i spent my adolescence adoring movies centered around growing friendships, especially between girls. aquamarine, mean girls, wild child, sleepover, the clique; all movies with cute 2000s fashion and vibes that you just cant re-create these days. that being said, i feel like you get two kinds of friendships displayed in these movies. a toxic dynamic and a healthy one. the friendship in aquamarine has its ups and downs, as every friendship does, but its generally a beautiful, lighthearted tale where 3 girls learn to value the love they have for each other. a similar sentiment can be said about wild child, where poppy's vulnerability in a foreign country drives her into the arms of her roommates who all begin to bond and form a love for one another.  then we get another type, like mean girls where the dynamic is often focused on power, envy and toxic validation.

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have you seen the move thirteen? i only ever saw it for the first time about a year ago. i think i was definitely too young to see it when it originally came out. but evie and tracy's friendship was one that really resonated with me. they loved each other but simultaneously envied eachother. i think a lot of the time that dynamic is really real and relatable. a lot of us have had a friendship where some days you loved each other and other days you felt, for lack of better words, unsafe, in their presence. tracy initially befriends evie for all the wrong reasons, feeling uncool, wanting to feel validated, wanting to be like evie. evie initially greets tracy's advances with behaviour akin to hazing. it's only by stealing and "proving" herself as a bad girl, that evie ever takes tracy seriously. over time, the two begin a toxic dependency on each other, ultimately resulting in being caught and separated. i think of all the iconic 2000's girl's movies, it portrays the most nuanced friendship, where we see the girl's simultaneously love each other intimately but also feel jealousy of one another.

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in all honesty, jealously can be healthy. jealously can give us drive to move forward and achieve our dreams. but you can also get lost in it. it can literally make you sick. we can get so lost in what we don't have and someone else does, that we forget the reason we feel anger or animosity for a person in the first place. it took me a while honestly, to discover the type of jealousy i sometimes had for my friends was unhealthy, and the only way i was going to stop feeling this negative cloud over my head was to make changes and focus on what i want. not on what other people had. my friendships became so much more pure after that revelation. i used to envy my friends for positive things that happened in their life. instead now i cheer them on because i'm happy for them. i stopped viewing life through a dark, negative filter and suddenly the good things just began to slowly gravitate toward me.

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the friendships where we dress up together, do each other's makeup and hype each other up was something i yearned for so badly but never felt i had authentically till more recently in life. it's acutally quite hard because now my closest friends live quite far away. despite that, we still contact eachother and i've found a super sweet community of like minded girlies online. it's a dream to finally have found a ton of girls who just want to be cute and see other's be cute. it's like a breath of fresh air to finally let go of the world of jealousy.

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xo sugar xo

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