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| Our blog tribe taking a selfie with DJ Run in the background at the #BlogHer14 closing party. (Photo courtesy of Neil Kramer. Used with permission.) |
Usually when one thinks of cliques, images from high school
resurface. You envision the Mean Girl Lunch Table with its captain holding court. You recall her “Uh, why is she even trying to talk to us?”
face and their nasty giggles as you walked away. You see hair flipping in your
face as the cool girls breeze by you and your non-existence. The term “clique”
doesn’t have a positive connotation.
As adults, we tell ourselves that the sting from those
experiences is gone. We’re all better than that now, right? It’s been like
twenty years, so can we all move on? Well, not necessarily.
If you don’t think cliques exist in adulthood, you’re
probably in one. That’s not a slam against anyone – it’s hard to see a thing
for what it is when you’re in the middle of it. Maybe you’ve always been part
of the cool crowd, so you’ve never experienced the exclusion. Or maybe you were
the one excluded in high school, so now you can’t fathom treating someone else
that way and don’t realize that you do it. Either way, you probably don’t mean to be a clique because it goes
against your definition of self. Most of us are not very self-aware.
My definition of a clique is a circle of friends that is
exclusive – or wants others to believe they are exclusive – and they exclude
others because they have to. I believe people on the inside of cliques are just
as insecure as those whom they are excluding. A new person might threaten the
status of an existing member, and if the group gets too big, small groups might
splinter off. New members endanger the precarious thread of security that holds
the clique together.
I’m not saying all groups of friends are cliques. I run in
several circles: I have my group of college friends that live in Michigan and Boston. I have my local “mommy friends” (although I no
longer think that term defines us) whom I met after Quinn was born and have been my lifeline for the past three and half years. And thanks to
BlogHer, I have my new Blog Tribe.
I don’t think of any of us as exclusive, but I’m on the inside of these
circles, so who knows what people on the outside are feeling.
At BlogHer, I was definitely on the outside. As a
first-timer, walking into a sea of thousands of women, all of whom seem to know
each other, I could’ve easily just blended into the wall paper. Assuming
there were images of women standing alone and gulping wine on the wall paper.
Luckily, two amazing ladies I met at Springboard
were there, and they introduced me to three more amazing ladies, and we became
a tribe. Without them, #BlogHer14 would have been a very different experience.
I took great comfort in knowing whoever got to the keynote sessions first would
reserve a table for all of us. I liked knowing I wouldn’t have to scan the room
of thousands of women looking for an empty seat three times a day. I wouldn’t
have to introduce myself again and
risk being rendered uninteresting. “Is
this seat taken?” is an anxiety-inducing sentence for me to utter.
The few times, I did venture out on my own away from the
safety of my blog tribe. I talked to several new people, all of whom were
cordial, but not everyone was “welcoming.” No one said, “Hiiii! So great to meet you! Come over here. Join us. Here, let me
introduce you….” Each person seemed like they were hoping our conversation would
end soon so they could get back to the safety of their own tribe. (The
exceptions to this were my BlogHer buddy, MomoFali,
and my tribe ladies. They put their arms around me – literally and figuratively
– and introduced me to other people. I love
these ladies! They were like a security blanket. Plus they smelled good.)
However, others were not as willing to welcome me into their
groups, but I can’t blame them. There’s safety in numbers. There is validation.
There is belonging. All of these needs are on Maslow’s Hierarchy, so why do we
fault people for seeking to fulfill them? I mean, if you walked up to some
random woman at the grocery store and complimented her shoes, would you expect
her to become your insta-bestie? Of course not. So why would you expect women
at blogging conferences to behave any differently? That isn’t how the world
works.
For example, I entered into a lottery to be chosen for a
sponsored event during BlogHer, and I got invited to attend. Thirty-something attendees
were drawn at random, yet by some miraculous coincidence, there was a group of
four or five women there who obviously new each other quite well. When we were
divided into sub-groups of eight, these women insisted they could not be
separated and went into the same group. I attempted to make small talk with these
women, and they were cordial, but they were definitely not interested in
getting to know me.
When you have thousands of people at a conference, you
probably have a pretty representative sample of the population. Some people are
going to be nice and some people are not. And
that’s okay. I had realistic expectations going in, and so my feelings
weren’t hurt. I fully expected people to be people.
Even though the number of nice, warm, welcoming women I met
at BlogHer was far greater than those who were not-so-much, I might not attend
another big conference unless I know at least one other person there who will
let me attach myself to her hip because I’m pathetically insecure in those
situations. Small, niche conferences might be more my speed.
Please visit these ladies. They're RAD! MomoFali, Red Shutters, Busy Since Birth, Napkin Hoarder, Another Version of Mother, and Squared Mommy. And if you want to join our lunch table, please pull up a chair!
