De-Listed:
Back-handed compliments, toxic friendships and sixteen years of telling myself someone else’s opinion doesn’t matter.
When I was a senior in high school, I found myself sitting outside a house party with one of my friend’s boyfriends.
“You know,” he said, giving me a drunken side eye, “when we first started dating, [your friend] asked me to rank her friends in order of hotness.”
He held my gaze for a beat. “You were at the bottom of my list.”
Even in the dark, I felt my face flush, the embarrassment of his comment hot on my cheeks.
“But now, I’d change that.” He offered this up like it was a compliment — like he hadn’t just cruelly put me down just moments before. “At school you just never take off your North Face and it makes you look fat. But you have really nice legs. You should wear skirts more.”
I honestly don’t remember how I responded to him. I have a vague recollection of feeling weirdly vindicated. Like, ‘Yeah — take that, world, I’m not at the bottom of the list!’
I probably kept drinking, trying to numb out the pain of losing a contest I’d never asked to be entered in and to forget that I’d been unwittingly and unwillingly judged for something I had no control over.
So many years later, I try not to think about that night often, but when I do, it makes me sad. It makes me sad for me, for my friend, for the boy who gave me that piercing dig wrapped up like a compliment:
What drives a 17-year-old girl to seek validation so badly that she feels the need to force her boyfriend to rank her friends in order of attractiveness? (So she can be at the top of the list, obviously)
What compels a 17-year-old boy to think that he can tell an 18-year-old girl that she is unattractive? Or how to dress?
Why can’t that 18-year-old girl find the courage, confidence and voice to tell that boy to fuck off, to ditch her toxic friend and to find a healthier way to deal with tough emotions than to drink them away?
I don’t have the answers now, and I certainly didn’t have them then.
For the ten plus years following that conversation, that girl, the one with the boyfriend, remained one of my best friends. And over those ten plus years, I heard some version of that comment about my looks in various forms, from her — from other ‘friends’, ‘boyfriends’ etc. And I took it. (Sometimes they were straight up insults, but sometimes they were ‘compliments’: “Me and [other friend] were going through all our friends and saying if everyone was hot, pretty or cute. We decided you were ‘cute.’ I told [other friend] she was ‘cute’ and she freaked out, like, ‘ewww I don’t want to be ‘cute’!” Right. Also, this was something a 27-year-old said to me. 27.)
It wasn’t until I moved away from my hometown — feeling stifled by my life, friends, past and so desperate for change that I was looking for any and every way to escape where and who people thought I was — that I really realized how toxic some of my friendships were.
I was sitting with my roommates one night in our dining room, and told some anecdote about my friends from back home, the way you do when you’re sitting with your roommates in a new town, far from home.
One of them looked at me, square in the eye and said, completely seriously: “And why are you friends with these people?”
I couldn’t really give her an answer. I don’t think I had an answer.
I don’t write this to shame anyone, or to classify anyone as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ or ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ or garner pity or to fish for compliments for myself.
I write this because I don’t want any other high school senior to sit on a porch with a boy and be told she ranks at the bottom of a list. I don’t want any other girl to feel like she needs to compete with her friends to feel good about herself. And I don’t want any other boy to think that it’s OK to tell anyone else that there’s something wrong with the way they look or dress.
I write this because I wonder what a life for me would have been like if I had believed in myself a little more when I was younger. If I had more supportive voices in my life (and head) and more confidence. If I had worried less about how I measured up, physically, to my peers, and worried more about how I measured up to my values.
I write this because 16 years later, I still remember that conversation nearly word for word and wish that I remembered the actual compliments I received that well.
And I write this because, maybe by sharing, someone else will realize that just because someone says something nasty to you doesn’t make it true. (Maybe I’ll believe it.) It often has nothing to do with you. But it might be time to reassess where they fall on your list.
