My Brilliant Friends

When I was younger, I was skeptical of the friendships I saw portrayed on TV. Very few felt similar to my own. Even as a child, I knew 90210 was not meant to reflect my own future high school life back to me. I was never going to have the same problems as the teens at West Beverly. But as I got closer to the age of the characters I saw on TV, I still had my doubts. I can remember being fourteen, watching Dawson’s Creek on my bed, and writing in my diary that I could not fathom speaking to my friends the way the characters, meant to be only one year older than I was, spoke to each other. To me, this friendship dynamic was not even aspirational; it was just weird. A few years later, I’d feel the same way about Sex and the City. Their vocabulary felt more like my own by then but, I couldn’t help but wonder, is this how adult women talked to each other? Will I, someday, have these same conversations? I doubted it. 

I am a product of my generation. More specifically, I am a product of the 1990s. Not just the half of it when I was a teenager, but also the early years that were still shaking off the ‘80s like a wet dog. The years where Madonna and Murphy Brown were equally debated as “appropriate role models,” and Hillary Clinton became "radical" for saying she didn’t want to bake pies. Growing up, I did not know I was spending the entirety of my formative years - ages 6 to 16 - in the decade that birthed third wave feminism (or, at least, I wouldn’t have known to call it that). But, like a typical ‘80s baby/’90s child, I wasn’t super monitored and I lived in my parents’ world, not the other way around. So, I absorbed a lot of pop culture and news stories, preferred to be a fly on the wall with the adults to playing in another room, and quietly internalized what I was seeing and hearing. 

Now that feminism has entered its fourth wave, those of us who came of age during the Girl Power era are the journalists and scholars and influencers currently unpacking its pros and cons. I have a lot of opinions about this as an adult who is interested in history and politics and women’s rights. (There is, in fact, a much longer draft of this essay that went unsent.) But what it all comes down to is that as easy as it is to be disappointed by what is validly critiqued as White Feminism, Capitalist Feminism, and the superficial bitchification of feminism, a very large part of me is always going to be grateful that I was born just in time to experience growing up girl in the 1990s. Girl Power was, after all, a stepping stone for girls like me to become empowered - not a stand-in for feminism itself. 

This era and how it shaped me as a person is something I’ve been thinking about lately with regard to my female friendships. For every Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft ushering in a new type of hero, there was the underlying message that to be a woman who earns the respect of men, you needed to be exceptional. You want to be a “strong female character” in real life? It helps to have superpowers and look good in a halter top. Want to be the president of the United States or run your own company someday? Better learn how to fit in with the boys and pretend their jokes are funny even if it means selling out other women so you get that one available spot, not them.

Growing up under third-wave feminism meant being just empowered enough to have a sense of self-worth, but still understanding that I was not allowed to be “like other girls.” Society reinforced at every turn that to be accepted, you needed male approval. As a result, I convinced myself that boys just made better friends. They didn’t have “all the drama” that girls had and I could just be “chill” with them. Never mind that I was usually in a constant state of anxiety around them, even the ones I enjoyed being with, because of the mental gymnastics required to be “one of the guys.” The internal debates whenever I bit my tongue at casual sexism or homophobia, or that overwhelming anxiety at not wanting to “seem like a bitch” if I disagreed with them about something. I could tell they thought my feminism was quaint and was told flat-out that my intelligence and sense of humor was “different” from other girls and therefore, I suppose, made me worthy enough to sit and watch them play Madden or whatever. And yet, despite spending a lot of my adolescence being the only girl in a group of guys, and seeking male approval, the title of Best Friend(s) was always held by other girls. Most of us were internalizing the same patriarchal garbage at the time and didn’t always know how to be friends with each other, but there was something special about my female friendships that I couldn’t quite articulate. It was like being allowed to exhale.

That’s what it still feels like for me, even though, as an adult, most of my closest friends are other women and the men in my life recognize that women are, in fact, people. I feel it when I spend two hours on the phone with my best friend from high school, when I find myself smiling at a text chain with college friends, when my book club talks more about our lives and what we did the previous weekend than the actual book. And when we do talk about the book, the conversation is lively and brilliant and thoughtful because these are the type of women I’ve been lucky enough to surround myself with. 

More recently, I felt this exhalation during a weekend away with friends I made over a decade ago when we trauma-bonded as undervalued assistants at the same literary agency. Now we all live in different places, have an epic Slack chat, and, before two weeks ago, hadn’t gotten together in person in almost four years. We spent time writing, as was our main mission, but we also spent two days straight with no one but each other, diving deeply into conversations about all facets of life, turning to topics like personal fulfillment, politics, and philosophy just as often as various hobbies, what we’ve been watching on TV, and the men we left at home.

Coming home from this most recent female-friend extravaganza is what got me thinking about all of the other important friendships in my life, how grateful I am to have met such passionate, curious, and creative women, and why it took me so long to prioritize their role in my life. Because at a certain point, occasionally coming up for air is not enough. You need people around you who let you, simply, breathe.