‘It’ girls always fascinated me throughout high school — their fancy lives, their entourages, their parties, and their popularity. I could never get enough of how popular they were. As I used to walk the hallways of my school, I used to wonder what it was like to be an ‘it’ girl. To be loved, wanted, and envied by all. It really made me wonder what it must be like to get all the attention. Wasn’t it annoying? And didn’t it ever make them wonder if it was genuine or not? Like, how can everyone like one person? It’s humanly impossible. There had to be a degree of fakeness to it. But I highly doubt the actual ‘it’ girls had time for such mundane questions. Their lives were too interesting for that.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any problem with ‘it’ girls. I’ve been friends with loads and they were (mostly) very interesting people. They had interests, besides being popular, they liked things, disliked things, and I could actually make conversation with them. I have nothing against ‘it’ girls. But I have something against the label, and everything that comes with it. It’s shallow, categorical, and elitist. It fits us all into categories, and leaves us there. It doesn’t allow us to actually know ourselves, grow, and change. That’s what I’m against.
‘It’ girls got away with everything. I couldn’t get away with one swipe of kajal on my eyelid and ‘it’ girls got away with bold winged eyeliner. Funny, right? It wasn’t, and it was obvious, the teachers didn’t want to mess with the ‘it’ girls. Let’s face it, everyone wants to be popular, the teachers had to stay in the good books of the ‘it’ girls if they wanted to retain their student popularity status. Therefore, there were no rules for ‘it’ girls. They could enter class late, with a full face of makeup, and no thought for the dress code. They had it all.
In all honesty, they did not have it all. ‘It’ girls suffered, maybe silently, but they suffered. And nobody saw it. Because nobody could look past all that glamor and glitz that hid the tragic stories they had. Not all of them were like that. But most of them were. A prime example being Gossip Girl’s Serena Van Der Woodsen, the iconic ‘it’ girl who time and again lost her way due to her status and all that it came with. It can’t be easy being so popular and not making a mistake. We’re all human. We’re all bound to trip, fall, and make errors. Serena repeatedly lost track due to wrong company, wrong decisions, and more often than not, intoxication. This the most common problem for ‘it’ girls because with popularity comes a truckload of ways to intoxicate yourself. And you have to do it, because you’re popular. It’s when the limit gets blurred and everything gets out of hand, that’s when things get bad. ‘It’ girls suffer from mental illnesses, but nobody addresses this because how could a perfect little doll feel mentally sick. Well, they do, and us not talking about it only makes it worse for them.
It’s time we looked beyond the facade. ‘It’ girls aren’t playthings. They’re people. They might not look or live like regular people but they’re still just people. And it’s time they were treated exactly like that.
