How attending an all-girls' high school affected my adult life

With the intention to give me as good an education as any private school could, and probably also to remove boys from the picture for the time being, what was the reality of the effects of attending an all-girls' high school?

High school can be the most challenging part of anyone's life, no matter who you are; hormones flying about, bodies changing, not knowing what direction you want to take your life in. With Margaret Thatcher's name in gold in Old Hall as previous head girl of my school, I was probably supposed to be full of inspiration. I wasn't.

I, although I'm sure it could have been worse, didn't have the best time. Not only was I uprooted with domestic on-goings and was in and out of different schools towards the beginning, I struggled with weight and a questionable hair-cut (which was originally inspired by the movie Tangled, where Rapunzel gets it cut short at the end and it turns brown. But it turned out it only looked good when it was styled, and we soon learnt I could not be bothered to do that, so I ended up looking like 2010 Justin Bieber, instead.) The first few weeks was fine; I made some friends, I was funny and so were the girls I met. However, for whatever reason I began to be left out, and I quickly became defensive and stand-offish to protect myself from any possible future rejection, and practically spent the rest of the first year of high-school alone. "Fat lesbian" sniggered in the hallway in my direction demonstrated the height of the sophistication of teenage "insults" in 2011-12. I didn't help myself; I came into school every day in a bad mood, filled with anxiety deriving from the anticipation of having to eat on my own come lunchtime, isolating myself and being short with anyone who did talk to me. This way, I was in control of my ostracisation. I don't think it was until 2019 that I finally reached out to a colleague at work to go for drinks. She is now my best friend that I cannot imagine life without. The fear of rejection has stayed with me for life, I've just grown to rationalise the thoughts that tell me to run away from any possible friendship or relationship, and I've learned to trust that people could actually want to be around me, no matter my weight, hair cut or mood.

"The fear of rejection has stayed with me for life, I've just grown to rationalise the thoughts that tell me to run away from any possible friendship or relationship"

Apart from moving schools and having someone literally roll their eyes when they saw I came back to my original school (this girl has since gone on to join a pyramid scheme and once complemented my gym leggings via Instagram in an attempt to segway into her business venture, hahahahah fuck off), Year 8 was somewhat uneventful. On-and-off meaningless relationships began, the skirt got shorter, and make up was starting to be experimented with. It was Year 9 that I had a consistent - although somewhat unstable and dysfunctional - group of friends. However, people soon learnt that I was easily wound-up and instead of being poked fun at for my physical appearance, I was now taunted for my irritability. Although this still plagues me, I've learnt to laugh at myself instead of allow myself to get riled. Comparing the girls in high school with the girls I have in my life now, there is a difference between people who are taking the piss because they love you and they want you to be part of the joke, and those that take the piss because they find humour and superiority in your misery and discomfort. Bizarrely, I had this internal conflict where I was so angry and frustrated that I could have lashed out physically or frankly thrown my computer monitor across the room, but I was so scared of getting in trouble for doing said things that the negative emotions I was feeling continued to build up in my head like pressure, like I was trapped underwater, the vessels in my head close to bursting. At this age, there was no ability to rationalise, no way to calm myself down, no strength or inkling of self-worth to combat or even attempt to balance-out the spiralling tornado of self-destruction was that circling my head, dragging me down to the deepest depths of what felt like an ocean of the mind. Unlike now, between the ages of 15-18 I had not an ounce of self-compassion to talk my inner-saboteur off the ledge it constantly teetered on. So, between feeling like I was drowning in anger and self-loathing, and feeling too scared of the consequences to let it out in some ultimately destructive form (although I guess this is a good thing that I didn't resort to punching my peers, and I did once give in and kick a sanitary bin so hard it broke, ew), it was released in panic attacks on the floor of the school toilets, crying so hard it comes out silent. No life lesson came of this other than to get the fuck away from people who make you miserable as soon as you can.

"At this age, there was no ability to rationalise...no strength or inkling of self-worth to combat the spiralling tornado of self-destruction was that circling my head"

Something good that did come out of my school was the councillor on hand. Sometimes I went to her if I needed to remove myself from a situation where I wasn't quite hysterical enough to cry on the floor of the toilets. She listened when I needed to rant and just let me sit in her office while she worked if I just needed a time-out. She eventually referred me to CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) which is the service where under-18s can get help with their mental health on the NHS, and when I was 16 I began therapy in the form of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). This was my first insight into how to control my inner dialogue and gain some control over the thoughts that turned into emotions that turned into behaviours. I went to sessions over the course of a year, I think, but I ultimately decided it wasn't for me. When I'm caught up in a hysterical moment, I didn't want to sit down and brainstorm my thoughts and emotions and figure out how I was going to behave next. At the end of the day, the fact this is a service that people under 18 can access is amazing and I'm so grateful for the opportunity. Knowing this wasn't the type of therapy for me in adult life was so useful, because I knew I could rule it out when I was looking for a therapist at 21. Doubtful and defensive, it took a good three sessions before I was comfortable with the therapist we'd found for me. I'm so pleased I persevered. I started CFT (compassion-focused therapy) during my third year of university and it was the best decision I ever made. I decided I'd gotten all I needed out of therapy in September 2022. Having the opportunity to speak to someone like my councillor in high school taught me the value of sharing how you're feeling, not to offload your problems onto them, but to at the very least hear your thoughts out loud, which can help you make sense of a situation or feeling, or even see it from the other party's point of view.

"Knowing this wasn't the type of therapy for me in adult life was so useful, because I knew I could rule it out when I was looking for a therapist at 21."

Attending a girls' school possibly fans the flame that is teenage angst. I'll say it: girls are competitive (not all - some are happy to keep their heads down and actually do their school work). Whether it's who dresses the best on non-uniform days (or every day when it comes to Sixth form) or who looks the best in front of the boys at the bus stop, the politics of being a teenage girl are exhausting. Maybe it was a good thing to not go to school with boys (as a straight girl myself) and not be distracted by a potential crush if you shared a class with them, but girls being girls, we always found something. The argument is this: if you send your child to an all girls' school in the hope that they won't be surrounded by (and therefore obviously distracted by) boys, they will seek them out instead. Well, some will anyway. Maybe I wasn't sat with boys all day, everyday at school, but at the end of every day we got to look forward to the watering hole that was the bus station in the centre of town. It wasn't the most romantic of places, with some very questionable members of the public hanging around as well as students from the local college and other schools (#rivalry), but sadly this was the social highlight of the day from the ages of 13 through to 16. Social experiments could have been done on the interactions of teenagers at this bus station. Who was standing with who? Who was taking cigarettes from who? How come they're speaking? I thought she just shagged her ex's cousin! It was important for your status who you were seen with (get too distracted, though, and you just might miss your bus) and if you were seen with someone unexpected for you, it was the hot topic for a good few days. It was at this point that the name-calling in the hallway struck up again. "Slag" was hollered at me down a busy hallway during a class change-over period by a girl in the year above me after the newest rumour was that I was seen at the bus station with someone she used to see (or shagged once ?? Not sure). I'm pleased I didn't waste any emotion or energy on that incident because of how staggeringly insignificant it is in the grand scheme o' things (and I think I ended up befriending the same girl months later in a typical drunken girl's toilet rendez-vous) but I did feel scared. Who knows who she knows? Unfortunately, although my school was an excellent school, it was situated in a town that could get pretty rough, and for some reason I was getting hated on just for being seen with someone. This made the walk I necessarily had to make to get my bus home anxiety-provoking. Looking back, I think I was already aware that being called names was not the be-all and end-all. I was well aware that it said more about how they feel about themselves than how they feel about you; they want to put you down to make themselves feel better. They want to make you doubt yourself and scare you away from social situations because they are intimidated by you. By the fact you don't need as much make-up to feel like you can step outside every morning. By the fact you're being spoken to by someone she likes. Unfortunately, all of these toxic social interactions still occur in adult life, and one of the joys of growing up has been to remove these people from my immediate circles.

Removing people that no longer brought me joy was something I didn't think I had figured out I was comfortable doing until my first year of uni. Then, while writing this I realised I had learnt how to do it during Sixth form. I was placed in a form with someone I had had an on-and-off relationship since day one, but is now actually one of my best friends in adult life (you know who you are, I love you) now we've got past our angsty teenage insecurities. Cutting people out is one of the most important things you can do for your self-worth, and only by laying down these boundaries do you teach yourself that you are worth having these boundaries. Step-by-step you will build the foundation of your self-worth by the people you allow in your life. If you allow people to use you, walk all over you, let you down, cancel plans, talk behind your back, etc., every day you allow that person to stay in your life, you are telling yourself that that is the type of person that you deserve to have in your life. And little by little, without you knowing, it will chip away at your self-esteem because this is the life you create for yourself, and this is what you think friendship is. I think it was my first year of Sixth form, so I was 16. I was absolutely miserable because this girl and I, for whatever reason, always seemed to rub each other the wrong way. We had been this way since Year 7, just two tiny (figuratively tiny; I was chubby, she was very tall) doe-eyed 11-year-olds that clashed on a few levels of the personalities we were still growing into. I asked my Head of Year to move me into a different form, because I just couldn't come into school every morning and be this miserable. And without knowing it, that was the first time I had recognised that I was worth more than being subjected to feeling like this every day; anxious if we were going to get on or not. I deserved to allow myself to be removed from this situation, even if I was anxious to be the outsider to this new form, I knew I would be happier. I didn't know it, but I had just laid my first building block to a better self-esteem.

"...Only by laying down these boundaries do you teach yourself that you are worth having these boundaries."

Since then, I have cut out handfuls of people in my life and every time it's like a weight lifted off my shoulders. You don't have to confront these people and tell them explicitly that you are ridding them from your life, you don't even have to block them on social media (unless it's called for and they seriously need to fuck off); usually what I do is just unfriend, unfollow, take a break, or stop chasing them. I lay down the boundary of "I've tried to make an effort with this person, I have put in the time, but I don't seem to be getting the same energy back right now, or even the intention that I will get this energy from them in future. I'm going to take a break from this person for a while, wait for them to come to me, and see where it goes." And don't get me wrong; it's not about never making an effort with anyone in an attempt to test to see who fights to stay in your life; no one else's life revolves around you. Like you, they have other circles. There's a difference between looking at a situation or friendship, or even a relationship, and seeing it with non-self-deprecating goggles on: have you not seen them for a while because they're genuinely super busy with work, or have they blatantly stopped making any sort of effort to get a date in to see you, even if it means booking three months in advance? Have they let you down the last four times you've tried to make a plan? If so, give them the benefit of the doubt, no need for an arsey keyboard-warrior confrontation, but just see if you ever see them again after you stop making the effort. When you make the active decision to let some people go, just see how much time and energy you have for the people that are there for you. Feel the weight off your shoulders when you let go of the need to stay friends with everyone you were friends with in high school. Your circle may get smaller after high school, but what an amazing circle it is.

I want to say thank you to my mother for choosing this school to send me to. It was great school - the people in it weren't your fault. I want to say a big thank you to the various councillors and therapists I've had over the years, although you won't ever read this. And I want to say the biggest thank you to my small circle of amazing girls and guys that I may or may not know from high school, but either way I am so happy to have actively chosen to have you in my life, and I am so grateful that you actively choose to have me in yours. I hope I make you feel as lucky and happy as you do me.