Displacement and Belonging

This past week I had an experience of someone I know feeling displaced when she was with two of her longest and best friends. One of my close "Rome" friends, we'll call her A (she goes to SMC, I just met her on the Rome program), came to me upset about an issue of essentially, displacement. She was feeling left out and somewhat abandoned by her two friends, B and C, for a few reasons, the main one being that they both now attend Notre Dame and not Saint Mary's. One of them transferred at the beginning of this year, and the other one went to Rome with us, and transferred at semester. Seems like a lot going on, but its essential girl drama-I'm sure most of you can keep up :) A was upset because she has been trying to keep close with B and C, and has been succeeding for most of the semester until now. A has been working to keep these friendships because she has known B since the beginning of high school and C since the beginning of her time at SMC, and they were Rome roommates. But now, A feels B and C have been changing their plans and saying they were invited to more exclusive events and parties by their new "friends"-since they're ND girls and not SMC ones. To A, and it would to me too if I had that happen, it hurt A LOT. A feels betrayed, forgotten about, and unloved by two of her best friends, and in a way displaced I think. She doesn't know how this happened or why, especially since these are supposed to be her friends. A bigger issue here is that all three of them have been aligning themselves with stereotypes it seems: A is the SMC girl vs. B and C, the ND girls. How did three friends who were so close get stuck in such a situation?

This situation also led me to make some connections to Woolf's relation of how she wasn't allowed into the library or chapel alone at Oxbridge since she was a woman. A isn't invited to these parties since she's a SMC girl, not an ND one like B and C. 

Displacement can have many meanings, as we discussed at the start of Othello and asked What is displacement? For A, it's feeling out of place with two of her best friends. Often our location and surroundings can change us, affect us, and how we identify ourselves can too. Rome changed me and many of the other girls I was there with. For me, it wasn't anything like a complete personality change, but smaller, yet significant, changes. It seems to be happening once again with B and C attending ND and not SMC. A is noticing a change in who they are, and it hurts when she's not doing the changing too. Place changes us. Displacement can happen even with two of our best friends.