There are few things more reassuring than when celebrities confess to facing the same existential struggles as the rest of us. In the unbelievably confessional track that is Girl, so confusing featuring lorde, zeitgeist artists Charli XCX and Lorde admit with disarming honesty and piercing self-awareness to the difficulties that can emerge in female friendships when comparisons and critiques are drawn between the two individuals that make up the bond.
“Like all best forms of art, Girl, so confusing is personal yet encompasses the universal, detailing specifics whilst simultaneously inviting the listener in”
Most of the time, female friends help us to untangle the knots that mercilessly clump together to make up this messy life. But these friendships can sometimes be more complicated than we would like to admit. Like all best forms of art, Girl, so confusing is personal yet encompasses the universal, detailing specifics whilst simultaneously inviting the listener in. There was a time when both artists failed to realise that they had the ability to intimidate one another, and that behind the other’s success was another woman struggling to work it all out: “She believed my projection … Forgot that inside the icon / There’s still a young girl from Essex.” Both singers admit in their own verses to the specific challenges that have plagued them during their friendship. Lorde points to her own insecurities surrounding her weight and appearance, compounded in Charli XCX’s presence: “I was so lost in my head / And scared to be in your pictures.” Charli XCX meanwhile concedes to a general confusion that riddled her feelings towards Lorde: “Sometimes I think you might hate me / Sometimes I think I might hate you.” They subsequently unite to sing on the chorus of the universality of their female struggle, “Girl, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”
“I was furiously jealous of her, concerned for her health, and loved her ferociously all the while”
Part of this is acknowledging that some of our best female friends are women with whom we are obsessed with, whom we admire and always want to be around, and therefore it is almost no surprise that we sometimes find ourselves drawing comparisons between ourselves and them. In turn, these comparisons can sometimes, against our conscious wishes, lead to jealousy. There is one moment in particular that I remember, with a former best friend, on a summer’s evening after a long day of meandering through a dusty old city. She was walking just ahead of me, and as I gazed at her skinny legs leading down to her flimsy sandals. I was furiously jealous of her, concerned for her health, and loved her ferociously all the while. This, for me, is the crux of female friendship, one of the most disarming bonds of love that the world has to offer.
“I understood female friendship in that moment better than I ever had before — that willingness to see all of someone’s humanity and stay by their side as they grow, to accept a friend’s multidimensionality and not determine their personhood on the basis of a singular act”
Sometimes you can think you are sharing absolutely everything with a friend and not realise the things you are withholding from them. These concealed thoughts are those that you may be ashamed of subsequently withholding, even from yourself. I think that, in the more sinister friendship breakups, when a decision to end things is taken by one person, there can be a lot of little things that build up over time, and yet a singular event might be pointed to as the explanation for the friendship’s termination. A female friend recently ended a friendship with me when I did something morally suspect, despite the fact that the act did not in any way pertain to her, and had only to do with my personal life. This now-former-friend could not see beyond what I had done. She chose to view it as being entirely representative of who I was as a person, rather than the act of a young woman who is daily finding her way in the world and working out the sort of person that she wants to be, figuring out which acts can align with her values, desires and morals, and which cannot. On the day that she left me, two other female friends turned up for me. They told me that yes, I had done a bad thing, but I was not a bad person, that I am young and learning and that that is what life is. They said that what she had offered me was not friendship but harsh judgement and sudden leaving. They told me that they were still my friends, of course they are. I understood female friendship in that moment better than I ever had before — that willingness to see all of someone’s humanity and stay by their side as they grow, to accept a friend’s multidimensionality and not determine their personhood on the basis of a singular act. To work it out, be it on the remix or elsewhere.
In leaving, men have hurt me, but the women who left have broken my heart. So this is to the girls who have stayed by my side through it all, who have watched me grow and have grown alongside me, who have made it all just a little bit less confusing, a little bit more manageable, and a lot more fun. It is, after all, so confusing to be a girl. I’m glad that Charli XCX and Lorde have managed to work it out. I’m grateful with all of my being for the women who have stuck with me through the times when I might not have been easy to be close to or easy to love. They stayed with me through the darkness, and now we get to walk together in the light, to dance together to songs like this one, which honour female friendship for all that it is.
