Mean Girls

There was a house, and in it were many of my acquaintances. They were making a sort of festive reunion. There was alcohol and games, and the rooms and other areas of the house were large and dark, giving a sensation of loss of direction and vulnerability to me, but offering great opportunities to any of the other guests. An old crush of mine was also there and for a moment I saw myself wishing he would show interest in me and would ask me to get out of there with him.

There were many women in the party. In fact, there were only girls, with one or two exceptions. None of them was, however, my friend. I had nothing in common with any of them, but at first they looked nice and receptive. They insisted that I should drink, eat and stay there the rest of the night with them. I saw myself suddenly uncomfortable, without any apparent reason, except maybe the exaggerated solicitousness with which they treated me. I looked for a way out, but the house was like a labyrinth. There seemed to be no windows. The man I liked vanished from sight, and one of the girls pointed me to a room with the door slightly ajar – I could glimpse a dark, ugly and poorly decorated interior, full of mattresses, couches, blankets and soft pillows, as if left there specifically for the guests that wanted to sleep (or do other things) there.

Despite the mattresses, blankets and all that, the atmosphere in the room was sinister. The girl who indicated the room to me contributed to this sensation, telling me the boy I was interested in was inside the room with the youngest of the women, who wasn’t even 18. That seemed to me like a bad omen, and with that I decided that that environment wasn’t safe for me, though I had felt a strange feeling even before getting there. The only door I found – the same door through which I had come in – was locked, and I then went to ask the woman who owned the house to let me out. In this moment, the women’s evil intentions became clear: they had called me there just for the pleasure of locking me up, insulting, mocking, frightening and psychologically tormenting me. In a tone of mockery, despise and false pity, the owner of the house – a fat, dark woman full of tattoos and dressed like a hippie – started to point out all my most intimate defects, deepest flaws and paralyzing fears, and also to enumerate all of my wrong past actions of which I am most ashamed of. She emotionally undressed me with cruel words, revealed fears of whose existence I hadn’t even been aware until that point, all that while using the words that hurt the most. My stupidity, my foolishness, weakness, hesitation, shyness, and mostly my incapacity to hear my own inner voice of caution, my natural instinct of self-defense and conscience of self-preservation – these inner voices I simply ignored, on innumerable occasions, for meager and invalid reasons: fear of unpleasing others, fear of not being accepted, of being rejected, fear of causing a social deadlock, fear of being alone – she showed it all to my face and laughed at me for it.

Yes, these are fears worthy of attention and consideration. But not to the point of justifying my own downfall, the manifest rejection of the Self, the ignorance of the internal voice that guides me and serves me as a shield against evil. It is always at my service, always bringing me security and self-preservation, avoiding dangers from an outside source – and maybe from the inside too. This inner voice should be heard as if it were my “Knight in Shining Armor”, ready to put itself between me and any source of danger that might show up along the way.