Good morning.

Happy September. 

Pumpkin candles have been purchased. 

I’m sitting outside, pretending that the seventy-five degree breeze is crisp and autumnal, reading through my journal entries of the week. Each one seems dipped in one central idea–friendship. So I suppose that this is about that. But more so, it’s about the complications and messy instincts that cloud making friends in the post-adolescent years. At least for me. 

SOME STORIES OF GIRLHOOD

Before I say anything, you should probably know that friendship has never been an easy or painless thing for me. I was talking to my mom the other day about this book that she used to read to me as a kid called The English Roses. Written by Madonna, it tells the story of a girl who is smart and kind and beautiful, and who is utterly abused by her peers because of these things. The other girls treat her terribly, leaving her out of things and gossiping behind her back. Since it was a children’s book, by the end they were of course all friends.

My life has not been such a book. It has, in fact, been anything but.

AGE SEVEN

I remember being seven years old, watching my friend from school flip me off in the middle of a playdate. I have memories of her screaming at me, calling me names, making faces, all of the things. One disagreement over who got play with which doll would set her off. My mother was always coming to pick me up. Why I hung out with her at all could be said to have had something to do with the fact they she was quite wealthy, and there is nothing more appealing to a little girl than a sprawling house full of hiding spots and an endless collection of dolls. I didn’t know why this little girl was so mean, but I did know that she had three different sets of staircases and something called a “bonus room” and that was enough for me. 

AGE ELEVEN

Not too many years later, I had a friend in the neighborhood who I practically worshiped for no real reason other than the fact that she was a whole year older than me and that that, back then, was a very big deal. She knew this. She used to prank call me while hanging out with her older, cooler friends. One time she even told me to come over, only for me to meet her mother at the door, who, in a state of confusion, informed me that her daughter wasn’t even home. Oh.

Around the same time, an event occurred in my life that was, you could say, the nail in the coffin to all of this. I had been befriended, though it really felt more like being chosen, by a popular girl. I didn’t really care about that and actually liked her a lot, so we began hanging out. I practically lived at her house for all of sixth grade. We would scroll through Tumblr, take artsy photos of each other holding flowers at odd angles, tan by the pool, share secrets, loves, all of the things that any preteen does in an effort to be a cool, older girl.

SECRET FRIENDS

But there was a catch. It was a secret. Her friends, the other popular girls, would get jealous if they found out that she was hanging out with me and not them. This naturally threatened the delicate power structure that is a sixth grade classroom. But this girl and I had become something of best friends. So, we kept our friendship a secret. I was essentially trained to never tag her in any of my posts, to never mention that we hung out, and, most vitally, to never act like we were friends while at school. It’s not like she was some great friend when I was with her either. Writing this now, it sounds incomprehensible. But I suppose the sad thing is, I don’t think it will be read that way by women everywhere. I have a feeling that this might not sound so unusual to you at all. I wish it weren’t that way.

But it gets worse. By the end of that year, it had all come to head. Without getting too into the details, there used to be this site called ask.fm, where you could ask anonymous questions to each other and it would all be posted online. So brilliant, right? I woke up one day to countless, never ending streams of anonymous hate being poured into my inbox. These girls started writing messages all over this site that would bring tears to your eyes as soon as they found out about my secret friendship. I waited for it to blow over, but it never did. They, having the upper hand in the social dynamic of the sixth grade, turned the entire class against me. They made up lies, spread rumors, the whole nine yards. Getting kicked in the gut by a professional soccer player would have surely hurt less than the pain that nestled into my body. I lost my best friend, but I also lost my innocence. And that, as it would turn out, was the only real loss there. It was one of those points in life where there was before, and then there was after.

HIGH SCHOOL

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that I found real friends. Cool, interesting people that I loved with my whole heart. We did everything together. And then, one day, at the start of our senior year, they too decided that they were done. I was suddenly invisible for reasons that I would not be given until years later, in the form of a physical apology letter in my mailbox from one of them, explaining that it had essentially all come down to insecurity. Jealousy. Poison. You can read more about that and my experience of reading that letter here.

I don’t tell you these things to make you feel bad or to beg for some kind of condolence. This was all a long time ago. I tell you them because, unfortunately, I know that they are not rare. I know that I am not special, that these may easily have been your stories too. And that breaks my heart. I wish I knew how to fix it. 

UNDERSTANDING THE TRAUMA OF GIRLHOOD

Bu I do know how to understand it.

I took an adolescent literature course last fall that had an emphasis on girlhood. I didn’t really know what this meant going into it, mostly because girlhood was not something that had ever been talked about in any of my academic studies before. Girlhood was sharing secrets at two in the morning and passing tampons under school desks. It was crying and laughing behind closed doors and driving around with all of the windows down late at night. In other words, girlhood was a secret. Our secret. 

And then it wasn’t. I can still feel the love that reverberated off the walls of that classroom as we read scholarly articles about what it means to grow up a girl in a patriarchal society, sharing our own, not so unique after all, stories.

One of the things we researched quite a bit, the thing I have never forgotten, was the idea of “horizontal violence”, or violence that moves side to side along the social hierarchy, as opposed to up and down. Meaning, girls being mean to girls, but not to boys. This fascinated every last one of us. I remember reading one scholar’s work who explained that girls are mean to each other, not just out of jealousy and insecurity like our moms always told us, but out of a thirst for power. Which was so much scarier.

She explained that as girls, we are born into a world that lets us know pretty early on that boys have the power. A little girl, we are told, is about the weakest thing that you can be. So we battle for it. We yank each other’s hair and spread lies as a way of climbing to the top of what we were given. Another powerful girl was not an inspiration, she was a threat. Our first instinct was to take her down, not ask to be friends. This was, to be sure, the entire premise of that picture book my mother read to me as a child. I just liked the pictures back then. I didn’t know that it would be my life.

THE POINT

The big point that I am perhaps too slowly crawling towards is that for all of these reasons, making friends is hard for me now. I talk to people all of the time, I make acquaintances, but I think a part of me is always sure to keep a safe distance. A part of me still that little girl, knocking on the door to find no one home.

For a while, I tried to fix it by avoiding it. I convinced myself that I didn’t need people, that I didn’t want them either. I’ve always been really good at being alone, so I ran with it. I embraced it. And for a long time, I lived that way. Solitude was safe, but it was a dark and quiet room. It had no windows. It had no air. I was never quite sure if I was real, or just floating through the world. Because if a tree falls down in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

I remember everyone always telling me that I would “find my people” when I got to college. We seem to whisper this narrative into the ears of lonely seventeen year olds across America. And I think it probably really does happen that way for a lot of people, why else would it be a narrative at all? It just never happened for me. From the very start, I have felt like a strange alien on my university campus. I gave up on “finding my people” somewhere in the middle of my sophomore year.

MAKING FRIENDS AS AN ADULT

And then, by some strange twist of fate, now in my very last semester, I seem to be meeting interesting people. Maybe it’s because we have all been together for a few years now and have an illusion of knowing each other, or maybe it’s just because it’s my last semester and that has a way of making everything sentimental and sweet, but for the first time since the day I stepped onto campus, I don’t feel so alone.

Which brings up a lot. The nice thing about not having met “my people” yet is that I haven’t had to deal with my trauma that surrounds friendship. The trauma that the aforementioned stories burned into me with a white-hot branding iron. For the first time in years, I’m meeting people who I actually really love, yet my first instinct is still to stay back. To keep a distance. I’m working on that. It feels a lot like closing your eyes in the middle of the freeway, while naked, but I’m trying to do it anyway. Healing my inner child and whatnot.

Because if I should have a daughter , I would want her to grow up in a world where women build each other up, not tear each other down. I would want her to have a sisterhood that spreads far and wide across the globe instead of a being surrounded by a thousand tiny extinguished fires and the burns on her forearms to prove it. I would want her to feel loved for being strong, not targeted. I don’t want to have to read her The English Roses like my mother did for me.

This ended up being heavier than I thought, but I think that’s okay. I think it’s important to share this kind of stuff. Real stuff. I wish that this was there for me to read back then.

For more real stuff, here is an old post of mine talking more about girlhood and here is one about the relationship girls grow up having to their bodies. And, if you’re interested in some heavy reading, here is that research I was citing earlier about horizontal violence.

Happy Sunday.

Love, m.

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