting like I said I was the friggin' homecoming queen. Not even close. My life was lived outside of school (I rarely even dated anyone from my school), so I had a different perspective. My classmates were just a bunch of people I was thrown together with. And unlike some of you, when the bell rang, I was out of there, both in body and spirit. It's not that I hated everyone. More that I didn't see them as a permanent fixture in my life. I saw them the way most of you probably see your co-workers. You mostly get along, you like some more than others, you try not to make enemies, and then when it's time to go home, they're not a part of your life... until tomorrow. You just get through it and wait for the bell to ring.

You don't have to be "special" or "glowing perfection" to be in your mid-40s and to have moved on from things that happened over 25 years ago. That's just called "growing up." To compare surviving high school to surviving the concentration camps is over-the-top to say the least. Walking wounded? Spurting blood? Scars? Horrors? Hell? My God, how dramatic. I'm sorry if I didn't take algebra and history class THAT seriously, and I still don't. It was just reading, tests, homework and papers to me. It wasn't the very essence of life itself. It wasn't my identity. Should it have been? Should I NOT have looked past the cliques and the dances and the football games? Should I have seen high school as... IT? Sorry. It just wasn't.

I didn't view going to school as a social occasion, and I didn't allow my classmates to define how I'd feel about myself 20-something years down the line. I'm really sorry for those of you who did... but please don't dump your own inability to get over high school on me. I'm not the one with the problem. If you're still the same person you were in high school, with the same issues, and you actually think your suffering was equal to that of a concentration camp survivor... you should seek help. Not to mention forgiveness from actual concentration camp survivors for comparing what they went through to petty teenage squabbles.

How depressing, that people 20 years on still harbor or even remember petty resentments from high school. I graduated almost 27 years ago (admittedly longer than the "High School Reunion" folks) but high school was behind me as soon as I walked out the door with my diploma. Never gave the place another thought. I hightailed it out of my town ASAP, moved to the big city and soon afterwards to Europe. Kept in (spotty) touch with one person. That's it. Never had even the slightest desire to attend my prom, God forbid a reunion.

And I wasn't unpopular, either. I was one of the popular ones. In high school. In an atmosphere of forced association that you pretty much had no choice but to participate in, and contrived relationships born of proximity and not much else. I saw it as something to get through as quickly and easily as possible, so I never quite understand it when I see adults still reliving high school. Heck, I don't even understand adults still reliving college. Few things creep me out like someone in their 40s still obsessed with their college football team, trash-talking people from other colleges like some sad sports version of Miss Havisham.

Life is a series of stages. We can't forget each stage, but we should leave it. Well-adjusted adults experience, learn from and move on from one stage to the next. The rest, well, end up like the people on "High School Reunion."