Learning to love; adolescence, girl code, jealousy and feral hearts
We thought with our hearts when we kept secrets we shouldn't have kept
Hello, I’m Laura. I write about relearning to live in my 30’s with themes of creativity, healing and self discovery. Subscribe to support my work & to read more.
Prologue
I have been learning to live more creatively as a way to slow down and heal. For anyone who is new you can read more about it in the post below.
As part of that process I have been exploring a few different mediums and have been drawn to collaging. I think this works for me because I have fully leaned into the idea that creativity isn’t about perfectionism.
When I was looking through my collages I noticed that they told a story, the earlier pieces revolved around themes of heartbreak and being a girl, followed by pieces exploring my creative journey and finally a collection of collages depicting love letters.
As I reflected on this I was reminded of Bell Hooks who said,
…it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.1
As a person who has always known love I often felt that I should not feel the absence of love and that to feel or admit lovelessness was to be fraudulent. But, I have felt unloved at times, not totally out of love - Dolly Alderton has highlighted that love comes in many forms2 - but not totally loved either.
And I think that’s because love is a language that isn’t used enough, when was the last time you loved as a doing word? Feeling love is so much more important than hearing love because saying ‘I love you’ comes too easily sometimes. And, with that said, I want to delve into platonic love, especially that all consuming love that teenage girls have for one another, in hopes that it will show me how to love as a verb.
When I was a teenager, from around 14-years-old to 19-years-old, I had some of the most intense relationships I have ever had. They revolved around a group of girls who were messily entangled in varying degrees of kindness, jealousy, affection, contempt and pride for one another. Although at the the time none of us knew what our feelings were or how to express them we knew we were bonded in some way by an unspoken girl code. The code, was not a set in stone thing, it evolved and changed and although we could not write down the rules, we always knew when someone had crossed the line, when someone had broken girl code.
But it kind of didn’t matter how much someone hurt someone or how much someone disliked someone or how jealous we were of each other, we had one goal that unified us all. That goal was to always stick together because beneath the bitchiness, the control and the power trips there was this unruly, feral kind of love for one another. That sisterly kind of love where we can be horrible to each other but someone outside of the group can definitely not be horrible to someone inside the group because to insult a member of the group is to insult the group. However, unlike sisters, we didn’t have a parent to keep us in line so we figured it out between ourselves, often in the most toxic, brutal and hurtful ways imaginable.
Toxicity aside, the love we felt for one another and the way we showed that (as a doing word) is unparallel to any other kind of love. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we thought with our hearts, not our egos.
We thought with our hearts when we hunted in packs for boys who had broken our friend’s hearts.
We thought with our hearts when we vowed to give someone (who had hurt one of the group) the silent treatment.
We thought with our hearts when we lied to each other’s parents about where we were staying.
We thought with our hearts when we kept secrets we shouldn’t have kept.
We thought with our hearts when we rescued our friends from perverts.
We thought with our hearts because we weren’t emotionally or intellectually intelligent enough to think any other way.
And although we can’t live by thinking with our hearts alone, because we know that it’s not healthy to blank people or to lie to people that want to protect us and sometimes someone tells us a secret that needs to be told, we are reminded that thinking with our hearts does show love in its own way.
And, over time, as we all became more aware of ourselves as individuals, rulers were overthrown and the group descended into chaos. You leave school, make new friends at work or college or university, and suddenly that shared goal of always sticking together doesn’t seem important. And although 15-year-old me would kill me if she knew I didn’t speak to some of those people now, I still love them with that tiny bit of my heart that’s still feral.
Bell Hooks - all about love
Dolly Alderton - Everything I know about love