The Categorisation of Personality at School
Mean Girls was supposed to satirise the high school experience and teach teen girls that being the ‘mean girl’ should not be an aspiration. Instead, I saw the ‘Mean Girl’ trope used as a template of how to navigate high school, by those who seemed to misinterpret the film.
The girls I knew emulated the behaviour of the plastics and tried to enforce the ridiculous rules and categories that the film presented. Some of the categories that the film introduces are: freshmen, preps, jocks, nerds and the plastics. Mean Girls isn’t the only film to set out these high school rules, St Trinians displays a similar category system with first years, chavs, posh totties, geeks and emos.
My sister once overheard a girl at our school unironically tell a friend that they must wear pink on Wednesdays. But unlike Mean Girls, these categories that we are put into, and put ourselves into, are not obviously stated or well defined. And sometimes, maybe even most of the time, are completely arbitrary and unhelpful.
As a child I loved football and sports. I used to go up to the park with my dad most weekends to play tennis or football. But at school I never played sports because I was not a boy or a ‘sporty girl’. One of the few times that I played with the boys, I was told that I was good at football... for a girl. At the time, I took it as a compliment. I now realise that this ingrained in me the idea that sport was not for girls. I held this belief throughout my school years and never exercised consistently. When I did, it was never to build myself, always to shrink myself.
Exercising for fun was always something that was undesirable to me, something that wasn’t part of the category that I had, somehow, been stuck in. I was a reader, an introvert and a quiet creative. We creatives seem to take strange pride in not looking after our bodies, so we can focus on the mind.
When my parents took in a lodger who was really into running, I saw the joy that it brought her and was jealous. I had never had that much joy with exercise. It was something negative in my head. She recommended that I try Couch to 5k. At first I genuinely thought I would never get to 5k. I just couldn’t imagine that I would ever be able to run that much and for that long. But it starts off slow, you run for 1 minute on the first day. That first run was so hard for me. But I did it and then I did the next one and before I knew it I had finished the whole thing. I still couldn’t run 5k but I could run for half an hour straight. Whenever anyone had told me how good running feels I always assumed that they were being hyperbolic; they were not.
Now, I will be honest. It took two gos for me to finish the couch to 5k programme because I didn’t keep up the habit. Mostly because going to the gym and running there intimidated me. In my head everyone else deserved the space more than me. But after completing it twice, and nearly two and a half years on from when I did my first run, I run 5k at least once a week and have even done a couple of 10k runs.
I missed out on so many years of so many different experiences because I wrote them off as ‘not me’. When honestly, who knows what defines oneself as a teenager? (and even as an adult?)
At school and university, I felt like I was bound to my category forever. I decided who I was at 11 and those personality traits had to continue until I died. People behave like cartoon versions of themselves as teenagers just for continuity's sake and in an attempt to fit in. Entering the workplace really made me realise that life didn’t have to be like this. Adults are not defined by what they liked as a teenager. It is their history but not their whole personality. Which is a good thing because many teenagers seem to hold on to one aspect of their personality and grow around that. This may not be a wild concept to other people but it was to me. For example, if you were a One Direction fan as a teenager you didn’t just casually like them. You absolutely adored them and made sure that everyone knew that about you. It was your category. Far too late into my teen years, I realised that other people just decided not to care that other people would find them weird for taking up a new hobby, or getting into a different type of music.
They just did what they wanted to. I think that is the main lesson that coming out of formal education taught me. When you have a full time job your time is so precious and you should spend it doing activities and hobbies that you truly enjoy, not just doing something because it is ‘on-brand’ for you. What I’ve learned is that just because something hasn’t been ‘you’ in the past, doesn’t mean that it isn’t you. You can be anyone and do anything that you want to do. Within reason. If it isn’t hurting anybody then do it.
Written by Amelia Croom
Amelia graduated with a degree in film production in 2020 and is currently working a 9 to 5 office job. She is also an avid reader and listener of podcasts.