Picture this: the once scrawny dudes who barely made the J.V. team a few years ago are now rising juniors and in charge of the pong table. The tight-dressed girls who are debating which clever location they should tag for their Instagram used to be alter servers at your church. Your old friends who dragged you here are nowhere to be found, despite their promise that you would only be stopping by tonight for, like, five minutes tops. This is a high school party, you are a college student, and you ask yourself how you ended up back here.
Returning home after being away at college can occasionally get lonely and sometimes college students may feel the need to resort to various means of fun. Socializing with human beings apart from your parents may sound tempting, but hanging out with a younger crowd is not going to make you miss your college friends any less. These partygoers are not peers—they are children—and you deserve a minimum of $8.05/hour for babysitting them.
Not only does showing up to a high school party make you feel creepy, but the kids will also think of you as someone who cannot move on from the so-called glory days of high school. Despite your internal protest that you are (kind of) making it in the real world, they will not realize this because to them, you are the same person you were when you graduated, and they are the same fourteen-and-half-year-olds you remember hogging the hallways.
There are many ways to feel about your hometown, but the most important thing to remember is that home is exactly the way it was when you left it. The high school party will feel weird, but that is only because you have changed, not the party. Think of the new kids at the party as actors who have taken over the roles of those who came before them, and they will continue the tradition of passing on the torch to the next round of actors when their turn is up. I am not saying that no cool people below the age of eighteen exist, but there is no need to be in search for them by attending a party.
If you do go to a high school party, all you will be doing is asking yourself how you got to this dark place. This time home was supposed to be a time of change, or at least that is what you told yourself back at school. The P90X DVDs you vowed to follow turned into nightly trips to Redbox, morning yoga turned into an extra hour in bed, and the novel you could not wait to read is still sitting unopened on your nightstand. And now, you are at a party with the same crowd you could not wait to get away from back when you were in high school and were counting down the days until college began.
Next time you are invited to attend a high school party, use the invitation as an opportunity. Smile at the offer, politely say, “No, thank you," and run home so that you can start doing all of those things you said you would do.
