The Jealous Friend

A reflection on female friend groups and being the envious one.

There were years when I had a tight-knit group of female friends whom I’d actually see often. I was 12 or 13, 16 or 17. These were the years I didn’t keep a calendar. When a “What are you doing right now? Want to hang out?” wasn’t an invasion of my privacy. These were the in-between years where things felt like they were definitely changing. Our curriculums. Our bodies. Our interests, ambitions. Our relationship statuses, romantic and sexual experience levels. Where we were going to school next. How we were going to reinvent ourselves. Who we were going to be next year. All of that stuff had weight, while being just at the tip of our fingers.

In middle school, my friends and I would see each other every day if our parents allowed it. I held no concept of introversion, or perhaps, I simply wasn’t introverted at the time. I savored the giggles and whispers my friends and I shared, our heads ducked beneath the bed sheets. I felt like I was in a movie when I was at the mall with them, using our allowances on bras that we didn’t fit into or going to the theater with boys in our grade. We were adventurous and attempted to lighten our hair with lemon juice. We were in-over-our-head and watched The Human Centipede together late on a Saturday night. We were silly and blew air into our bikini tops to make it look like we had boobs. We were cruel and played pranks on the pizza delivery people. We were we, and that was everything to us.

We spent the majority of our time at my friend S’s house, a gorgeous Italian revival home with a large circular driveway, pool, hot tub, trampoline, and many rooms for us to hide in and run through. It was in the most coveted part of our already affluent hometown and within walking distance of our middle school. S’s mom even let her invite boys over. How could I not want to spend all my time there? There was a week in 2013 that I slept over at S’s every night. I now wonder how my parents must have felt, me being away from them constantly, sleeping in another family’s house and being under the supervision of another parent. I never once stopped to think about how weird the concept of constant sleeping over was. If I for some reason wasn’t allowed to one night, I was convinced my parents were trying to destroy my life, by way of me simply missing out on an inside joke that I’d eventually forget the origin of.

Even though we didn’t have all of our classes together, my friends and I would debrief at lunch or after school at S’s. We’d jump on the trampoline, striking poses at each other and practicing moves we learned at cheer tryouts. We'd lie on our backs, look up at the sky, and share our deepest secrets with each other. We’d talk about other kids in school. The girls who were pretty and we cruelly assumed were “slutty,” whatever that means at that age. The boys we talked to on Facebook or grazed knees with in class. We’d talk about our families sometimes. Our parents’ divorces, which sucked, but never much more than that. We weren’t old enough to understand how our parents’ divorces would affect us in later years. How it’d inevitably come up in therapy one day. How it’d impact our relationships to romance, intimacy. Why they sometimes made sense. Why they didn’t happen earlier. Back then, never wondering how our parents might feel about it all.

Life at the time, for my friends and me, was just a languid, selfish quest for experience for the sake of experience. We wanted to share every moment with each other and grow up as fast as possible, learning all we needed to know about kissing, periods, eyeliner. We wanted the bragging rights, the stories for our diary entries, the secret knowledge about something none of us had ever done before. We sometimes congratulated each other for the other’s achievements. Other times we seethed in pain that it wasn’t us telling the stories. I was the meek, least experienced of the group and didn’t have much to share. I’d sometimes try to interject but my friends would, subtly or unsubtly, tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Yet, there was something to learn in all of these stories traded. And there was fun, too. It was all mostly fun, and I listened eagerly.

One day in eighth grade, there was an assembly for something, I don’t know what. This time was the peak of my friends’ and my closeness. We’d spent the last year together inseparable. There was a boy in school that we all thought was cute but never thought too hard about who he’d like most in our friend group. He had a girlfriend since sixth grade, until he broke up with her in the hallway after a school dance. Seemingly instantaneously, everyone was mumbling under their breath of the news, as we waited in the pickup circle for our parents to drive us home. My friends and I suspected it was our friend C who had inspired him to break up with his girlfriend, having noticed that he and C had been consistently flirty during lunch break. I felt comforted hearing that his popular ex-girlfriend held animosity against C, something I also felt but was too ashamed to admit. She and I became instant best friends when she transferred to our school district in 5th grade. We were inseparable and talked in annoying “Ms. Swan” accents together. People knew us as a unit, but C was always the prettier, more bubbly, more mature looking one, not to forget that we were also both Asian. All the boys always liked her and threw their arms around her whenever they could, while they were caught hand hovering me in photos.

It wasn’t C but S who sat next to the boy we all liked and held hands with him during the assembly. She told us that afternoon, during lunch in a quiet hallway. It felt like casual news to her and likely something she doesn’t even think about now. For me, it felt like an incredible blow and further proof that the popular boys would just not like me like that, I guess. They wouldn’t see me as more than just C and S’s not-as-cool, not-as-pretty friend. I wasn’t desired to the level that my friends were, which stung me in a way that I couldn’t even put into words. I remember my efforts to recreate certain circumstances in order to get chances at these experiences myself. I made small attempts to be in close physical distance to said boy, or send him silly yet calculated texts like “What was homework again?” in hopes of sparking a deeper conversation. My eagerness to engineer these “perfect situations” might have gone unnoticed by most but they certainly never worked. I was trying so hard to replicate my friends’ natural charm that I came off stiff and definitely not cool.

I was old enough to know that expressing my frustration or envy would be embarrassing and incredibly detrimental to my friendships that I spent so long building and clinging onto. There was only minor empathy shown to me when a group of boys in our grade wrote down a list of the “hottest girls in grade” and I was the only person from my friend group not to be included. All of this hurt my feelings, but I had no one to tell. Now, still young but over a decade removed, I try to remember how I responded to all of these feelings of jealousy and insecurity. Did I ever sabotage those female friendships or my ability to keep them, as a result of their growing confidence and perceived attractiveness? I probably did; I just can’t remember to what extent. In freshman year, they did call me out for being the “jealous friend” who had a hard time being happy for her friends. They confronted me about talking shit about C being bumped a level in the dance class above ours, and how just because I wanted that too, didn’t mean it constituted bad mouthing.

This hot jealousy, unfortunately, would remain and grow. When my friends made the dance company and I didn’t. When college admissions decisions came out. There would still be jealousy over boys, before we had the vocabulary and open dialogue to agree that boys were trash. We hardly got mad at them or called them out on their bullshit. Not really. I saved all that rage for college and beyond, to the point that hearing myself call men trash felt almost nauseating, like a cliché. It wasn’t until college that I felt that I could let go of this tendency to self-compare a little bit. I became a small fish in a big pond, able to flail in privacy while knowing what I was working toward was vastly different from the person next to me. It was humbling and freeing to be somewhat anonymous at age 18.

Admittedly, my tendencies to self-compare and be envious of my peers, especially my female friends, still sometimes come out, and it makes me feel sick. I will see how my beautiful female friends make heads turn and time stop, and wonder where they learned that superpower. They’re funny, and smart, and artistic, more open and adventurous than I am. I still ache to know their ways, but I also feel proud that they love me and I love them too, though saying I do doesn’t come out as naturally as it does from them. The settings and circumstances I have placed myself in for the last few years (i.e. undergraduate business school, the entertainment industry, LA!) beg for a high level of competitiveness that is hard to escape. Hell, we are trapped in systems that encourage a “winner takes all” mindset. Yet, as much as an environment can impact the way we interact with another, it never quite justifies praying on a person's downfall for the sake of your rising to the top, rationalizing your inability to be excited for a friend, and downplaying their qualities, talents, and capacity to deserve. In getting older and realizing my flaws and blindspots, I’ve retreated to isolation in the hopes that my self-improvement won’t be a result of competitiveness but innate ambition to be better.

I have female friends, of course, and still talk to most of my friends from high school, even if not often. A girl’s girl is always a girl’s girl, they say. I just don’t have a female friend group like I did before. The ones you give names, like acronyms combining your initials, or a fake sorority name called Kappa Beta Beta Koppa, KBBQ for short. I prefer having individual friendships with women, maybe because the conversations get deeper and are more kind, or that it’s easier to end a hangout with one person rather than many, simply because you’re tired and want to be alone. Yet, I also miss this sense of adventure, casualness, closeness, and belonging between a group of female friends. In my early 20s, I’ve had glimpses at these feelings. Eating burritos at a taco stand outside a bar at 3 in the morning, having drunk conversations with my girlfriends about nothing really. It’s summer and you still feel warm. Having your girlfriends over for “Witch & Wine” night, baking pumpkin muffin edibles and reading each other’s tarot cards. Seeing into the future but feeling more present than ever. Driving down to Joshua Tree and looking at the stars. It’s deadly quiet down there, all you can hear are each other’s breaths.

I sometimes miss the bigness of my world when I was 12 or 13. How my best friend holding my crush’s hand meant everything was crumbling around me. I cringe at Facebook’s reminder of statuses I posted, or the silly ones my friends wrote up as “hacks.” But I can look at the photos and videos we captured on days we never thought we’d reflect upon, or totally thought we would when we were glamorous adults, and I feel a fondness for that baby of a human. One who put eyeliner on to look older. Made goofy faces on camera with my friends. Wished she got her period like the rest of her friends already. I miss that person who was self-conscious but not quite as closed off as I am now. I wonder if I was more selfish then, or if I’m more selfish now. I think that I’m kinder now, at least. We were close, but were we nice to each other? Was it that we were all individually mean and came together? Or did us being together turn us nasty and vicious at points?

There was no clear moment when we all stopped being friends. It might’ve been the spring break of eighth grade. Having run out of things to do, my friends thought it’d be a fun idea to cosplay being kidnapped (insane, I know). Each of us would practice being blindfolded, tied to a chair, and locked in a dark and stuffy closet, and we’d time each other on who was quickest to escape. I was the first up to go, maybe because I was the youngest or I just didn’t touch my nose fast enough. I started to hyperventilate when I realized how hard it was to remove the bandana over my eyes or the jump rope around my wrists. I got out of them and, instead of looking for my friends who were hiding in the house giggling in the shadows, I walked out the front door of S’s house. I was going home.

I figure it was high school. We made new friends over summer school. Kids from different middle schools enrolled and we could now cling onto them instead. We could join clubs and befriend people from the grades above if they let us. We could let things fizzle out and go our separate ways, as the only things really bonding us at that point weren’t our interests, values, or us liking each other. It was our memories together. But those were of the past. What mattered then is what mattered next. All we wanted was to grow older, be cooler, even if that wasn’t together anymore.