Exclusive | These high school mean girls grew up, but did they change? Im so scared of karma
Chea Eagleson realized she was a mean girl while lying on the floor of an Indiana crack den.Then 17, the party girl was sprawled on the beer-stained carpet at 2 a.m.
as two small, feral children slept by her side.Before dropping out of high school the previous year, Eagleson had spread rumors that a classmate’s scab-surrounded mouth was really an outbreak of facial herpes, blocked her school lunch table from anyone but the “party girls” clique, and regularly got kicked out of class for disrespecting her teachers.The reformed mean girl is now 36 and works as a minister and substitute teacher at her old stomping grounds, occasionally working alongside some of the same teachers she used to torture.The mother of four says that because of an abusive home life and a deep desire to belong to something outside her troubled family, joining a clique of lip-glossed teen tyrants felt urgent to her survival — even though they were “spiteful and deeply anguished individuals,” Eagleson admits.As her friends partied with older guys in the next room, Eagleson says her “inner child” emerged, wondering why she was so unloved — and why she would make anyone else feel as unworthy as she felt.“I was like, ‘Why are these kids here? What am I doing here?’ I don’t want to be this person…It was something that shifted.”Eagleson represents a horde of former “mean girls” who swear they’ve grown up — and are ready to take responsibility for their actions.
They type their victims’ names into social media search bars seeking to make amends.They lie awake hoping their own young daughters won’t be targets of similar cruelty.
And they wonder if every hardship, from a layoff to a random fender bender, might be karmic payback for their teenage sins.But even after developing a fully formed frontal lobe, can a former high school mean girl ever truly change?“Absolutely,” Christina King, a California therapist who specializes in helping tween and teen girls,...