Holmes Patricia - Girlology - A Girl's Guide to Stuff that Matters

Who is in your group?

What do all the girls in your group have in common?

Do you welcome other girls or exclude them?

Outsiders and Feelings of Isolation

We hate to keep bringing up the yuck side of cliques, girl relationships and brain changes, but these things are important. Feelings of isolation and being on the outside are normal and real. Really real. At some point, almost everyone experiences these feelings a little or a lot. They happen to you and every one of your classmates.

For starters, kids who make other people feel isolated and on the outside on purpose are not worth a minute of your time. That just had to be said. We know that’s an easy statement to make and a tough statement to live by. But we also know that it is true!

Girls who want to make other girls feel left out use some pretty sneaky tactics. They’ll tell secrets, start rumors, exclude you, give you the silent treatment or manipulate you with confusing talk and demands. They may try to “steal” your other friends by monopolizing their time or telling them bad things about you.

They may also use more obvious tactics like putting you down and making snide remarks in front of other people. They may tease you, harass you and reveal secrets you told them. They may even attack you physically. And sometimes they can totally ignore you and exclude you, like you are invisible or a puff of smoke they brush aside with a wave of the hand.

Feeling ignored, unknown and invisible can be the worst feeling of all. If it happens to you, you can believe it has happened to a lot of other girls, too. When you find someone who has had the same feeling, it’s almost a relief to know you are not alone, and better yet, you are not invisible! Nobody is. Sometimes it just takes finding the friend who sees you well.People who ignore you are just looking at superficial stuff. They obviously don’t know who you are on the inside—the real you.

We’ll let you in on a big secret. People put other people down to make themselves feel better . . . that means the popular girl who makes a snide comment about a classmate may be a little jealous. She probably sees something in another girl that she doesn’t have. That kind of bully wants to make her “prey” feel bad about themselves, so the bully can feel like she has power over them.

So how do you handle it? What does a bully hope to get by bullying? Power. How do you keep the power away from a bully?You don’t give her what she wants, which is usually crying, feeling bad about yourself and sucking up to the bully. You have control over how you respond. You don’t have to feel bad about yourself just because someone wants you to. And you know what’s really cool? If the bully doesn’t get any power from you, she will leave you alone.

Boy. . . Friends?

Now through this whole thing, we have mostly talked about your girlfriends as being your best friends, but we need to back it up a minute. What about friends who are boys?

Before we go any further, let’s set the record straight so we don’t get confused. When we talk about your friends who are boys, we mean boys that you don’t have a crush on and don’t have romantic interests in . . . we’ll call them guy friends. When we talk about the boy you hang out with and have romantic feelings for, a special boy you like and who likes you back . . . we’ll call them boyfriends.

And then there are guys you have a crush on, but they don’t necessarily like you back in that same way. Your crush could be a famous singer who’s never met you or a guy in your math class who doesn’t even know you. Maybe it’s the boy next door who thinks of you as a little kid or the lifeguard you met this summer at the pool. Anyway, it’s a person who gives you “happy” butterflies in your stomach and someone you like to think about being romantic with, someone you want to know more about and someone you might think about a lot. We’ll call them crushes.

It can get pretty confusing because your crush can become your boyfriend and a boyfriend should definitely be a crush. A guy friend can become a boyfriend or a crush and vice versa. So you see, all these friendships can overlap and get all tangled up to the point that you’re not really sure how to define the relationship.That’s okay, too. Nobody is going to give you a test on it. It’s just the lingo we’ll use in this book to try to keep us talking the same language.

Lots of girls have great guy friends. Sometimes it’s easier to talk with a guy friend than it is to talk with your girlfriends. Guys and girls have different points of view on the same question. Guys and girls think differently, too. Something a girl thinks is a huge deal may be hardly worth talking about for a guy, and vice versa. Your guy friends can help you understand the ways boys think (“Boys think?” you say? Contrary to popular belief, they do!) and help put some things in perspective for you. Both girlfriends and guy friends are valuable friends.

Nothing More Than Feelings

There’s a fairly goofy old-school song that goes, “Feelings . . . nothing more than feelings. . . .” Nothing more than feelings? Ha! It’s more like nothing more important than feelings!

Feelings will affect your friendships, your relationship with your parents, your interactions with teachers and your response to your siblings all day every day—especially while your brain is sending you those “Who am I?” messages. The tough thing about feelings is that they can grab hold of you with lightning speedeven when it’s not a reasonable feeling based on truth. Based on truth? Here’s what that looks like:

A girl at school calls you a loser. Are you a loser? No, but you still feel insecure.

You get a bad grade on a test. Was the test unfair? No, but you still feel angry at your teacher.

A classmate makes fun of the car your mother drives. Is a minivan a perfectly good mode of transportation? Yes, but you still feel defensive.

Feelings aren’t bad, but the way we express feelings can be bad. Check your feelings against the truth of what’s happening. That first feeling that sweeps over you may change!

Agreeto Disagree

Tolerance. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot these days. Everyone has a right to her opinion, her own likes and dislikes, and her own ideas. Being tolerant of other people’s opinions doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them.Tolerance means you put up with things (opinions, beliefs, actions, appearances) that you may not agree with. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have opinions of your own or that you can’t argue your own opinion. It simply means you have to listen to the other side, be open to new ideas and agree to disagree if you don’t find common ground. Learning to agree to disagree is part of learning tolerance and respect.