Trippin’ with Fran & Ed

How revisiting our younger self can shed light on possibilities ahead.

Fear & Loathing in High School

If you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, what would you tell your younger self? Would you give good advice to relive your life for the better, or offer dire warnings to avoid your biggest mistakes? Would you share your hopes and dreams, or describe whom you actually came to be? Would both of you be proud or ashamed, excited or afraid, optimistic or fatalistic?

In lieu of having a time machine, remembering and sharing stories from our youth is a compelling psychological exercise. Deep in our past specific events triggered us and made us who we are; reminiscing gives us the opportunity to discover our strategies and coping mechanisms, perhaps explore insights to help make our future self more actualized— or at least more self-reflective.

For early peakers high school was the high point of life, the prom kings and queens, honor students and valedictorians, debate team captains and varsity athletes. For slow learners those teen years totally sucked, the dropouts and delinquents, breakfast clubbers and detention junkies. For most of us falling somewhere in between, we took the good with bad, tried to figure it all out.

Looking back I see the mirror image of a rambunctious kid having my adult strengths, weaknesses, and quirkiness, inchoate but already manifest: I was and still am smart but scatter-brained, intuitive yet self-deluded, wise but immature, loud-mouthed yet timid. Forty years later I’m essentially the same person — enduring similar mistakes, enjoying similar successes: meet “me”.

Then like now I had a small but close circle of friends. Ed was big and tall, round-faced and shaggy-haired, bespectacled and introverted; Fran was tall and thin, long-faced and crew-cutted, wide-eyed and extraverted. Ed and I were tight and spent time, Fran spontaneously showing up on a whim, his jittery hysteria dipping into our world only to just as abruptly dip out again.

Also tall, with strong legs and long arms, I inherited the physique of Michael Phelps but the eyes of Mr. Magoo. I could have been a contender — a football, baseball, or swimming champion if not for my nearly incapacitating myopia, astigmatism, and nystagmus…