Sincerely, the mean girl
In movies and TV, I was always drawn to the mean girl’s bedroom.
How high the rich-colored curtains were; how grandiose the queen-sized bed was, with a stuffed toy clumsily plopped in the middle of luscious pillows. They say the bedroom is how writers and directors materialize their characters’ psyche, so I adore spotting what clustered mess of girliness they deliberately put on the bedside table, or which designer shopping bags were in focus.
I note which female icon they have plastered on their wall, if any. In the case of Blair Waldorf, the snobby overachiever from Gossip Girl, the entire left side of her bedroom had a painting of Marie Antoinette. I thought, “Isn’t that so pretentious?” But I realized that I was just the same for admiring beautiful bullies.
I never knew why I preferred the quintessential mean girl. They were, as the script (and the entire world) often says, insufferable with a prima donna complex. Yet that didn’t stop me from liking the manipulative yet pretty Kurumi instead of the shy and awkward Sawako from the shojo-anime Kimi ni Todoke when I was 11 and painfully quiet. Maybe it’s for surface-level reasons like her character design, but maybe because Kurumi felt more human, more plausible to come across at school than a truly kindhearted and well-meaning person.
The fact that the stereotypical mean girl is always clad in the prettiest clothes and goes home to a princess-like bedroom didn’t help my case. Despite their flaws, they found success, either in material pleasures or in the appearance of being untouchable.
The trend of unlikable girls in contemporary fiction has been a subject of study. Recently, the Sapienza University of Rome published a book dissecting trauma narratives in women’s writing. The piece I specifically read focused on Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante as weavers of such female characters, whose meanness comes with melancholia. It asserts that their cruelty towards others doubles when they look inward at themselves.
As psychologist Laura Brown puts it, mean girls did not just originate from havoc, but were also birthed from “the banal cruelties to which they (traumatized individuals) have been subjected by people whom they loved and trusted.” It seems that as girls, our tendency to be unnecessarily bitchy and judgmental at times can be excused as self-preservation. As the online phrase goes, “If you go low, I go lower.”
After-school dramas
The word “spineless” was my favorite in April of junior year. I started to use it to describe anyone who didn’t agree with me. I also found a rapidly growing talent for bon mot tossing, with an effort to say the hard truth everyone believes but was too afraid not to sugarcoat.
The younger me would deny this. I was embarrassingly meek; bullied for stupid reasons like boys and beauty. During the earlier days of high school, I would be absent from class presentations because I hated speaking my mind.
Yet weirdly, that was when I first encountered female cruelty. I got locked in the girls’ restroom by a clique of older students because one of the girls’ boyfriends broke up with her to pursue me. The rolling eyes and knowing giggles, which I heard behind the restroom door and whenever I walked past those girls in the hallways, haunted me.
When I transferred schools, my personality shifted. From being a recluse, I slowly became hyper-aware of how I presented myself. It was a new environment, and I did everything in my power to appear good and clean.
Until one Character Values class, when my classmates and I were tasked to form a circle, put our names on a piece of paper, and write our first impressions of each other. Surrounding my name were “maarte,” “pabebe,” “feelingera,” “pampam,” and “maselan.” Not a single good thing was said. I never found out who said what. From then I didn’t see the point in trying to be friendly and nice, because no one did for me.
Guileful girls
These girls remain a blurry fragment of my teens. Their names are now unknown on my social media, and their whereabouts are probably not as cool as they used to seem. I find pleasure in making fun of them, in thinking that my life turned out better than theirs.
This may just be one big case of schadenfreude. It’s noticeable not just in myself but in the stories I hear, of girls striving to find something in themselves that isn't present in others to feel some semblance of satisfaction. So whenever I enter a room, my eyes instantly scan others, and a subconscious voice would analyze how different or prettier I am in comparison.
This usually manifests in the downplaying of a mean attitude as harmless fun, akin to the knowing glances and layered jokes only known to a specific group of girls; often veiled with a “Sorry I know I’m being mean but…” before saying something heinous.
This is how every good-girl-to-bad-girl pipeline goes. But the thing is, I never fully resonated with being good. I've always felt that I am just as selfish and deeply insecure as the rest because even back then, I observed others in silent contempt. So when I recognized the secret but potent hierarchy that girls unknowingly succumb to and calculate in their heads, it felt like finding the cheat code of life. It taught me that it’s better to be envied than to envy and to be slightly mean than for someone else to be completely mean to me.
This is the only problem I’ve yet to overcome. I struggle to find the in-between, to acknowledge that I can be both kind and mean, that I can be vivacious yet cruel at times, and others all the same. I already forgave others in silence, yet I don’t know if I can forgive myself for being hypocritical. So now, I settle with this confession:
In the many unheard stories of acquaintances, friends of friends, past lovers, ignored relatives, and other nameless strangers we barely remember the faces of, we were once the mean girl; the image they roll their eyes at, the punchline of the joke, and the subject of long debriefings. I’m not here to cry about that.
Instead, I'm here to say that I’m just the same and that we have all fallen under the grim language of girls—a language we learned to speak in defense. We were left with no choice but to be on the receiving end of the whip or be the one yielding it, rendering us helpless in a continuous cycle of “Who hurt who first?”
Kindness has become a luxury in a world where everyone’s trying to assert their identity and moral compasses. But is it really impossible to love our differences and similarities with each other? To give flowers when it's due? To caress instead of mock?
Before we can lead by example, can the acknowledgment of one’s own ugliness suffice as a heartfelt apology?
