Shitting oneself about Shit School reunions

There are so many people who hated school that I'm finding it all rather comforting at the moment, so if you're one, well you're perfectly permitted to take comfort from me, or not, as you like!

My friend Jab came by yesterday and I told her my head was full of a reunion I might go to at a Shit School I hated when I was a teenager.

"Are you going to shit yourself for the next two weeks then decide not to go because that's what I'd do!" and we laughed, because it is funny, especially when you're as old as we are.

"Yes," I said to her. "I think I will but I also think I might go."

I feel I have no choice in going. I shit myself every time I think of going to that school. I spontaneously shield myself or cry when I'm in the vicinity of it. That is so shit, that memories, ok, fucking shit ones, who fucking cares, have such power over me.

I didn't tell you did I? Or did I? I think the reunion is in the school. It is a feast day and I think there is a High Mass. I think a point of the reunion is to go into Mass like old times then go to lunch (lunch? In that awful soulless refectory with those long wooden tables where I couldn't eat a morsel of toast off those white plastic trays?).

i went into the school website yesterday and had a proper look around it for the first time. There is a teacher still there. I remember that name. Was it him or the deputy head who told me I couldn't go into the church because "God doesn't want you there." ?

Thank God I've been to church between then and now but the whole day feels like a baptism of fire. I'm feeling distinctly uncomfortable already.

I asked myself yesterday, who would go through something like this?

Then I remembered lying in a hammock in Phnom Penh, Cambodia having spent the day in the Killing Fields and a guy asked me: "Do you want to have children one day?"
I'd answered: "Who in their right mind would bring a child into this world?"

The answer to both came clearly to me yesterday.

Me.

Believe me when I say to you, that anything I can do, you can do too (even if I'm not convinced at this juncture that I can actually do it. I might combust through shitting myself).

There comes a point when you need to make peace with your past. You will know when that point it because you will feel it.

Walk through the fire and drink the water that awaits you afterwards

(or in my case of course, get pissed,,,well, Jesus did turn water into wine, didn't he? Why yes he did!)