Mean Girls All Grown Up

I was standing on the soccer field behind my high school when a girl I barely ever spoke with approached me. She sat at what is still termed among my group of high school friends as the "front lunch table." It was the one exclusive clique in the school where you couldn't venture without an invitation. They were basically the group of "mean girls" that everyone loved to hate, and yet they still somehow were deemed "popular." Very kindly she smiled and told me there was a letter pealing on the back of my gym shirt and asked I wanted her to fix it for me. I told her thanks, that would be great.

It was only about a month into my freshman year and I was still feeling insecure and trying to find my place. It was a small, all-girls Catholic high school and only a handful of friends from my elementary school attended. I was in first period gym class and had forged a bond with only one other girl in that sea of sweatsocks and tennis shoes. It was by far my least favorite class and it didn't help that it was my first class of the day where I was left to look and feel my sweaty and smelly worst for the remainder of the day's classes.

She went about picking at the back of my shirt and while it seemed wrong, I just let it happen. And soon enough she had whittled out of my last name an insult that I had never imagined could be had from the letters that graced the back of my shirt. And so I was just another victim of a laughing group of mean girls. My sensitive soul bit back the tears and absorbed the hurt.

I know that at times in my life I have also been the "mean girl." I went along with the crowd, I manipulated and made "friends" feel guilt. I laughed at someone's hair or clothes or words. I levied the word "bitch" and hurled other insults that were based on my own insecurities.

That day my freshman year I was the victim - as I had been before and since - and it hurt. And as much as I was hearing a message of female leadership and empowerment daily in many of my classes, I was also witnessing how horrible girls, and then women can be to one another.

I was never someone that was bullied or teased much and when I think about that and how much incidents like the shirt one hurt, I can't imagine the people that live with that torture daily. I think of how blessed I've been in ways to, for the most part, have been involved with really positive, healthy female friendships.

And still I remember being teased once by an older girl in elementary school when we were in line to walk back to our building from church of all places for my hair cut. I remember the girls in the mall that laughed at my jeans that were too short as I bit back the tears and clutched the bag that held the new ones that weren't in my hands. I remember in college when someone dear to me told me she couldn't be my friend any longer because I was just "too much." And I remember a year ago when I lost what I thought was one of my best friends in the midst of my journey out of depression for reasons that I will never know. All of these incident stung me enough that I still remember them. They shaped me. And yet I still remember being the person that laughed and carried on at the expense of other women when the feeling suited me after most of them.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about women and how we relate to one another and I often wonder why so many of us are so horrible to one another for so long. Many of those same mean girls are now mean women and they wear their "ugliness" as a badge of honor. Television is full of examples of women that call one another "friend" and then proceed to stab that women repeatedly in the front and the back.

What is it about women that makes us so threatened by the success or happiness of a fellow sister? Why is it that so often we just can't be happy for another woman, but we are more than happy to help her wallow in her sadness? Why is it that we want to fit our friends into little boxes and will do everything in our power to keep them contained in said box?

The simple answer is that some of outgrow, embrace and own our own insecurities and once we do that we don't need to weigh other women down to feel like a worthwhile human being.

I'm so happy for the woman in my life that have stood by my side, but in some ways I'm happy for the mean ones too - they have showed me exactly who I never want to be in my life and why.

I can't say that if someone called me the same name today that was made on the back of my gym shirt that I wouldn't hurt a little, but in the end I would walk away, happy that I wasn't that girl that needed to do that to get the attention of her friends.

I just wish there were more women in the world that knew that you don't have to drag the world down with you and that instead you could build it and other women up around you and that it wouldn't make you any less of the incredible woman that you are.