Perhaps because the novelty—by which I mean an alcohol-accentuated tincture of horror and awe—has worn off, I’m not coming away from my fifth reunion with the same crazed list of stories as I had after, say, my Freshman year. There were no drunken alumni saving me from arrest at the hands of Mohawk-profiling P-safe officers; no rambling stories from Bill Fortenbaugh ’58 about the hookers we could expect at his 70^th birthday party; no thieving of giant inflatable monkeys from the 35^th (I’m still unclear about how that one happened).

Still, I think I “did” reunions pretty well. I went through the P-Rade with the band no less than three times and felt like I played my heart out despite dancing too energetically to read the music for songs I had never played before. I ran into my thesis adviser in a heavily inebriated state on Poe Field. I managed a temporary coup d’etat and convinced the percussion section to start “Children of Sanchez” for the umpteenth time. I swam in the fountain, got a 4:00 a.m. “Eggplant Parm without the Parm” from Hoagie Haven, and stayed up for a reunions sunrise (a first!). And my antics in the band office led one undergraduate officer—perhaps not realizing how much I would treasure the comment—to say that I really was the “hot mess” of band lore.

I list stories and antics and happenings because I always hope that, by adding them up, they will sum to three days of consistent and straightforward happiness. And, for most people, it seems like they do: my facebook feed has been dominated for days with comments about the “best damn place of all” and the sheer joy of revisiting our alma mater. I imagine there’s a certain amount of posturing in that, but I more-or-less believe the sentiments are genuine. I wish I shared them, though.

Somewhere between the moments of blasting away on trumpet and catching up with my best friend on the deck of Terrace, there were what seemed like interminable periods of wandering around alone at the 5^th, avoiding eye contact and fearing conversation. I hadn’t initially expected to spend the entire weekend with the band—not even most band alums do that—but then I realized that the alternative was walking around campus by myself, not sure if I did or didn’t want anyone to see me. It’s not that I’m not incredibly fortunate to have great friends from my class: only that interacting with them, with the attendant sense of “losing” them again as soon as the weekend was over, was hard for me to bear.

Depression is, in so many ways, all about struggling with your past. For some, it’s past trauma. For me, it’s an idealized sense of past happiness that I alternate between desperately want to relive—not in the “telling stories with old friends” sense, more the “build a time machine” sense—and wipe from my mind. When I walk around Princeton, I’m not sad because I see the room where I used to cut myself, the health center where I had to inter myself Freshman year, or the street where my roommate had to pull me away from oncoming traffic. No: I’m sad because I’m constantly thinking about the sense of wonder and meaning and community that I had there and yet never really managed to appreciate and which, at Berkeley, seems so impossibly out of reach.

Being me, I told myself this was my last reunion. Not in the sense that it’ll actually be my last, but the last where I feel like I can actually have conversations with undergraduates, play with the band, or dance drunkenly until 4 a.m. It also feels like my last because I’ve chosen to make coming back a logistical absurdity, whether I’m in France or California or England or anywhere else. I feel jealous of the people who can maintain a connection to Princeton after they graduate, and I frequently fantasize about coming back for a road trip or two each football season, but I’ve realized that I burn my bridges with the past every two years because I probably couldn’t get by any other way.

For me, at least, there’s wisdom that comes from the experience, and not just angst, which makes writing about it on my 27^th birthday seem less pathetic and more edifying. When I first started to recover, I followed a pretty rigidly Benthamite pleasure-maximizing strategy, avoiding anything that might make me feel bad. Now that I know that I can break down a bit without falling of the deep end, though, I am realizing that depression can be part of the normal flow of experience—that it’s okay to go back and laugh and dance like an idiot and play trumpet and bask in the warmth of good friends and, yes, cry a little bit.