Girls Being Mean to Other Girls

From what I've witnessed growing up, our society as shown to enjoy putting others down. In one of the articles I read, the author claims "both genders bully, but girls are better at it; they are more switched on to the advances of social interaction and use psychological forms that are harder to detect and easier to deny, and they can do it with a smile." The first time I actually witnessed this was in 7th grade, when my so-called best friend decided not to talk to me for 2 weeks. I had bought the same shirt as her. I was devastated because it was the first time I had ever really believed I had a real friend and it turned out it wasn't so real at all. Afterwards my parents tried to convince me not to be friends with her anymore claiming she was controlling and overbearing, but because I felt as if she was my only friend, I didn't listen and continued to be her master puppet.

As I grew up I never was good with other children. In fact when I first moved here in 7th grade it was my first real chance to make friends. I was the kind of kid who if you said your favorite flavor was chocolate, and then I would say mine was too. But if you changed your mind to vanilla, I'd change my mind too. All I really wanted was to be accepted by the other kids. As I got older I continued to stay with the same group of friends. The same girls that would constantly harass me, call my cell phone repeatedly, and force me to eat alone in the lunchroom, and still, even then I felt like they were all I had. I remember sophomore year when I had gotten into a fight with the "queen bee" and I ended up being shunned by a group of 5 girls. I was forced to be my own friend for about a month after that, but soon after I was once again friends with them, blaming myself and proclaiming it was entirely my fault. Toward the end of that year I changed friends, friends who were into smoking, getting drunk, and whatever else they could get their grimy little hands on. I realized what a big problem drugs were in our school, but not only that, I finally found out what "peer pressure was." My low self-esteem caused me to become one of them, telling myself I was at last liked, and I fit in. I loved the phone calls I got constantly asking me if I wanted to smoke or go to a local party. I never had so much fun in my life. Only a few months after my nonstop smoking binge began, I got hooked on coke. Not only did it allow me to question the superior powers, but it allowed me to look at myself in a higher aspect, and made me much skinnier. Me hating the way I looked manifested from the fact that I was always larger than the other girls, and almost always called "big boned." The feeling of finally not caring about anything that went on in my life, overpowered me, and caused what many would call "an addiction."

In the article Mean Girls Rosalind Wiseman says "I've realized that it is the relationship between girls that is directly responsible for creating low self-esteem that leads woman toward abusive relationships, unwanted pregnancies, drug and alcohol addiction and a whole subset of poor self image manifestations from anorexia to bulimia." Now from this statement, can you actually say that because I was tortured by other girls as I grew up, that is what contributed to my drug addiction, abusive