gearheads and artsy-fartsies. Your school probably has other groups that don’t have such stereotypical names but are just as well-known. Can you name them?
Preteen and teen girls have a funny way of defining their groups. Clique is one way to describe a group of people who hang together. The word
Have you ever seen a group make fun of other people who aren’t like them? When groups of people get together, they feel a lot more powerful than any one person would ever feel alone. In a group, people will do things they would never do on their own—sometimes mean things or risky things. At the head of many cliques is a leader who likes control. Some of these leaders win friends by insisting on loyalty and making people scared they will be excluded if they don’t go along with everything the leader says.
But there are also good leaders. They are the girls who gather people together based on shared interests. They welcome new friends into the group. And they allow you to have other friends outside of the group. They don’t boss their friends. These types of groups also have more power than any one individual would have, and they can accomplish powerful and amazing things—good things.
You may even belong to several different groups. You can be a soccer player and a brainiac at the same time. You can share common interests with your neighborhood friends and your friends from your religion’s youth group. The girls you meet at a Red Cross babysitting class can even become a clique because you all share the same job.You may be in a group or clique yourself. Do other people have a special name for your group?
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.
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.
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
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
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. . . .”
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?”
