Hating high school and its associated reunions feels as American as baseball, jazz, apple pie, etc. But that wasn’t my experience back then or at my 10th, 20th, or this past weekend’s 30th reunion. In fact it was a whole lotta fun and lovely to see everyone. Maybe for the 40th they’ll give my last name its proper capital B.
I won’t lie, one of the most fun things for me about the whole thing was folks digging my response to the “what do you do these days” question (map design). Everyone said things like “of course you do!” (in a good way) and “what took you so long?”
It put the lie to my recent fear that all I’m doing right now is regressing. The funniest/strangest thing for me personally in this decade has been my complete reversion to the personality and interests I had before peer pressure, higher education, amateur music, and a marketing-adjacent design career eroded my original sense of self.
I’m all about maps, baseball, bikes, Legos and D&D at the age of 48 and I’ve actually never felt better. If something catches my interest right now, it’s probably because it juices one or more of those interests.
- I stopped my post-quarantine job hunt and committed to a freelance map-design side hustle
- I became the stay-at-home spouse and significantly junior breadwinner in my marriage
- I self-published a homebrew fantasy map atlas based on 1990s D&D 2e scribbles
- I composed/recorded/released a music project of 7 songs allegedly written by my 5e bard
- I got sucked into a video game for the first time since 1992 because I could play as that bard
- I spend my hobby-money on Lego sets, throw out their instructions, and make weird spaceships
- I stay physically healthy via regular cycling and mentally healthy via unapologetic escapism
I don’t say any of this to brag. I don’t expect this to last very long either. I’m just glad that for the moment, most everything I worried about too much in the past 25-30 years ended up not really mattering much.
