Mean Girls

In my previous post I told you that I attended the wedding of a good English friend last weekend. What I did not tell you was this was the first time I saw her school friends again after 30 years when I  had attended school in Maidenhead with my hostess for a week or two. Back then, I found these girls all downright scary. They were very cliquey, made insider jokes and used slang I didn't undersrand. Above all, they pretended to be very worldy wise and experienced in the things that mattered to seventeen-year-olds back then...all of which I was very inexperienced in myself. It wasn't that they were mean to me, I was just an isignificant add-on to their friend and they didn't give me much attention. It was more that they left me feeling inadequate and provincial. Fast forward to 2019 and they (a group of 5 women) clearly did not recognise me at the wedding and to be honest I had not given them a single thought in the past 30 years, but I immediately recognised them and remembered how intimidating they seemed back in 1989.

Only a few days later, I had a very unpleasant work meeting where a group of female colleagues was very vocal about their discontent with a project I was the central point of contact for. I'm not saying that their anger was entirely justified, but it was as tiring as it was unpleasant. Bestie Boy helped to act as mediator and together we stayed late to produce slides to appease them. Essentially, they had felt poorly informed and I realised that my strategy had been entirely wrong: I like to avoid conflict and confrontation whenever possible and my instinct was to minimise contact with the evil witches demanding colleagues and just hope for the best. Well, that backfired and only served to make an already extremely stressful week that bit more stressful. Learning: try not to avoid the mean girls or wait until they seem harmless a few decades later, but face them and hope that your own friendly attitude rubs off on them.