Tonight I ran into someone who I went to high school with on the bus home. He was a couple of grades ahead of me, and was very popular back then. When I first saw him, and realized who it was, I felt nothing beyond the natural excitement of bumping into someone you haven't seen in a while, and I eagerly tapped him on the shoulder to say hello. At first he didn't recognize me - and I was fine with that - as I said, he was older (and a high school celebrity), so I didn't necessarily expect him to know who I was.
But as I got up to get off the bus, recognition swept over his face, and he smiled (and maybe, or was it just me? giggled?). In that moment, as he said my maiden last name, I was suddenly overcome with shame and embarrassment. If he remembered who I was, I thought to myself, he must remember what a gigantic loser I had been - and he's probably still laughing at me now, I thought.
I went home and played the scene over and over in my mind, as I chopped up my fresh kale for our dinner. And somewhere between analyzing my perception of his perception of me (can he tell how much I've changed?), and cringing at the thought of that pimple-faced teenage girl with that awful last name who I have been trying to so hard to distance myself from for the last decade...I remembered something: that girl was just a kid. She was just a girl doing the best she could. Just a quirky, smart, socially awkward girl, with a tendency to over-share (which hasn't changed), suffering from hormonal skin in a small town. This guy didn't know me...if he had any perception of me, negative or otherwise, it wasn't based on anything factual - it couldn't be, we had never spoken directly to each other in our lives up until today...
I felt something soften in me tonight, like that moment when the shell of a piece of candy left out in the sun starts to melt. I felt a compassion for that younger me, where before there was only revulsion. And as a result, I didn't need to try to tear down this guy's character in my mind to make sure that I maintained some sense of self-esteem (i.e. if i make him out to be a vapid, shallow person, his opinion won't matter). There were no judgments of the kind necessary. And I suddenly even found humor in the idea that he would have thought I was a nerd..."If only he knew," I smiled to myself.
So it looks like all this Buddhist stuff I've been reading/practicing lately is starting to sink in...what da ya know? :)
