In light of a few recent personal experiences with what some call mean girls, I was reminded of a conversation I had with my sister. Over Christmas my mom asked me to have a chat with my 14-year old sister about mean girls. I thought about this for a while and what I would say. Do I tell her the truth and own up to the fact that there are some girls who will always be mean, regardless of how old you are? Do I tell her to be mean back? Instead, I chose to reflect on my experiences and how I overcame the mean girls.
Almost every girl I know has at least one story to tell about an emotional experience involving a mean girl. Why do you think Tina Fey’s movie “Mean Girls” was so funny? It’s because it was spot on. Girls are just mean sometimes, even at our own sex’s expense.
My first memory of a mean girl was in first grade. I was a tomboy and my best friend was a boy. We would hold hands and run around the playground digging up flowers looking for worms. The girls teased me incessantly because I “liked” a boy, which was forbidden at that age. In junior high at my first boy-girl party we played spin the bottle. When it was my turn the bottle landed on my crush. Little did I know, he had been drinking cheap beer and chewing tobacco. When we kissed, I wanted to vomit from the taste of the mixture. I had a mild freak out on him and told him that he needed to brush and floss if he ever expected to kiss me again…which is when the mean girls in my grade began calling me a prude.
Perhaps my most crushing experience came during my freshman year of high school. I was extremely lanky. Long limbs, a high metabolism and later than normal puberty will do that to you, especially when you’re running track and playing volleyball every day. The girls in my grade were already curvy and filling out their bras much better than I did (and still do!). Whether they were jealous or just plain mean, the teasing started. One day at lunch I went to sit with my friends at a picnic table in the courtyard and as I sat down I remember one girl telling me that I better be careful where I sat because I didn’t want to fall through the holes. While traveling to a basketball game I decided to order a slice a cheesecake for dessert. One of the girls snagged it from me before I could eat it, saying that I would just be throwing it up anyway and it would be a shame for something so good to go to waste.
These experiences might sound juvenile or of no consequence to you but to me they are defining moments in my life. They are the moments where I chose to not care what others thought of me. They are the moments when I clung to the belief that I was choice a daughter of God who loved me. While I admit to coming home almost every day my freshman year in tears, I still found confidence in who I was, a confidence that I still rely on today. I told my sister that mean girls just don’t go away. I can bet you there are women in my grandmother’s nursing home that could rival Regina George in meanness. The key to beating them is to not forget our individual worth and divine nature, which is precisely what I told my sister.
