This week, a familiar name popped up on my Instagram. Heart lurching I quickly blocked her and attempted to proceed with my day. It’s crazy how, seven years after school ends, the bitch who made your life hell can make you feel just almost as uncomfortable as the days you spent cowering in school changing rooms while she threw dirty underwear at you. Yes, really.
So my sympathies were with Kendall Jenner last week when reports circulated that the reality TV star turned model, who this year is basically everywhere that is anywhere high fashion, was picked on by the resident model mean girls while at New York Fashion Week - with some sources even claiming that they put cigarettes in her drinks.
READ MORE: Kendall Jenner Was Bullied At New York Fashion Week. We Can't Say We're Surprised
It’s a scenario that was all too familiar to me. You know Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls? The producers basically took the story out of my diary and fluffed it up for Hollywood. Having moved to London from Egypt (Africa) at the age of 13 I attempted to ingratiate myself into a girl’s school where cat fights often revolved around whose parents had made it onto the Sunday Times Rich List.
Safe to say it wasn’t the most friendly of environments. And when the resident mean girls, who had initially decided to take me under their wing, changed their minds because of a guy (he’d decided he liked me, not them - see? It really is like Mean Girls), I was unceremoniously thrown into a hell of their making. Girls are mean. Girls are really, really mean when they want to be.
Getting changed for gym class in the locker rooms I’d dodge the dirty underwear they’d nicked from the lost and found bin to throw at me, only to embark on a PE class where the girls mission was less to to score goals and more to cause me as much physical damage as possible. Dodge ball quickly turning into ‘how many bruises can we give her?’ Netball into ‘how many times can we shove her onto the floor before anyone noticing?’
READ MORE: Teenager Tackles Bullies By Posing In Bikini Next To Body Shaming Graffiti
People say they’d rather someone said mean things about them to their face than behind their back, but it’s not really any better that way around. Staring unflinchingly in my eyes the girls would dredge up any nasty comment they could possibly think of about my face/body/personality/ life. And we’d been friends at first, which meant they knew enough about me to draw some of my biggest insecurities. In fact they wrote them on permanent marker on the school walls, just so everyone got to read them.
And in case what they’d said to my face at school wasn’t enough, they’d call me on private number at all hours of the day and night to hurl more abuse at me. One girl even went so far as to get her mother to call mine and tell her (falsely) that I had slept with her boyfriend. My relatively conservative mother was not pleased, and even tried to drag me – her 15-year-old daughter - to the doctors to ‘check’ whether that was indeed the case. Pretty horrific stuff.
But I’m not the only one who’s been at the hands of girl on girl bullying. Statistics show that a girl is bullied every seven minutes while at school, and that almost 1/3 of girls are directly involved in bullying, whether as the bully or the bullied. Not fun. Particularly as the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that bullying is the third leading cause of death between the ages of 10 and 24.
The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that bullying is the third leading cause of death between the ages of 10 and 24
It’s been seven years since I left school, and they’ve been a wonderful seven years. I have an amazing, large group of friends and a supremely busy social life, a great boyfriend and my career is flourishing. But it takes a lot for me to trust people – especially girls I don’t know, and some of the scars still remain. For starters, I will never, ever answer a private number, and it takes a lot for me to answer a phone number I haven’t got saved. It gives me an uncomfortably suffocating anxiety that I don’t know who, or what is waiting for me on the other end of the line.
READ MORE: Bullied In The Playground? You Might Still Be Feeling The Impact Now
It’s also affected my work and personal relationships to a certain extent in that I positively despise confrontation and avoid it at all costs. I’ve lost a number of friends over the years by simply bowing out when the going gets tough, choosing to just lose them and leave than need to deal with confrontation, whatever it may be.
Not to say that I would ever wish the experience on anyone - no one needs someone else’s soiled underwear anywhere near them - but it really did teach me a lot. It’s definitely made me a stronger person and taught me numerous important lessons, namely that regardless of anything else you should BYOBF (be your own best friend).
It also taught me the most important thing I’ve basically ever learnt – everything is temporary. Good or bad, it won’t last. So don’t let yourself drown in it.
Kendall had the right idea when she humorously uploaded a picture of her laughing with a fellow model backstage with the caption – taken from none other than Mean Girls - ‘You Can’t Sit With Us’. She seems to have already understood what it took me a good few years to, namely that bitches ain’t shit when it comes to the real world.
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
Follow Alya on Twitter @moorizZLA
Picture: Lukasz Wierbowski
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.