Mean Girls and A Pack of Wolves and Lessons Learned

I spend too much time wondering what people think about me.

Lately, I have gotten a bit over myself and dried my eyes and realized that if I am talking shit about someone, they are probably talking shit about me.  What goes around, comes around, and it is life.

I have recently been practicing holding my tongue a bit.  Censoring myself.  This mostly comes to not saying things like, "the barrista liked you, I could tell, he was just staring at the huge bulge in your pants and it made me very proud to be with you, " in front of Crush while he buys me my vanilla latte.  Sometimes I get a bit carried away.  And Crush wears his jeans a little snug.....my bestie calls them "Texas Jeans" and she is from Texas, so she would know.  There is nothing quite as nice as fitted (NOT TIGHT) jeans on a man....YUM YUM YUM!  Strong thighs and a cute tush....bring it on.

Growing up in the neighborhood I grew up in really messed me up.  Like A LOT.  I was much happier before I moved to the place where my parents (and me) still live now.  I never really fit in, in my heart, even though I was popular off and on.  As soon as I had the chance to flee to college, I never looked back.  I stopped returning calls from high school friends, I didn't visit them at their new schools, I changed my phone number, and I didn't come home much for college breaks including summers.  I NEVER wanted to come back and yet I did, 5 years after I began college, I came home to work in the city close to my parents and start my real adult life.  My heart was never in it.

This place, the place I get to leave in 8 months (WHOOT) is the silliest.  People live WAY beyond their financial means to impress, they all like the same ugly things, no one has an original thought, and everyone starves themselves.  People who are "best friends" sleep with each other's husbands, they wear the same clothes as their children, and they party all the time....

Clue: Mean Girls the movie was based on where I grew up and yes, it is just that pathetic. Everyone grows up together, goes to college together, moves back together, marries each other, and then publicly divorces in the most hateful and cruel ways.  It equals my version of HELL.

I always yearned to go somewhere warmer, to be free of the pack mentality that my little neighborhood provides.  The hungry wolves who eat each other's souls instead of eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Even at 10 when I arrived from the East coast, it all felt so silly, so empty, so stupid.....but, I felt that I had to change myself to fit in rather than be who I really was...the person that just started to truly emerge in the last year.

There were two girls that made my life HELL growing up.  One I call The Bitch and the other I call The Snake.  These two....if I saw them to this day, my heart would drop and the blood in my veins would turn to ice, I just HATE them.

A little back story....

Bitch and I became friends in 5th grade, went to the same Hebrew school, she was kind and sweet and VERY needy and meek as a little one.  But, she needed the POWER.  The boys, the girls, the older kids...she liked conflict and drama.  These are the things I have always hated.  I knew the minute I left the room, Bitch would scheme and rally a plan against me....to bring me down to make me feel like a nothing.  Everyone got a turn in our group and mine came often.

Snake and I became friends in 8th grade.  My mom met her mom through a business interaction and her mom begged my mom to have her included in our group.  Meh, it was super awkward.  Especially because I always felt very weird being alone with Snake......she was just not like the other girls I was used to hanging out with.  No one wanted her to come and everyone, mostly Bitch, made my life hell because my mom was making me bring Snake around to our sleepovers and trips to mall.  You all know where this is going right.....?

Bitch and Snake became best friends and who was kicked out, why yes, me.  I have never truly forgiven my mom for this...I know, I like to hold on to things....but, I promise you all, I will never interfere with friend politics one day when I have children.  Sometimes I like to think about what high school would have been like if Snake wasn't around.

Snake and Bitch were then inseparable.  They also became anorexic together (the true standard of beauty in my neighborhood is simply who is the skinniest, horse faces aside).  They left everyone else out.  The started rumors about me....one being that I was a lesbian which is ironic and I will touch on that later in this post.

When they got caught with booze or pot, it was always mine and everyone believed I was this super bad kid that I wasn't.  I truly didn't even know how to get the pot they were smoking.....people's parents began to not want me around.  I had this bad reputation for nothing.  My vices were Hershey Bars and Fritos.

One day when Bitch's brother drove us home from school....I realize now that it was a set up, he started in on how he was going to go to the cops because he found MY POT in Bitch's room and he didn't like my influence on her and I should thank him for not going to the authorities because Bitch begged him not to and then he called me a "fat cunt" and stopped the car in the middle of a busy street and told me to get out.  It was December and freezing and he was home from college for Xmas break...he was a sophomore in college and I was a sophomore in high school......and I didn't tell my parents because I knew my dad would go over to his house and kick his ass and come after winter break...it would make it all so much worse when I had to return to school.  It wasn't my pot of course, it never was.

Sidenote: Once, when I was in college, I saw Bitch's brother smoking pot at a concert and went right up to him and told him I was going to call the cops.  He looked at me blankly, stoned out of his mind trying to place what I was saying and who I was (I was quite thin at the time) and I walked away......I am sure he had no idea the emotional damage he did to me when he kicked me out of the car. To this day, being called a "fat cunt" something that sadly happens from time to time with clients (because some are from my neighborhood and I won't work with them anymore for the most part...but, fat cunt seems like a really popular insult around here) triggers something inside of me that keeps me in bed for days.

Bitch and Snake told people I said things about them that I never did.  I woke up one day without any friends, it was like a nightmare.  Oh my, if there was Facebook....it would have been epic, the level of bullying these 2 would have done.  I am glad there wasn't because I don't know if I would have survived.  I hated confrontation and still do.  I didn't know how to handle all of this nastiness.

I will say, after a while, I let them win and disappeared.  I made friends from other schools.  I turned to books and food.  This is the time I truly began to cope by eating and not feeling.  To top it off, my mom's brother was having a nervous breakdown and declared bankruptcy and I didn't feel like I could really burden my parents with my drama.  Especially because my uncle was living in my house at the time.  I became utterly depressed and didn't really talk about it.  I stocked up on junk food at the local convenience store and got into bed and read YM and Jane and cried and ate Cheetos.  I felt like a failure.  Instead of rocking grades and whatnot, I started really slipping.  I felt like if I couldn't have friends.....I couldn't have any other success in life.

After high school as I mentioned earlier, I disappeared.  I went to college broken.  But, I made real friends.  A few who I love and cherish like sisters to this day.  I didn't believe I was worthy of friends because of high school, but I made them. I also reconnected with a best friend from junior high in my early 20's and we are super close to this day as well...oh how I missed her.  Bitch and Snake first kicked her out of the group before they did me in....It kept me up nights on end before we reconnected, why didn't I just stick up for her.

We went to our 10 year high school reunion together and none of the mean girls could show their faces.  Karma is truly a Bitch.

Bitch once invited me out sophomore year of college when I was home for a few days over Xmas break.  I saw it as a peace treaty and I accepted.  She never picked me up.  I remember when I got her on the phone a few days later, I told her every single thing I thought abut her.  This had been on the tip of my tongue for over 10 years at the time.  All she said was sorry and hung up.  I think my boldness surprised her into silence.  To this day, I have never seen her.  God has protected me.

Snake called me junior year of college after stalking my mom for weeks for my cell phone number.  She apologized and wanted to see what was new with me....I told her honestly and openly that she will always know inside what she did to me and I will always question why, but I don't ever want to be friends with her and I couldn't accept her apology because I genuinely felt she was apologizing for her....for a deeper reason....it seemed so insincere.  I have seen her twice by accident and both times she scurried away from me.

3 years after she called me, Snake married her high school sweetheart (a TOTAL douche who I see from time to time and think very little of) only to divorce him rather messily a few years after that because she finally came out and is now in a loving relationship with a woman.  To this day, I think she called me in college to confide that to me, that she was attracted to women and not men.  I think she knew inside that I wouldn't have judged her and I would have supported her.  I would have.

And bingo!  There is was, the secret, the thing that never seemed right.  Bitch and Snake loved each other.  I knew they had threesomes with people in high school at drunk parties and had this secret bond of sorts and now I truly believe it was because they were absolutely in love with each other and didn't want me to find out.  When I was invited to a party, they would call me and tell me I couldn't come because the host said no fat girls aloud.  When I wanted to go to a concert, they said I couldn't come because all the parents hated me because I was a "bad kid."  When I wanted to go shopping with them after school, they said I would stretch out the clothes....I was a size 8-10 btw...

Because well, I would have been THE PERSON who would have said something heartless, careless, and bold without even thinking about it. I would have exposed them without even realizing I was doing it.  I think they feared my mouth as much as I feared their torment.  As a team, they stuck it to me before I ever had the chance to call them out.  But, I do think I would have figured it out in real time, I am perceptive that way and I think they knew it.

Years later, I will never accept them or acknowledge them, but I understand.  I know that being different in high school is hard, even if you are the most popular girls in the grade.

And now I try to keep my words firmly placed in my mouth when they need to stay there.  High school is nothing if it doesn't teach you life lessons.