08/26/2026
I’m so glad I went to my 40th high school reunion.
Out of about 330 graduates, we’ve already lost 40. That was sobering. And it made me incredibly grateful to be 57, still here, still healthy, still going strong—and still getting to see how all of our stories unfold.
It was so much fun reconnecting with old friends, but I also loved getting to know people I barely knew in high school. Forty years has a way of leveling the playing field.
Behind every face was a whole lifetime of stories—loss, divorce, illness, addiction, heartbreak and starting over. But also adventure, success, love, joy, reinvention and second chances.
Basically, a whole lot of 50/50.
That’s one of the things I understand so much better at 57 than I did at 17. A great life was never supposed to mean getting only the good half.
We don’t get to choose everything that happens. But we do get to decide what we make it mean, what we learn from it, what we leave behind, and what we take with us.
Coaching has taught me to use ALL of it. The good decisions and the terrible ones. The successes and heartbreaks. The things I’d do again and the things I definitely wouldn’t.
None of it has to be wasted.
And then there was the shared experience of growing up in the ’80s.
The memes really are true. We were free-range, wildly optimistic, a little rebellious and somehow survived an adolescence with very little adult supervision and absolutely no digital evidence. 😂
We didn’t know how good we had it.
One of my favorite parts was bringing my husband, who happens to be exactly 10 days older than me. We’ve had so much fun discovering how many of the same ’80s memories we share—even though we didn’t know each other then.
So we decided to recreate my senior prom picture.
Forty years later.
At the same house where I grew up.
He even rang the doorbell.
And maybe that was my favorite reminder of the whole weekend.
At 17, I could never have imagined the next 40 years—the people I would love, the things I would lose, the mistakes I would make, the lives I would live, or that someday a completely different guy would show up at that same front door to recreate that picture with me.
I wouldn’t trade the whole m