It's July, yet June gloom lingers in the San Gabriel Valley.  As I woke up this morning, subconsciously I pulled a gray shirt over my head.  I realized I am trying to sympathize with the clouds. Everyone, well most Californians, hate that the clouds remain in July as they fantasize about baking on famous beaches. However, today it reminds me of home in the Northwest.

I've been thinking of "home" a lot lately. Probably because my high school reunion is this weekend. The past few weeks I have truly embodied June gloom - a looming gray murkiness over the impending event. Stories from my current friends haunt me as they say their ten year was the worst due to everyone feeling the pressure to prove something or show-off. I don't know... I've never done this before.  So I'm trying to see through the gray, and make something of it, but it's hard.

I've found myself looking in the mirror more, I've complained about my weight, I got my haircut (which was probably due anyway because I get a mullet when my hair gets to my shoulders). I sensed something gloomy as I stood there trying to make peace with this girl turned woman who is going to reintroduce herself to people she hasn't seen in the last decade.

Home has changed not only in place for me, but in my soul and how do you explain that at a family BBQ or a dinner for "adults only"? How do you even begin to tell the story of how you have arrived at adulthood?

As the clouds begin to burn off and the sunshine tries with all its might to burn through the ever present layer of smog, I begin to look past the mirror to the life I have been privileged with.  A loving husband, a great job, a book about to be released and even the things that seem horrendous - doctor's visits, radiation, family drama, etc. I see my life for what it is and it's beauty and mess, but I am boggled as to how to "reunite" and try to explain all of this. The age old question of "What do you do?" will be asked and then you have to answer -- but I want to know who they are and how they are.

I've spent a large majority of the past 10 years healing from so much of what happened 10 - 15 years ago, so yes I put on a gray shirt and I stare at myself in the mirror because all of a sudden, she's there -- my 15-year-old self. She's frantic about her weight. She's worried about her clothes, her skin, her appearance. She wonders about people's opinions and fears judgment. She is right there with me, in me, trying to decide what she's going to be when she grows up. And then in the blink of an eye, she's grown up.

She will always be with me, but my 28-year-old self appears and realizes that the fights (with myself and others), my marriage (for better or worse), the sickness, my family, my body, my career, my schooling have brought me home... they ushered my arrival to being an adult -- they made me who I am. And these people are part of that, my former classmates, even a decade later.

Sure they don't understand what I've been through in the past 10 years and I won't even begin to comprehend all of their journeys in one day's time, but that's okay because we did all go through something prolific together -- high school. It was the last time we all had the excuse of "being kids."  That all changed as we left and entered the threshold of our late teens and twenties.  Mistakes were different now, so was discipline.  The school of hard knocks was life and we've all experienced that for 10 years apart from each other.

So I comfort my 15-year-old self by recognizing that there is no other brain or body I would want and I thank her for what she went through as a kid to make me, well, me.

There will still be cloudy days for sure, but the sun will always be there behind making sure time does one thing: go on. As will all of us even after this weekend. So bring it on class of 2000. I'm excited to see who we've all become.