What Mean Girls Taught Me About Authenticity

I am what some people might call “pop-culturally challenged.” It took three years of middle school for me to readily admit that I rather liked the skinny jeans trend and that I might even (heaven forbid) try wearing a pair every so often. I didn’t get a cell phone until my freshman year of high school and I didn’t get a smartphone until I was a senior. I lived through the Twilight craze without so much as turning a page in the series, and I have yet to watch a rom-com based off of a Nicholas Sparks book.

All this being said, it may come as no surprise to you that I did not watch the teenage girl “classic” of the early 2000s until just this past weekend. Yep, you guessed it. Thirteen years of naivety whenever my friends used a Mean Girls reference came to a crashing halt this fall when I finally decided it was time I learned what all the fuss was about.

Mean Girls is probably the most accurate depiction I have ever encountered of what happens when young women fall into the trap of comparison, body insecurity, and inauthenticity. Call me crazy, but watching that movie absolutely broke my heart. Despite being classified as a comedy, I found very little to laugh about. I was shocked by how far each of “the Plastics” was willing to go to make one another’s lives miserable. They gossiped about one another, picked apart each other’s flaws, took advantage of one another’s weaknesses, and called each other absolutely hateful names.

Mean Girls served as an astonishing reminder to me of the pain that countless teenage girls in this world suffer through EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. It reminded me that there are girls in this world who stand in front of the mirror every night, analyzing the size of their waist, their bust, and the gap between their thighs. It helped me to remember that there are girls who are willing to do anything to make friends. They are willing to sabotage someone’s reputation, wear extremely revealing clothing, cover every inch of their face with ridiculous amounts of makeup, or avoid wearing hoop earrings entirely because their “friend” told them not to. But most of all this movie reminded me that there are girls in this world who feel like they have to be someone they’re not just so other people will like them.

Perhaps you are one of these girls I just described. Perhaps you, too, think that Mean Girls is not just a joke, your average teen drama, or a classic comedy.

It’s your own raw, real truth.

Once the end credits started to roll, a hard and heavy question came to rest on my heart and it’s a question that I truly feel we ALL need to be asking.

What if people enjoy the movie Mean Girls, not necessarily because they enjoy the humor or the witty quotes, but because it paints an all-too-real picture of life as they know it?

If that’s true, what on earth have we done to our daughters, our sisters, our nieces, and our friends to make them feel like they have to be someone they’re not? What have we done to make them feel so unworthy and unloved?

I realize that Mean Girls is just a movie and I know that the story and its characters are fictional. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that our world is chock-full of “Regina Georges” and “Cady Herons.” Like Regina George, there are girls who are mean to others because it’s the one thing in this broken world that they can claim as their own, and how they make others feel becomes their identity. And like Cady Heron, there are girls who are willing to sacrifice any and every part of their true identity just for the sake of having someone to sit with over lunch hour.

As daughters of the one true King, we are called to lift each other up, not tear each other down. And that means lifting everyone up… even those “who curse” or “mistreat us” (Luke 6:28). We must remember that we don’t always see the entirety of someone else’s story. We don’t always remember that the “mean girls” in our lives have stories of brokenness and heartache, too. Does that excuse their behavior? Absolutely not. But it does allow room for grace, for forgiveness, and most importantly, for love.

We are also called to claim our identity as God’s wondrous creations because in His image we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). As tempting as it is sometimes to exchange our God-given identity for an identity that we think will make us more likeable, we cannot run from who we are.

I know that life’s journey can be lonely sometimes, (I’ve been the lone girl at the lunch table, too) but how can we possibly change our identity when we are already created in the image of God? Besides, as daughters of the King, we are never truly alone, because our relationship with Christ outweighs any human relationship available. And with time, God will bless us with people who love us as He created us, and who will fill our lives not with the sting of jealousy and superficiality, but with empowerment and authenticity.

Gradually, God will fill lives not with mean girls, but with meaningful girls—women who uplift us and encourage us and see the God-given beauty in us, just as we are.

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

#approval #breakingdownculturalnorms #struggle #loneliness #lifesstorms #relationships #value #femininedignity #truebeauty