Why I love ‘Girls Like That’ by Evan Placey

A few weeks ago, I discovered a piece of writing i had written two or so years ago. Initially i considered posting it on its own but after some rereading, i decided to post it along with an extract where I reflect on both what the passage talks about and also the passage itself. Hope you enjoy.

"I was just 12 years old when I went to boarding school. I had spent the last year at a different school where I really struggled and developed quite bad anxiety from my experience there. So when I joined this new school, I was very nervous that my experiences there would just be a repeat of the year before. But it actually surprised me. For the first month or so of my time there I was very happy. I met some really lovely people and made some new friends. I felt like I was gaining my confidence back. And then it all fell apart. I wont get into the details of what happened then because that experience isn't what i want to talk about. I want to talk about what happened after that. I want to talk about what my time at that school was really like and what it actually left me with.

To anyone who hasn't heard of ‘Girls Like That’, it is a play about a group of 20 girls who grow up together and are supposedly a tight-knit group from being thrown together in a class at a young age and going through their primitive years together. At the time of first reading this play, I wasn't really sure why it resonated with me so much, I simply assumed the feminism aspect was something that I felt strongly about. However, after rereading it again this year, after having left that school, I finally see why it actually made me feel so passionately about the issues being addressed. It wasn't just the feminism, but the fact that the story it told in itself was incredibly similar to my own at said school. 10 girls. These girls will be your friends for life, they told me. These girls will be your family here, they told me. These girls will be the people who will make you who you are in the future. Sadly, that is, in some ways, undeniably true, as the relationship I had with the rest of my year in my house definitely affected who I was at that school and who I still am in some ways. I am sorry to say that the relationship of the “St Helen’s Girls” in the play, strongly resembled my year in my house at that school. And sadly, I was Scarlett. It would help if you are familiar with the play from this point on but if u cant be arsed then it’s your loss. It was only once I had left that I had they emotional capability to let the other girls know the amount of damage they caused me. And their responses to this information made me giggle: they were so sorry, wished they had known, didn't know what to say… the thing is though, they did know. They knew exactly what they were doing."

It is interesting to think about the conclusion that I have come to here. If read one way, it sounds as if i am suggesting that every action was premeditated and done with the sole intention to hurt me. While there were definitely a lot of moments that felt like that, realistically they were teenage girls not Agatha Christie villains. The damage that their behaviour caused me was and is very much real but what I only found out later is that they cannot have known the extent to which I was hurting. At least this is what i hope to be true. I have also realised however, that all those years there and since that I sent contemplating the situation, i was subconsciously excusing their actions and placing the majority of the blame upon myself. Making statements such as "i was too fragile" and "i probably was weird and annoying". And while I may have been more susceptible to their behaviour due to my experience, I have come to realise that at the end of the day, they were teenage mean girls. And they were very cruel. I know this doesn't make them heinous people and that the majority of it will have stemmed from insecurity, but I cannot continue to blame and villainize myself for their actions. I owe it to my teenage self to heal my relationship with myself and take back the confidence that they took from me. In realising this, I have begun to let go of all those years of emotional and psychological trauma that I suffered and to move on with my life.