Odd Girl Out (11 page)

Girls describe their social communities as worlds in which unresolved conflicts hang like leaking gas in the air, creating a treacherous emotional terrain in which discord is rarely voiced and yet may explode silently with the slightest spark. For many, if not most, girls, every day can be unpredictable. Alliances shift with whispers under cover of girlish intimacy and play. Many girls will not tell each other why they are sad or angry. Instead, they will employ small armies of mediators, usually willing friends who are uncomfortably caught in the middle or eager for the moments of intimacy that result from lending a hand to someone in trouble.

Alternative aggressions, and the nonassertive behavior they suggest, are as embedded in the daily lives of girls as makeup, boys, and media. A girl learns early on that to voice conflict directly with another girl may result in many others ganging up against her. She learns to channel feelings of hurt and anger to avoid their human instigator, internalizing feelings or sharing them with others. She learns to store away unresolved conflicts with the precision of a bookkeeper, building a stockpile that increasingly crowds her emotional landscape and social choices. She learns to connect with conflict through the discord of others, participating in group acts of aggression where individual ones have been forbidden.

In my conversations with girls, many expressed fear that even everyday acts of conflict would result in the loss of the people they most cared about. They believed speaking a troubled heart was punishable. Isolation, they cautioned, was irreversible, and so too great a price to be paid. As a sixth grader told me, "You don't want to say it to them and if you do, it's like, well, you might as well just walk off because they're not going to want to be your friend." Hannah, an Arden seventh grader, explained, "If I tell my friends I'm angry at them, I'll have another enemy. It's a vicious cycle." In a world that socializes girls to prize relationships and care above all else, the fear of isolation and loss casts a long shadow over girls' decisions around conflicts, driving them away from direct confrontation. By taking uncomfortable feelings out of everyday relationships, girls come to understand them as dangerous to themselves and others, worthy of being carefully shielded or perhaps not disclosed at all.

Many girls are afraid of not being able to anticipate the response to their anger, so they resolve to maximize what they
can
control. One of the reasons girls like to write letters, an eighth grader told me, is that they "help us to organize our thoughts and get it out perfectly. If I say it to her face, I'm gonna break down, mess up my words, say things I don't mean." Some girls described writing letters that they burned or trashed in order to balance feeling angry and preserving friendship. Letters were preferable, eighth-grader Shelley said, "because if you have a conversation, they can see your face."

A one-on-one conversation is scary, an Arden seventh grader said, because "I don't know what she's going to say next. You don't want to lose the fight. You're scared the friendship's going to end. You don't know what they'll say. And if the discussion goes badly, she might get other people involved. That's why I don't talk." You can't just tell someone that they're being mean, her classmate told me. "You think, 'Oh my God,' [she'll] get mad at me, or [she] won't be my friend anymore. People are afraid she'll spread rumors. You don't know what that person's going to think."

The need to consider others' feelings at the expense of their own was a theme that ran through my interviews. No matter how upset they were, these girls said they would rather not hurt someone else's feelings. Their own needs seemed to them utterly expendable. They described shrinking problems and feelings into "little things," calling them "unimportant," "stupid," "not worth a fight," stowing them somewhere inside, an inner room that would one day be too small to contain them.

 

boom!

I went to Jennifer's house twice before she agreed to speak to me. The first time, I sat drinking tea with her mom, and the eleven-year-old girl's fuzzy slippers hung slightly over the cracked divide between the kitchen and the den. She was checking me out. The second time I visited, she nodded shyly. On the couch in the den, I was pleasantly surprised to find her animated as a dragonfly, hands streaking the air with energy. Rapid-fire, she said, "My friend and I always ask each other if we're mad at each other. Immediately after we go, 'No,' because you don't want to say, 'I'm mad at you.'"

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because then you make the other person feel bad because you know someone's mad at you."

"Is it important that you feel mad?"

"Yeah, but are you supposed to let it out at the person you're mad at?" she asked, as though she really did not know.

"Some people would say yes because your feelings count," I said.

"What about her feelings?" she asked.

"What about them?" I asked.

"I just ... no. We don't talk about this. I don't know if best friends talk about this. This is private." I ceased and desisted.

 

With twelve-year-old Carmen Peralta, a wry Latina student at a private school in the Northeast, I was asking about what it's like to tell someone you're angry. She said she never did, and I asked why. "Because it sounds weird for one thing! 'Hey, by the way, I'm mad at you!'" she drawled sarcastically. Becoming more serious, she began to stall. "I won't say, 'I'm mad'—it just—I don't know—I don't like that way of dealing with things because it's weird—just to say, 'I'm mad at you.'...It's kind of like
boom!
"—Carmen made a huge, satisfying noise—"to them. They're just like, 'What did I do?' And if you say, 'Hey, I need you to know I'm mad at you,' it's just like
boom!
I think they'll end up thinking less of you." For Carmen, conflict falls like a bomb inside friendship, apparently blowing it to smithereens. Conflict for Carmen is outside words, outside relationship, indeed seems to have no comfortable place anywhere in her life.

Some girls face conflict by appealing to lifelong lessons in being nice. In Mississippi, ten-year-old Melanie was explaining to her classmates why she couldn't tell Kaya she was mad.

"You can't do that!" she cried.

"Why not?"

"Because some people are really sensitive in our school, and if you said something like that, they'd bust out crying."

"But you'd be saying how you felt, right?" I was pushing for a reason.

"But then you'd be hurting some people's feelings."

"But what if you're
reeeeeeealllly
upset?" I asked, and some girls giggled.

"Sometimes you tell your friends but [sometimes you don't] tell anybody," she decided. Anyway, she said, you'll probably get a chance later to be mad at them. "You'll go up to somebody and say, 'Oh you know, Kaya gets on my nerves. She told me that so and so, and so and so.'"

"But why don't you go up to Kaya and just say, 'Hey, you made me mad!'"

"Because," she said simply, looking at me with cautious eyes, "you want to get back at them."

 

For most girls, anger and hurt become the elephant in the room. As the feelings grow in size and intensity, so does the challenge of restraint.

Her best efforts notwithstanding, Meredith at Arden thinks it's useless to hold in her anger. "When you don't let one of your friends know, it builds up inside you. There's bitterness inside you. It's hard for them and for you." Charlotte agreed. "You can't make the feelings go away. If it's hidden it gets stronger and it gets harder andharder to hold in."

One student told me when she felt angry she kicked her dog. Plenty more said they hit their siblings. Some students I interviewed described feeling depressed as they tried to sequester their anger. Others told stories of escalating fury. "You get angrier and angrier when you can't hold it in. Then you explode," said Emily at Marymount. "It gets bigger and you find even more stuff to dislike about that girl." Disturbingly, the more intense the problem, the more likely a girl may pretend that everything's cool. Said Nancy at Marymount, "I was so angry I couldn't tell her about it. It was easier not to say anything and for her not to know I was so angry."

Fear of speaking face to face usually ends up worsening girls' conflicts by forcing them to involve third parties. When Shelley couldn't get Sarah to talk directly about the problem between them, Shelley began asking others what was wrong with Sarah. But to the ignorant observer—say, Sarah—Shelley looked like she was going behind her back. Sarah was enraged. "But I'm getting advice!" Shelley exclaimed, echoing innumerable girls I spoke with. A Mississippi fifth grader saw it as damage control: "If you tell the person you're angry at yourself, they're going to be madder quicker than if you tell someone else. And then later you have time to think what you're going to say and what you're going to do." A sixth grader from the same school described it this way: "You're scared the person will take it the wrong way, so you try out different versions and opinions. Otherwise, you might get it wrong and make it worse." Unwittingly, they are doing just that.

Other girls believe anything is preferable to the loss of a relationship. In their minds, they are merely choosing a lesser evil. "Girls can break each other," Hannah said simply. "Instead, they cool off by gossiping behind their backs. Otherwise you could end the friendship." Some girls reported trying to circumvent the conflict process by expecting their friends simply to know, like mind readers or superheroes with X-ray vision, that they were upset. Linden sophomore Lily Carter, whose quiet thoughtfUlness gave the impression of her being far older than she really was, laughed shyly as she handed me a tiny pink journal that she promised would detail the social chaos of her middle-school years. She had already flagged the pages with yellow Post-it notes, and in the very first entry of seventh grade she wrote, "It's hard having my feelings bottled up inside. I'm a sensor. I sense things and give people hints to how I'm feeling." She later noted:

It's strange kinda feeling that the people you've been friends with so long can't get the hints I give. You'd think they'd know. When I'm not with them, they NEVER ask if I'm mad at them or try to talk to me. They just ignore me, as if I don't exist or like "thank heavens she's gone." I'm
MISIRABLE
[sic]!

Like a boat adrift at sea, Lily was sending distress messages no one could hear. The more she used indecipherable speech and gesturing to communicate, the more alone and abandoned she felt.

When silent pleas are ignored, a girl's despair can turn swiftly to anger. Many girls reported feeling indignant because their friends didn't know how they felt. These girls felt it should be obvious from the clipped tone of their voices, the terseness of their notes, the nights they didn't call. Yet their friends never responded. And as the girls silently willed their friends to know their inner feelings, their rage doubled when their friends didn't.

 

not my fault

Why not just take the girl aside and tell her calmly, in a nice way, what's bothering you? It's a question countless parents, guidance counselors, and bullying experts have asked. So did I.

"I try that," a Linden ninth grader told me anxiously, "but she tells me something I did wrong and then it's my fault." It was a comment I would hear over and over again, from girls of all ages. "She'll turn it around," "she'll make it about me," or "she'll get everyone on her side." Because so many girls lack facility with everyday conflict, expressions of anger make listeners skittish and defensive. The sound of someone upset feels like the first sign of impending isolation, a kind of social thunder rumbling in the distance.

For these girls, absorbing anger is just as frightful as voicing it. The idea that they may be "at fault" or "wrong" makes them uneasy, and it can breed panic and impulsive decision making. In many cases, they grasp for whatever will move the harsh spotlight away from them and onto someone else; sometimes, using alliance building (explored later in the chapter), they grasp for the girl who will stand with them and assure them of continuous, unconditional friendship. Raised in a culture that prizes sweetness, what feels right to these girls is an anxious scramble to remain the "good" girl; to hold up a mirror to their friend and, instead of listening, point out a past infraction. Needless to say, such conflicts escalate swiftly, often leaving both girls filled with regret and fear.

 

i'm sorry

The surface of a girl fight can be silent and smooth as a marble. You know that if you've ever been the last person to find out someone's mad at you. Many girls use double doses of distance and silence to announce their anger, leaving defendants clueless about what they've done. Beneath the surface, of course, is another story.

Girls approach the rituals of fighting and peacemaking with an eerie rigidity. For many, the shared knowledge that they are "
in
a fight" is much easier than actually going to the trouble of having one. Freyda and Lissa's "fight" may entail passing each other in the hallway silently for days before anyone speaks. No matter that the source of their conflict is utterly trivial and that in the silence between them the conflict will swell, taking on a life of its own. As one girl waits for the other to give in and say she's sorry, both girls may lose track of why they are fighting at all. "When [girls are] angry, they won't listen, and if you don't talk, [girls will] build up with anger and then you won't remember why you're in a fight," explained a Sackler sixth grader. "Sometimes it's over, but you have to keep going," an Arden sixth grader remarked. "You don't want to give up. You don't want to drop it. You don't want to be the loser."

When the fight is concluded, one girl has usually surrendered and apologized—via note, messenger, e-mail, instant message, or in person—while the other has "won." It is not uncommon for girls, especially preadolescents, to avoid processing what happened beyond the immediate apology and relief. Many sit on the sidelines of their own discord, skirting the substance of conflict and instead clinging to process—to the rituals of a fight's beginning, middle, and end. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan observed in girls an uncanny ability to say "I'm sorry" and give conflicts "almost fairy-tale-like happy endings, so that strong feelings of pain and indignation end abruptly with this final act of attrition."
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