high school.

One of the reasons high school was so terrible for me (bear with me, this is not an acne story) was because I have a huge fucking mouth. In real life, I rarely keep my opinions to myself, as it absolutely pains me to do so. Life is too short to shut up; that's been my motto. In high school, there were very few people who appreciated my adolescent candor, and as such, I spent four very lonely years harboring a disdain for pretty much everyone around me, and voicing it to whomever was sucker enough to listen.

Once I grew up a little and formed some not-quite-so severe opinions, and moved to Manhattan, and surrounded myself with left-leaning hipster intellectuals, and discovered the internet, and stopped reading Catcher In the Rye, I realized that everybody loves me as long as I'm on their side. That's the way it goes, and that's perfectly acceptable. Still, even now as a grown-up, among people I believe have, like me, grown past the stage where they feel it is necessary to convey a hurtful story to someone despite the fact that it will be nothing but hurtful, sometimes my huge fucking mouth comes back to bite me in the ass.

And I really hate that, because it makes me feel like a horrible insensitive person, which I'm really not -- really, candor and insensitivity do not go automatically hand-in-hand -- and it makes me just want to start keeping my mouth shut, because sometimes when you call someone on what they truly are, it's just not worth the trouble. And so, here I am, with shitty memories of high school (which I thought were gone for good, you know, lesson learned, let's move on) rushing through my head, wondering if it's worth undoing some grown-up damage I unwittingly caused.