Why is everyone so obsessed with the "popular" people of high school? Do you all not realize that most of them end up in the same crapfest of life that the unpopular people end up in sometimes? It's not about who you were in high school, it's about how hard you work....or how many excuses you make.
I think it takes a while to figure out they they weren't all that and a bag of chips, and that while you can't do anything about their judgments, at the same time, it never really mattered or meant anything anyway. It only seemed like it at the time.
I know the way I thought about life, attraction, and a lot of things changed once I realized that, even if I HAD "gotten" a preppy-esque type woman back in the day...one of the traditionally "hot girls"...I probably wouldn't have even been happy if I didn't feel like-minded with them, and if it was all about looks and I didn't care about them emotionally. It wasn't that I was "not good enough" for them, even if they say so. It was that we just aren't the same. And that's OK.
It was a game changer realizing that, and I wish I had realized it sooner instead of wasting years being mad at the "cool kids" because I thought they thought I was a second class citizen, and were shutting/freezing, muscling/edging me out of something, imposing some kind of limit on me, or were "better" than me inherently.
I think a lot of it has to do with regrets, like wishing you'd played your cards differently or known how to play them at all. Like, I wish I worked out more, got good at some kind of skilled interest, got more of a style, and yeah, fought back more and not cared about getting in trouble as much. There are a few people - not a lot, but a few - that I really wish I would have just fought them, consequences be d***ed. It was the least they deserved, because they were, and probably still are, classist, hateful, and rotten to the core.
Another thing that helped me get over it is going online, looking them up on Facebook, just to see if I missed out on anything. And I have to say, every time I did so, I never came away feeling like I missed out on anything after all. It's just as well that I wasn't "cool" because I didn't really find those people that interesting - maybe they are to someone, and that's fine, but that scene wasn't ever for me. The answers I was looking for, just weren't there. I don't hate them, but at the same time none of them are people that I really want to talk to or hang out with. We just never had that much in common. The friends I have, are more than fine.
Anyway just my thoughts. I think it's really about wishing you could have done things differently then, and how your life would have unfolded differently since then.