The role of the mean girl plays a very important part to who we are all destined to be. For some we are the mean girl for others we are far to shy to even get the words into place to stand up for ourselves.  In high school I was the girl usually to shy to speak and when I spoke I was immediately interpreted as being snotty. It wasn’t that I was. I was just to scare to voice who I was on the inside so I thought it best just to be the fly on the wall.  There was a group of girls in my school who got extreme pleasure of making those girls who didn’t fit in feel even worse. I remember not wanting to hold my head up as I walked from class to class to scared to make eye contact. I was a constant misconception so it was far easier for me to just try to fade away.

Like any girl who sticks out like a sore thumb you try to do what you can to end the pain. When drinking didn’t fill the void you hoped that the empty bottle of the pill containers would. The problem though…for the most part the strongest pill we kept in the house was extra strength Tylenol and that wasn’t the strength I needed to turn out the lights. When you begin to fade nobody sees you. Vanishing into the night you wonder if it is worth all the pain anyways. There was days that I was too scared to even go to school. Maybe it was due to a blacked out state from the weekend or maybe I looked up and made eye contact with somebody I shouldn’t have. Either way I desperately hated who I was and my life and I would have done anything just to have it end.

I used to smoke cigarettes at the back of the school with the other kids. The summer that I returned from my “holiday” with my sister. It wasn’t a holiday. It was like a half way house. I was sent away because my parents didn’t know what to do with a girl who was assaulted and left pregnant at my age. Not only was I trying to grieve the lost of my angel but I was forced to help my sister care for her newborn and son. To anybody who has ever lost a child in anyway what I was forced to endure for months ripped my heart out. My sister always liked to hold her baby and look at me and say, “Do you see what you could have had”. I already knew what I was losing. I thought about her everyday. I still remember the grotesque words of the aging doctor who told me not to ask the sex because when the procedure is done it just looks like ground up hamburger anyways (this is basically because the suction rips your baby apart). The body knows when something traumatic is about to happen. You will fight in ways that you would never think possibly. I will never forget the doctor between my legs with this tool looking up at me and saying, “Oh shit she is awake.” Looking up at the two nurses I was gassed again. The next time I awoke I was with my mom. Why did I tell you this? That summer I returned and one of my close friends had written, BABY KILLER, in red. That is how I started my year back at school with the realization that even best friends will use what they have against you to try and become popular.

When those you share secrets with use those secrets against you to gain popularity and fame it really drives a wedge in your ability to bond. I trusted no one. Needed no one and from that day one would struggle to ever be the same little girl again. I spent years either hiding who I was or telling it all in the hopes of driving others away. It took a lot of work and determination to forgive myself for the sins that others would always use against me. I was beginning to learn that maybe I was just not born to fit in. If I was wouldn’t it be easier. As much as I like to pretend that all the walls or down there is a moat around my heart that serves as protection. To me my storey should be used to help others make it through those terrible adolescence years. Some of us don’t even get the honour of making it out of that time. What used to be so magical is now a question of survival. If I grew up in a time where drugs ran even more rampant and alcohol tasted like candy I am sure I wouldn’t be alive right now.

Even though the mean girls terrified the life right out of me they also breathed life in. It would take decades for me to finally blossom (at least begin to blossom) and shed the skin that I adorned to weather through the storms. It’s easier to blame the third party instead of looking inwards to blame me.  Blame being a little to harsh because in those first fragile years we are all just coming of age trying to understand ourselves. Maybe I was always destined to be the poor little farm girl with nothing to offer anybody. At least that is what is still being said to this day both from those who are close to me and people I hardly know. What I do know for certain is not everybody matters. Not everybody matters to me and my inner circle. They are entitled to their own opinion as I am mine and both points are just as valid. What is different though in each is the inner peace that we both achieve. One maybe superficial and convoluted but the other deserves to be shared with the world.