Annie Gerspach

Doctor Erin Dietel-McLaughlin

WR 13300
15 October 2014
The Mean Girls Guide to Multimedia
When I was younger, I sometimes thought about how nice it would be to be a
mean girl, just for the pure ease of never having to be hurt. I guess I always felt that
way because, well, Ive always been the sensitive type. I like to like people, and I like
to be liked. So I was always the one to have a tough time with those mean girls.
Mean girls, I am sure, have always been a phenomenon. However, they
seem to have been armed with a weapon in the recent past that has given them
more power than they ever had before.
Hey what are you guys doing tonight? I anxiously click, click, clicked each
letter on my phone. Whoosh, sent, to my ten best friends? I put my phone down
and continued on with whatever I had going on that day.
It was the Thursday of Memorial Day weekend. I had a four-day weekend
ahead of me! I began to imagine the sand that would be between my toes, and the
Bar-B-Que smells that would fill my nose! When I would return to check my phone, I
imagined a plethora of responses from all my friends. I could not wait to figure out
what we would be doing that evening! Silly me. After an hour, I had received no
response.
No problem! Maybe theyre at practice. In the shower, maybe! So I left my
phone alone for a little longer and began to think about what I could wear out that

night. Another hour went by. No response. So maybe they are out to dinner, I
thought to myself as I began to apply a little bit of makeup. After three more hoursstill no response.
5 hours passed and as the alarm clock in my room struck 10 pm, I realized it
was time to give up. In that realization, I felt alone. And the pit that sat in my
stomach, so large, was as a reminder of the rejection I was experiencing on that
warm night in May.
Being ignored by my friends was something I was used to as a freshman girl.
I walked to the cold, lonely bathroom next to by bedroom. As I began to take off my
makeup, I looked in the mirror. Why me? I asked myself. If only I knew... I felt the
rejection ripping at my heart, and the loneliness fall down my face in the form of
tears. I tried to figure out what the reason could be, why others never seemed to
want to be my best friend. Why no one ever texted me about what I was doing.
I thought I knew how the story would go from there. I would receive a text
the following morning explaining how they were so busy, they forgot to respond, or
their Mom said, You cant have any more people over! So sorry!
However, this time around went a little differently. The next morning as I
woke up, I tried to forget about the events of the previous night. Maybe today would
be different; after all, the long weekend was right at my fingertips! However, my
Facebook feed had another plan for me in mind. Facebook revealed pictures of my
friends. It appeared they were away for the weekend, in Montauk. So thats what
they were up to.

For the next three days, it seemed those girls rubbed their weekend right into
my sad, pathetic face. Or was it Facebook and Instagram that wouldnt let me forget
what my friends had done? Armed with social media, my friends gave me a constant
reminder as to how left out and pitiful I was. All that time spent posting pictures and
they couldnt even send me a quick message? I had been eating lunch with these
girls the day before. We walked through the halls together, talked together, laughed
together, but when the weekend came up they had all gone silent, and now I knew
why. Oh, how I felt like such a fool.
When the girls returned from their weekend, I was too scared to stand up for
myself, so the pattern of exclusion only continued, worsened by social media. I was
too worried that sticking up for myself would only cause me to be left out again. But
I realize that it did the opposite. I was so intimidated by the strength they seemed to
have, meanwhile, the whole time they were just hiding in large numbers behind a
screen. Standing behind their screens, they made it loud and clear how fun their
weekend was. They used social media to make themselves feel big. And for that, I
should have made it loud and clear how they so successfully made me feel so, so
small.