Making the most of class reunions

This article comes from CNN.com and is authored by Louisa Kamps. Read it in its entirety here.

(CNN) -- Throughout my 20s, I said "Thanks, but nooo thanks," to school reunions. Thinking myself a forward-leaner barreling toward the next big thing (a lusty new life as an aspiring woman of letters in New York City), I had zero interest in revisiting my high school or college days.

My reunion aversion wasn't about how I looked, how successful I was or some other fear of appearances. I just had no reason to feel nostalgic. As a student, I'd never found a solid perch in school's social aviary. While I always had a grab bag of close friends, with most of my classmates I often struggled to hold myself just so, to do or say the exact right thing. Among a circle of superachievers at my Wisconsin high school, I could break a sweat attempting the perfect wisecrack. With a posse of beautiful tortured artistes in college at Brown, I wondered, squinting through clouds of American Spirit smoke, if my expression was properly pained, my eyeliner adequately runny.

But as I inched forward in my chosen profession post-college and started settling into my own skin, I no longer felt such a compulsion to break with my past. And I started to become curious about my former classmates: What ever happened to all the brains and beauties ... and jocks and preps and stoners? Who were they growing up to be?

Hoping to find out, I headed to Providence, Rhode Island, for my 10th college reunion with my good friend and classmate Nina. It was 1999, the height of the dot-com hubbub. At the opening-night picnic, I was chatting with Nina and a few mutual acquaintances (some married; others, like Nina and me, still single) when word came that one of our classmates had to cancel last minute because she was finalizing a deal to sell her booming Internet advertising startup for, rumor had it, several million dollars. Our jabbering circle fell silent. We took longs swigs of our beers and frowned at our cut-offs and flip-flops. But when we looked up a moment later, we all just laughed -- deliciously, cathartically -- because we knew we'd been thinking the same thing: Where were our million-dollar paydays?

Right then I realized the consoling value of reconnecting with others who, by virtue of having passed through the same institutions with you and having been shaped by similar forces, share a good deal of your social-historical DNA. These are the people who understand better than anyone how you might have expected life to unfold and what a punch it is, therefore, when expectations and plans inevitably change. I've since become a true believer in reunions -- having attended every 5- and 10-year gathering at both of my alma maters since my first trip back to Brown.

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