Does High School Never End?
An open thread on the Mean Girls experience. Tell me about yours...
This week, “Who’s the Bad Art Friend?” a New York Times magazine article by Robert Kolker, sent literary social media into a complete tizzy. It caused writers to debate matters of plagiarism, the ethics of writing about other people, and which stories are whose to tell, and to debate whose behavior was shittier in this instance. (They both behave pretty shittily.) (←Update: I’ve changed my mind after a bunch of court documents have been revealed! Perhaps not surprisingly, the New York Times both-sidesed and false-equivalenced this story. And a lot of people fell for it.)
I found myself feeling a mix of sympathy and disdain for both subjects of the piece, but more than anything, it affirmed my long-held conviction, as I said in my Oldster Magazine Questionnaire earlier this week, that high school never really ends.
A Mean Girls pile-on in eighth grade had long-lasting impact on me, but I’m not alone. As I travel through life, I keep hearing from others that the same thing happened to them, either in junior high or high school.
It’s also a phenomenon that keeps repeating itself, at different life phases. And I’m loathe to admit that in different instances, I’ve found myself on different sides of it.
So I’m curious: how common is the Mean Girls experience? How many of you have been through something like it, either as a child, or an adult? In this open thread, help me, for once and for all, to settle the question:
Do high school social dynamics ever truly end, or is this a persistent, unresolvable feature of human nature?
Several girls started picking on me in the sixth grade in the Chicago Public School we went to. It was the same months during which my mother was dying of cancer, though I don't think the girls knew this. I lived farther from school, had no siblings, and didn't go to Catholic church, where all of their families knew each other (I later found out). So I was easy to single out. They mocked me a lot and then sent me a mean fake valentine from a boy they knew I liked. It really has left me hesitant to stick my neck out in life -- of course, that effect also came from losing my mother and having a depressed dad. And I imagine those girls had been picked on too. I imagine it's a never-ending chain of picking-on-somebody. But that was a painful time that wrecked the rest of grade school. If people had known of my loss and had been kind, I think those years would have left me feeling a lot more positive during my teens.
I'm going to share one that's NOT mine but I think about it a lot. My best friend was part of a group of women who met monthly. They had a Facebook group to organize their events (as they grew from monthly meetings to other activities like 5Ks, vacations, concerts, etc.). Eventually there was another secret Facebook group that several created to talk about a few people in the group of 12-15 women that they didn't like. And then there was ANOTHER secret Facebook group that several in that first secret Facebook group created to talk about a few people in the smaller group that they didn't like. When my friend told me about it (I knew some of the women in the main group) and who the anti-groups were about I'd think about it every time I'd see those women on the outs who had NO IDEA how much meanness was being discussed about them among a group they considered some of their best friends. At one point I asked my friend, "Why do you let X stay in the group when you all hate her so much?" She said, "Because if we didn't have her to hate we'd probably turn on each other." Yikes.