Visit with high school best friend leaves me pondering my old fears

By David McElroy · December 24, 2021

Until Wednesday night, I hadn’t seen Larry for roughly 30 years. When we were in high school, we seemed to be inseparable. He was my best friend. And we were close collaborators on all sorts of projects — at school, at church and in our personal lives.

This image is from the newspaper staff photo in our senior yearbook. I was the editor and he was the news editor. That was his title, but everybody knew that it really meant “second in command” for the entire staff, regardless of department.

In college, he was in Birmingham and I was in Tuscaloosa, but we still saw each other quite a bit. After that, though, we went in very different directions. We never had a falling out. We were simply busy with very different lives. I stayed in the South — mostly in Alabama — and he ended up in Washington, D.C.

He’s home to visit his mother for Christmas this week, so we had dinner Wednesday night and talked for three hours. We could have talked much longer, but we were the last ones in the restaurant and the staff made it pretty obvious they were ready to leave.

As I drove home, I reflected on how I felt to see him and to look back on our joint past through the lens of our present lives. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it suddenly occurred to me that I had been unconsciously terrified in high school about whether people would like me — and I somehow never worried about that with Larry. That gave me a new appreciation for something I’d never before considered.

And then Thursday night, a woman I barely know randomly told me that everybody likes me — and that everybody thought I was a joy to be around — so I’ve been thinking all night about the strange coincidence of these two contradictory pieces of information.

If you had asked me in high school whether people liked me, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said I’d never cared enough to consider the question. Consciously, that would’ve been true. Unconsciously, the truth was very different.

I wrote a week or so ago about how listening to some music from years ago had left me with a new awareness of uncomfortable emotions I’d hidden from myself back then. Maybe what I felt Wednesday night with Larry was just a continuation of that.

On the projects we did together, I was generally the one in charge. I was the editor of the school paper, for instance. I was the president of the Youth Council at church and he was the vice president. But he was always the more popular of the two of us. Always.

Everybody liked Larry. I think I was tolerated simply because I was useful at some things and manipulative at others. I was certainly accepted at school and at church, but from my current vantage point, it feels more like people accepting someone who is useful and necessary to getting things done.

That left me feeling oddly sad late Wednesday night.

I found myself thinking that I had changed a lot more over the years than Larry has. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it was my impression. The truth, though, is that I had a lot more that needed to change than Larry did. I came from a very dysfunctional family — and he knew that about me — but he came from a far healthier family.

I’d thought about all this for much of the day Thursday. Then when I was about to leave dinner, a woman who I don’t know well got into a very unusual conversation with me.

Her name is Sonya. She’s about 35 years old, maybe a bit older. She works at a restaurant where I go quite a bit. She’s married and has two young children. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, she started talking with me about how “magnetic” my personality is. She told me that my confidence and likability make everybody want to be around me. She said that “everybody” likes me.

I didn’t know quite how to react. It was a strange thing to hear out of the blue from someone who doesn’t know me that well. But it was even more peculiar in light of the thoughts I’d been having for the past day.

There’s absolutely no way she could have known what I’d been thinking about, but it felt like a very clear response to the thoughts I’ve been having. I’m always hesitant to suggest divine intervention in my life, but it actually felt as though God whispered to her that I needed to hear something good from someone.

I don’t know whether I’m right to believe that I’ve changed more since high school than Larry has. We’re both very different people now (and neither one of us fit very well in the small town where we went to high school). But maybe I’ve changed enough that I shouldn’t continue to carry this old burden about whether people are really going to like me.

When Sonya was telling me complimentary things tonight, I kept deflecting her words with my familiar old self-deprecation. It’s how I’ve always reacted to praise.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “The way you carry yourself and the confidence you have in yourself — and just how likable you are to everybody — is more powerful than anything else you can bring up to me. Everybody likes you and wants to be around you.”

I didn’t quite believe Sonya, but I wanted to. I still want to.

It sometimes seems as though I can’t quite outrun the old emotional dysfunction which seems to have been chasing me all my life. Am I ever going to finally become what I want to be? Am I ever going to be someone who can be loved and liked in the ways I’ve always wanted?

I’ve come so far from what I was when Larry and I were close in high school. I look back on that person — arrogant, strong-willed and oh-so-perfect — and I’m grateful that he liked something in me. I never worried about him judging me. I never worried about whether he liked me. And I didn’t realize until now how much that meant to me.

I think I’m more likable now. I want to believe I’m more emotionally healthy, too. I’d really like to believe the things Sonya was telling me Thursday night. I’m not yet what I want to be, but I’m grateful that I’m not what I was as a know-it-all 17-year-old.

And I’m grateful now that Larry liked me — or at least put up with me — back when I probably didn’t always deserve it. That means a lot to me.

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