What do any of us seek from a class reunion? For some - perhaps most of us - it's simply the chance to reconnect with old friends. For others, the reassurance that you are not changing, maturing or, goddamnit let's just say it -- growing older -- alone, that even the most popular among our former classmates is losing hair, gaining weight, been buffeted by and weathered similar storms life. Others return because some part of them is still stuck in the past, mired by some teenaged trauma, and hoping for resolution that allows them, finally, to let go and be free of it.

Perhaps the latter is me, although I like to think I went back mostly for affirmation of what has come since, not before. Could be I'm just splitting hairs.

Yes, I was excited to see a few classmates with whom I stayed in intermittent touch, those once best friends whose ties have been frayed by distance, time and separate experiences. And yes, I was curious to see how my other classmates had fared with life in general and with time.

But mostly, I sought the acknowledgement that I was no longer the skinny, pale, uncoordinated, underconfident child I'd been. Back then, I had a bad perm, braces on my teeth and my back, glasses and a decided lack of style. One especially memorable day, a group of boys howled at me as I walked down the hall. These were among the least popular boys in the class above me. Their howls were not of admiration, but of the jeering, cruel variety that few but children and teenagers can project.

By senior year, I think I had outgrown much of this. But that's not how my memory has it.

Twenty-five years later, I wanted to be told I was different. Remarkably different. Overall better. Even perhaps beautiful.

I admit this with a sense of shame. My life, the mirror and my sense of self already affirms these things. We all know by now that it comes from within, or it does not come at all. Why did I still feel the need to find it elsewhere, and from such a long-ago source?

It was not that I resented anyone from the Class of '82. I resented my old, beaten image.

What I took away from the reunion was, like almost all in life, not quite what I expected.

Two or three people expressed exactly what I wanted to hear. Wonderful! Beautiful! I didn't recognize you!

But most said this: You look exactly the same!

What??!

I had good hair. Hell, I had red hair! I had a figure. Fashionable clothes, contacts, and decent posture. Damnit, I had a pierced belly button! I was no longer a virgin, or Catholic. I was not the same!

"Either I wasn't as bad as I thought I was then, or I don't look as good as I think I do now," I speculated later with my sister.

She did not directly respond. "All I know is, you're high maintenance," she said, annoyed with the length and attention to detail it had required for me to make my public appearance. She was right. I annoyed myself.

But the strange thing was, most of my classmates did look the same. The men had aged less gracefully than the women; several had gained weight and/or lost hair. A couple women also had gained a few pounds, but their faces were no more than slightly lined, their hairstyle generally identical, their personalities as they were with a mellower, kinder tint. Divorces, losses and victories had both scarred and formed us all.

The class beauty was still beautiful outside and had grown even more so inside.

The class ho was married, but still walked the walk, smoking incessantly, drinking heavily and cursing at a rate equal to both her habits. She looked the same, only harder, her lines more markedly and deeply drawn.

The cliques were gone, yet strangely, I found myself falling back into my old role of my friend Mary's sidekick, the two of us among the class funny girls. I rolled off jokes I didn't know were inside me, and a small circle soon formed around Mary and me. Our group laughter soon attracted more. No one could have warned me that within such a short time, I'd feel so at ease, so oddly removed and at home in one moment.

I liked these people, and most of them far more than when we had last met.

Perhaps this is what we all really seek in reunions: Not just reconnections but new discoveries of the people we thought we had labeled so neatly and precisely.

And just perhaps, no one had ever labeled me the way I'd once believed. Maybe, just maybe, I'd applied it all by myself.