Throughout my life, I have always felt at competition with other girls. I felt like I had to compete to see who was the prettiest, who got the most likes, who could get the best guy. This created unhealthy relationships with the girls around me – because I constantly saw them as a threat. Coming to college and going through my first break-up, I have come to the hard-hitting realization that it isn’t a competition, and that I needed to work on myself before I would be able to build good relationships with the women around me. I realized that I needed to invest into my relationships with girls, just as much as I would invest in any other relationships. I needed to treat my girl friendships like the priority they are.
Girls have to be in it together, and the faster I realized this, the better my relationship with myself and with the girls around me got. I stopped comparing girls to how I would compete with them for a man’s attention – and that is when everything changed for me. I started to recognize that someone’s beauty didn’t take away from mine, and their strengths didn’t mean my weakness. When I did this, I began to be surrounded by powerful, driven women. I had found my girl gang.
Having a girl gang pushed me to be a better person and to support those around me. This doesn’t mean my friendships with guys were any less meaningful, but having a girl gang put me with people who just understood what it was like to be a woman and the challenges and perks that came with it. They understood the effort, the emotions, the stereotypes and everything in between. I learned how important it is to support one another, and that there is growth without comparison, there is beauty without competition, but most importantly, there is friendship with an endless amount of love. I no longer feel confined to the space around me but rather feel as though I can grow and bloom, and I will always have a group of girls who will water and tend for each other.