In the latest in our series in which Kiwis kick their old ways to the curb, author Sarah Catherall explains how her social priorities have shifted.
The alpha girls were in the A netball team, they wore their school skirts hitched up above their knees, they dated the rugby jocks, and they didn’t like me. I was an annoying mix – social but also interested in school. The cool girls didn’t like brains – it was the 1980s and at my school girls weren’t allowed to be smart. Only the nerds were smart. If you wanted to fit in with the cool girls, you had to be thin, like Brooke Shields, and sexy, and you also had to be dumb – or average – to be part of the scene. You definitely couldn’t be smarter than the boys.
I spent a lot of the fifth and sixth form trying to get the cool girls to like me. There were moments when they let me sit on the netball court with them at lunchtime, when they didn’t run their eyes up and down over me, scowling with disapproval.
One girl was leader of the pack: her father ran a hotel and she brought pies and donuts to school. She clicked her fingers and swapped lunches with whomever she chose, and I hoped so much that she would choose me and my marmite sandwiches. I wanted her life. I wanted to be cool like her.
“You’re square,’’ she stated, and those two words struck me like I'd been shot.
In sixth form, I went on a Rotary exchange to a town in Australia, and as soon as I arrived in a small high school I felt like a celebrity. I was the exchange student from New Zealand. I had status. The boys flirted with me, the cool girls wanted to be my friend. For the first time in my life, I understood what it was to be popular. I didn’t have to make an effort. I could be myself: outgoing and brainy.
Four months later, I returned to Napier and I was punished even more. The tall poppy syndrome kicked in. It was 1986, no-one in my class had been overseas and they ganged up. “You’ve got fat,’’ one taunted. They noticed the couple of pounds layered on my hips. “Fatty,’’ she said again.
I pushed my dinner around my plate. I went into my room and read my Dolly magazines and wrote in my diary and cried myself to sleep. I hated those girls. I hated myself. I counted calories and pored over Mum’s hip and thigh diet book.
The pounds slid off my my hips like melting ice and still the cool girls kept away. I didn’t bother trying: they’d never like me. What was the point? My periods stopped and Mum asked: “What’s wrong?’’ I slammed doors and I yelled a lot.
I blanked the girls out and I started eating again and my periods resumed. But popular girls still intimidated me and I had a magnet for them, like I could sense when one was near. I got to my university hall and I shared a room with a kind, shy girl. In the twin room next door were the girls I wanted to be friends with: film majors who wore Dr. Martens boots, ripped jeans and crop tops. They were beautiful and posh and they'd arrived from private schools. Their entitlement wafted around like the smoke rings they puffed out the window. I made friends with lovely, easy people who I didn’t have to make an effort with, but the film students were the prize: if only I’d get invited to the parties they went to, I dreamed of it.
Something shifted in my thirties, when I became a mother, and I stopped judging myself against how others saw me. I was too busy to be so self-obsessed. Our values shifted, but a kind of heirarchy remained. Now it seemed women were measuring one another on our ability to soar up the career ladder while keeping a house running like a well-oiled machine and looking perfectly slick and together when we walked into the office each morning. Popularity was measured on a woman’s ability to do it all.
Now I’m in my fifties, I’m too old to give a toss about what being popular means today. Being cool seems to be judged on whether you’re an influencer or you’ve got thousands of friends on Instagram.
Recently, I walked into a women’s networking event and I did that thing of glancing around the room quickly to check who I might need to impress. It was habit, engrained in me since high school. But as quickly as I noticed myself doing that, I also noticed what I did next. I chatted to the woman next to me and she seemed lovely and we didn’t judge each other. And when I left that night, I didn’t care if she liked me or not, or whether she wanted to connect with me on LinkedIn. I didn’t notice what she wore or even really what she looked like, or if she was cool or not, or what she thought of me.
Along with age, two big things have changed me: I suffered and survived a divorce, and I suffered and survived breast cancer. I’ve lost touch with the cool girls from Napier, but I hear that some never left; others took their husbands’ names and I have no idea where they are or what they did after high school, disappearing off my radar like ghosts.
Sarah Catherall is a writer based in Wellington. Her first book How to Break Up Well: Surviving and thriving after separation (Bateman Books) is out now.
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