Meeting with old friends
I haven't done any reunion of sorts with my school friends.
It's been years since the last time I was at school. Hari Raya comes and goes. For the past years, there were plans of meet ups but I rejected most of them with the excuse that I was going back to my university or I had other plans. It was just as it is, an excuse. This year, there was none of those. Maybe they got busy with life, new families, exciting jobs.
Up until now, I was not sure of the real reason of my aversion of meeting people from my past. It suddenly came to me that maybe it was because of my fear of not fulfilling people's expectation.
Should it be called fear? I am not sure. But what I am sure is that from graduating as a law student to being unemployed for 10 months to being forced to attend a teaching college that I don't even have any interest in to working as a teacher. In the first few months of being a teacher, when people know that I was a law student, they kept asking why didn't I pursue an employment from that department. Why did I waste 5 years of my life reading law when in the end I landed a job as a teacher? It really bugged me. It still bugs me. It is always as the back of my head that now, I do not mention about my degree at all.
So maybe, with meeting people from my old days, they would ask me about the things that I want to be kept hidden. And maybe, just by looking at them, I don't want to be reminded of my, I'm not sure how to call this, failures or insufficiency or incompetence or inadequacy, of fulfilling my dreams.