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Thursday, 10:38 pm in Books & Comics

So, remember the other day when I mentioned that I felt like going out and buying pop psychology books? Well, I did. Mean Girls Grown Up is a book about Relational Aggression in women. Female RA has been one of the big ‘in things’ in recent years, especially studying the trends of bullying in young girls. MGGU, ont he other hand, is about RA in adult women; in the workplace, the PTA, the feminist support group, the aged care facility, that sort of stuff.

I’ve never been very good friends with other girls. I mean, I’ve had plenty of female friends over the years, though they’ve generally burnt bright and strong but incredibly brief. I’m not entirely sure if it comes across or not (according to my johari window, maybe not), but I’m quite insecure about some things. It comes and goes in cycles, but overall this insecurity has meant I have always been attracted to girls in whom I see some kind of trait that I would like to see in myself; cool girls, outspoken girls, girls with a hobby I share (not so easy, since my hobbies are things like ‘drawing’, ‘roleplaying’ and ‘computers’), girls who I want to be in some regards.

The first one I can remember was called Susannah, whom I met in daycare. Susannah was cool, for whatever given value of that word applies to a three year old. She had a doll house and a box of dress ups and her home backed out onto a reserve, so we used to run out in the long grass and build ourselves homes and make gum leaf tea. I was told many, many years later that of all Susannah’s friends, her mother liked her playing with me the most; we had imaginative games, apparently, instead of sitting around reading Dolly and talking about how hot Dean Caine was (er, this is over something like a ten year period, incidentally). I think that in all those ten years I never felt as if I were Susannah’s ‘best friend’. I was a friend, but I wasn’t cool like some of the other girls. Susannah was a year older than me, and sometime between primary school and high school we drifted apart. Last I heard she was still at university, not sure what she wanted to do. I don’t have any negative memories about her, and I wish her well, but my friendship with Susannah laid the groundwork for pretty much every single female relationship I’ve had since.

In primary school it was actually a boy. His name was Lucas; he was kingpin Mr. Cool for seven years, his mother was a teacher, and somehow – by luck or design – we were in every single class together. His middle name, incidentally, was Cameron; Loki’s Travis Hale persona is based a little on what I remember of Lucas. Once again, I was never ‘cool’ enough in primary school to be in Lucas’ ‘in crowd’… but if there ever was a hidden vizier of primary school politics it was me. I was just odd enough, just creative enough (Lucas was and extremely gifted musician and, oddly enough, cake maker; for one of my birthdays he made me a cake in the shape of a treble clef), and just female enough that I was the one that ended up filling a kind of odd reverse Nice Girl role for him; “Should I date so-and-so?” “I dunno, you’re only nine; does it matter?” I remember spending a lot of time together, though – in the extreme measure of primary school ‘inness’ – I was rarely invited to his birthday party (i think I went to maybe two in seven years). Lucas wasn’t a girl, but he was pale and pretty with bright red lips (and yeah, I thought I had a crush on him at the time; that’s probably where it comes from) and my relationship with him more closely parallels my relationships with other girls than it does with most of the boys in my life.

Primary school also saw Nicole, with her pencil case full of faux jewels (she was of some kind of south-east Asian or maybe even Middle Eastern descent; it didn’t really seem to matter much in year four so I never asked). Elizabeth, the daughter of a Singaporean military attaché with whom I’ve probably had my most fulfilling childhood female friendship (she eventually went back to Singapore; when I was in the city several years ago I never got the guts to look her up). And Miranda, who drew and loved fantasy and sci-fi novels.

I had some weird friendships in primary school, but none which I would describe as destructive per se. High school was different.

In high school, it was a girl named Anna. I thought Anna was hot shit; she was outspoken (a self-proclaimed ‘bitch’ since this is generally the only role fitting for strong girls in high school). She drew and loved anime, she taught me to play Magic: the Gathering which I’d admired since primary school and was part of our Werewolf: the Apocalypse group. Anna was also the last straw for me. Year six, the last year of primary school, is always hard; suddenly your ‘best friends for life’ start breaking off into different high schools; it was exacerbated for me because I didn’t attend my ‘default’ high school and instead went out of area. I’d gone through a bunch of angst at this time with a girl called Kate, with whom I’d been close in the last years of high school, who came from a fairly old fashioned family and who was sent to a private girls’ school with a notorious reputation for breeding ‘wives’. I mention Kate because I think, from memory, that she was my first experience with teenage note-passing. You know the one; girls are generally ‘taught’ to hide our real feels, which between girls of a certain age often bursts out into fits of sullen note passing as we’re often not socially prepared for face-to-face confrontations. Anyway, Kate was my indoctrination to note passing. I don’t remember why any more; it’s probably irrelevant.

After Kate (and before I get back to Anna) was Ruth. Ruth was small and cute and one of those people you can genuinely describe as ‘wacky’ while keeping a straight face. For a while Ruth and I had a ‘secret language’ which we used to write notes between each other. This fell apart, as these things often do, when Ruth developed a clique (R.A.D.) with two other girls; a clique I was not part of. This was probably my first introduction to real, in-your-face RA. My reaction to this at the time was to tearfully write a letter to Ruth one evening in mum’s office. I never gave it to anyone; by the next morning it all seemed kind of silly and I got over it. Ruth was not only the first time I clearly and distinctly remember being the victim of RA (albeit not particularly damaging RA) but also my first tearful unsent letter.

Back to Anna. Something was rotten in our high school. Now, those of you who’ve listened to me for more than five minutes will know the great loathing I possess for fundamentalist evangelical Christian groups imported from the States. Most of you probably don’t know why. Asides from the intellectually obvious, there’s a personal vendetta buried there; a high school hurt, and there’s no deeper kind. At our high school it was a group called the Inter School Christian Fellowship, part of the Scripture Union. SU isn’t quite down the really scary “Jesus wants me ‘you’ to be rich” path, but remembering also that this is roughly eight years ago now. Somewhere along the line, ISCF became the ‘in thing’ at our high school. It occurred on Thursday lunchtimes, secreted away in a drama room and luring in children with the promise of free ice cream. I went to a few meetings (mostly in the winter; where being inside with a bunch of mad fundamentalists was better than sitting outside in the sleet) but from the start I could tell that something was… off. For starters, they lured in kids with ice cream. I’m not kidding about this, either, and come on you can’t tell me this isn’t suspicious. What the fuck does ice cream have to do with Jesus? To me, this seemed a frighteningly coercive move. Kids in high school are notoriously socially vulnerable; looking for acceptance and identity. Here was a group that was offering just that; a warm little clique every Thursday lunchtime. Jesus wants you to belong, kids. When the religion started seeping in around the edges it also seemed… wrong somehow. My parents never had me baptised or pressured me to follow one religious path or the other. As a university student, my dad had had an interest in Theosophy. As an adult it became eastern mysticism and early Christianity. He had lots of books on it, some of which I would flick through. The only religious book I ever had was Does God Have a Big Toe. Written by a rabbi in a Jewish storytelling tradition I don’t currently remember the name of, it managed to be beautiful account of human nature and the love of a somewhat non-denominational God. Every now and again as a very young child I’d tried being Christian, but it had never ‘worked’ for me. Praying up to God every night, wishing for things; even as a precocious seven eyar old this seemed somehow petty. Surely that was not the be-all and end-all of our relationship with the Divine? As a wish-genie?

I tried being an atheist for a while, too, but that didn’t seem right either.

ISCF just seemed wrong. It seemed predatory and dishonest and exclusionist and passive-aggressively violent (imagine my relief when in year 11 we studied Nietzsche and I found out I wasn’t the only one to notice these things). I borrowed some SU books on Jesus and the Bible from another friend and was… well, I was appalled. There’s no other word for it. Thanks to the literature the ISCF was passing out amongst the kids I literally had a boy come up to me and earnestly tell me the Bible was the true, unchanged literal word of God and that this could be proven by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which matched our modern Bible word for word. There’s no way to come back against that kind of propaganda, really. In the end, I took it as a lesson; people will believe all kinds of bullshit, and if it helps them sleep at night then who cares… but if you try and inflict it on me, I swear to my non-interventionist unknowable gender-neutral Deity that I will make you wish you’d never been born.

But if that was the only thing, I would have just been content to leave it at that. It wasn’t.

Apparently, the phenomenon of teenage girls running off to join church groups in search of some kind of sense of belonging (and power) is so common that when I mentioned it to my parents at the time they just nodded and said, “Most of them grow out of it.” And I think the real thing that ‘got’ me about ISCF was that it wasn’t about humanity’s relationship to the Divine at all, really. It was about belonging to a clique. They ran this camp, called Zone 40, the thought of which to this day still chills me. People used to go on Zone 40 because their friends were; everyone (and I mean every single person) came back a rabid SU kid. The government would love to get their hands on that kind of brainwashing ability, I’m sure. Anyway, one year Anna went on Zone 40. She came back… different. Where previously Anna had been my beloved queen bitch, she’d suddenly turned meek and passive-aggressive (incidentally, Christians, “turning the other cheek” and soulfully informing people you hope “God forgives them” is fucking passive-aggressive relational aggression; get over it). There was another girl called Sarah who was also part of the God Squad; like Anna, she too had been a queen bitch, but after her conversion she didn’t change. She just got a new weapon; God. Increasingly, God became Sarah’s RA tool of choice to pull Anna away from myself and our group of (non-ISCF) friends. It was Godless to role-play, after all. Why wasn’t Anna spending more time with God? Wasn’t she a Real Christian any more?

In a way, I think I did and still do feel kind of sorry for Anna. She was obviously torn between two groups of friends, and between two Queen Bees – myself and Sarah (I think in retrospect I can see myself as an aggressor, not just a victim). On the other hand, I was angry, too, because it was so obvious what Sarah was doing. I didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I suppose now I can see it as relational aggression.

In the end, I let go. In the end – after many more tearful letters and “praying to God for guidance”¹ – I think I realised that, even if I ‘won’, I lost. What was I trying to prove? That I was better than Sarah? More deserving of Anna’s attention? Where would that get me?

Not so long ago I had it related back to me from a mutual friend that Anna was ‘sorry’ for what had happened in high school and hoped I forgave her. Thanks, Anna, for yet more passive-aggressive third-party RA. What do you want me to say? Yes I forgive you, no you’re not a horrible person, yes you’re a good Christian and God loves you? You don’t need my forgiveness, Anna, you need to not fall into that kind of bullshit ever again.

I think it’s not that I’m still resentful towards Anna exactly, but that I recognise this conflict as being probably the most vital crux in my social development. After high school, I became much more reclusive; I spent most of college secreted away in the library. Something had just snapped off inside of me after high school; the desire not just to pursue friendship for the sake of it, but to keep holding onto a friendship long past its used by date ‘just because’ (why bother pretending to be friends with people you know don’t like or respect you?). Attachment, I suppose. Ah, how ironic; I’ve falling into the very selfsame nihilistic trap I criticise in Buddhism.

Despite this, my history of relationally aggressive friendships doesn’t end there. I’ve got one more, from university; yet another girl I fell in love with for her façade of uncaring originality. Yet another façade that was shattered into bloody pieces with experience. It’s irrelevant by this point, I think. Ask me again in the privacy of time and I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it. But not today.

I did have a point to all of this. Partly, I guess, it’s a catharsis of sorts; by writing down these experiences I can come to terms objectively with them. I can see with adult eyes what was going on, can observe the patterns. One of the things Means Girls Grown Up mentions is that the kind of people we’re likely to form friendships with in childhood are also the kind of people we’re likely to form friendships with as adults. If our childhood relationships are destructive or unhealthy, then it’s likely so too will our adult relationships unless we acknowledge what’s going on. Looking back, I can see now that most of my friendships with other girls were based on jealousy and competition, on desire, on wishful thinking. I had – and still have, and I don’t believe it’s uncommon – a tendency to project an idealised version of myself onto my friends. If there’s one lesson I bought away with me from dealing with Anna in high school (and Kate before her) it was that people change, they move on. It’s not up to you to ‘punish’ or judge them for it, but I also don’t think that you’re under obligation to compromise your own sense of self for the sake of a supposed friendship. This, incidentally, is an extremely threatening attitude to take, especially for women. Most people don’t know how to deal with it, because most people firmly believe in holding onto ‘friends’ for the sake of it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying not to form lifelong friendships or to toss people away as soon as they fail to live up to your imposed expectations. However I think part of growing up is accepting that sometimes people drift apart, and your best friend now might not be your best friend in five years’ time. Nor is this necessarily anyone’s fault. It’s not because they were a ‘bitch’; it’s not because you did something wrong. It’s just time, just experience. People change; if we met at age five would we have the same reaction to each other as if we’d met at 50?

The trick, I think, is to let go and learn.

Most people don’t learn. I don’t learn, really. Maybe you will. Maybe one day some LiveJournal kid will find this. She’ll be fourteen to sixteen, maybe she thinks she’s not as pretty as the other girls, maybe she tries to cover it up through the sort of mallgoth camwhoring that has the potential to turn her into a real razorrag princess one day. Maybe she admires some other girls – maybe on MySpace, maybe at school – and maybe she’s even friends with one of them. Maybe she wishes she was as pretty, as spooky, as good with hair or make-up as her friend. Maybe she wishes she were as confident, as sure of herself. A real cheshire. Maybe.

Cheshire, I was you. I am you. And because I am you, I can also tell you this; for every beautiful  you admire, there is someone out there who thinks that of you. It often takes hindsight to recognise it. For every time you think you don’t quite make the grade, there’s someone out there who thinks you do. They’re usually the people you least expect. Maybe it’s one of the popular girls; she has her hair and make-up just so, she has her boyfriend, she has her clique. Maybe what she really wants is to be you; to be able to be smart, to be able to be different , to be not quite what mom expected. It sounds so Hollywood, but it’s true.

Know who you are. Know what you want. Know how to define yourself as something outside how others’ perceive you (or how you think they do). Know when to let go.

You don’t have to like everyone, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a bitch about it.

Welcome to growing up. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time ‘round. Few people ever do.

1. An aside; ~Mat [h] once told me about an episode of the British TV series Top Gear which hosted a race between various religious leaders. The Christians were adamant that they would win, as they obviously had God on their side, and were quite obnoxious about it. In the end, the Buddhist driver won. When I retold this story to my mother she nodded wisely and, in the way of my mother, explained it succinctly. “Because the Christian wished for God to let him win,” she told me. “The Buddhist knew the only thing he’d have to rely on was his own skill.” ^

• Tags » books, growing up, life, relational aggression, reviews
• Comments By » Melinda
• Mood » introspective
• Music » Annbjorg Lien, "Loki"