Confessions of a Mean Girl

(*Names have been changed)

Her name was Teresa.*   She hovered in front of the double doors each morning while waiting for the school bell to ring, always alone.

Just like me.  As an overweight kid with glasses, frizzy red hair, freckles and an albuterol inhaler permanently attached to my hand, I was the consummate outcast child on the school playground.   I was usually first in my class when it came to grades, and last when it came to getting picked for basketball games.  In the brutal K-12 social hierarchy, I was the equivalent of a leper.

I started the year at a new school without any friends, just like Teresa.  Unlike me, she was tall and slender, but she shared my childhood curse of Irish-bright red hair, pale skin and freckles.  She dressed in clothes that, like mine, weren’t the most stylish at the time.  I saw her clutching her textbooks to her chest and recognized that we were in the same grade.  We cast glances at each other for weeks, and would occasionally exchange a smile.  Finally, she came over to me and said hello. 

It sparked a friendship that made that first half of the school year much less socially painful for me.  We ate lunch together each day, passed notes between classes, and phoned each other after school to talk for hours about the teachers we hated and the boys we liked.

Halfway through the school year when our schedules changed, I found myself sitting next to Leann* in one of my new classes.  Leann was cute enough to draw the stares of some of the boys.  She wore name-brand clothes and shoes, and rubbed elbows with the more popular kids.   I nearly fell out of my chair when she passed me a note in class one day.  It marked the beginning of another friendship. 

I was ecstatic.  I had not one, but two friends!  Leann and Teresa and I became a trio.  We huddled together on the playground in the mornings before school, and had lunch together every day in the cafeteria.  I was happy, but I later found out that Leann wasn’t. 

“Let’s not have lunch with Teresa anymore,” she said to me one day.  And without questioning it, I agreed.  When Teresa came to join us that day, we turned our backs and made a beeline to another table.  The next morning, Leann and I picked another spot on the playground, far away from Teresa.   When she looked at us with confused glances, we laughed at her.  This went on for weeks, and one day, near the end of school year, Teresa broke into tears on the playground.  She stood completely alone and cried.  I felt terrible, but Leann was laughing, so I did the same.

After the summer ended, I was thrilled to see Leann walking down the hallway on the first day of school. We hadn’t seen each other all summer, and I had been waiting for three long months to have lunch with her each day, and laugh and gossip and pass notes in class with her again.  I stretched out my arms to give her a hug.   When she saw me, she said “oh, hey” very quietly, and looked away.  Then she brushed past me and kept going.  I watched as Leann met up at the end of the hallway with another girl that she had befriended over the summer, and I heard them laugh as they looked my way.  Once again, I was alone on the playground each morning and in the cafeteria each day at lunch.  And my additional punishment was that I became the butt of Leann and her new companion’s jokes and mockery.

I never saw Teresa again.  She never came back to the same school.  I’ve always wondered if Leann and I had something to do with that.

As I wrote Lions and Tigers and Nurses, I read the research on lateral violence and interviewed the experts, but I was most moved by talking to nurses about some of the abusive treatment that they had received from peers.  A great number of them cried as they spoke to me about their experiences.  Every time I saw tears, I found myself thinking about Teresa.  I am deeply regretful for the pain that I caused her.  If only I could tell her how sorry I am, I certainly would.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve gone searching for her on the internet.  Google, classmates.com, linkedin, facebook, myspace…  and the list goes on.  I’ve searched endlessly for Teresa, as well as her sister, her brother, her mother and father in hopes of connecting with her, but can’t find any of them.  This may be the closest that I ever get to making an apology to her.  Should the real Teresa ever find these words, I hope that they can convey how very sorry I am for the damage I did to such a precious friendship, and a special young woman.

I’ve confided in others about Teresa.  And they’ve said things like, “don’t beat yourself up, that’s what girls do when they’re young.”  I recently watched the movie “Mean Girls” starring Lyndsay Lohan, and many of the situations and scenarios really hit home.  I’ve observed my own stepdaughter going through the motions of being bullied, as well as being a bully to others.  And in researching and writing Lions and Tigers and Nurses, I’ve seen very clearly that the female-dominated field of nursing is plagued with the same exact ‘mean girl’ behavior.  The more I look, the more I see that peer violence does have a stronghold among women of all ages. 

I’ve tried a million times to rationalize the way that I treated Teresa.  I could blame my classmates who were cruel to me and tell myself that I learned all of the meanness from them.  I could blame Leann and attribute my bad behavior to her influence.  Yes, I could certainly lean on all those scholarly theories about the cycle of violence and insist that there’s a science and predictability and inevitability to the way that I acted.   While all of that may explain my behavior, it will never excuse it, and will never offer me any consolation. 

To this day, I am haunted by the image of a young girl crying on the playground at my old school because of the way that I treated her.  I cannot undo it, but I can take the lesson to heart and refuse to let myself treat any other person the same way ever again.  As I begin this new year and I set my resolutions, I’m borrowing the Hippocratic oath from our physician friends and applying it to all of my relationships:  DO NO HARM.    

Thanks for taking the time to read this.  We’ve done a lot of talking on this blog about how we’ve all been victims of violence, but I’d like to make this an open letter to all those that we  have victimized.   Is there a Teresa in your life?  Do you owe an apology to someone?  If you have the opportunity now to make amends face-to-face with someone that you’ve hurt, I encourage you to do so, as I would give anything to be able to say the words “I’m sorry” to Teresa.  But for those of us who can’t, I welcome you to take the time to put your thoughts into words, and share them here. 

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

-Mohandas Ghandi