Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf is an iconic queen of mean and the Upper East Side.

“I’m the best of the best. I’m Blair Waldorf.”

In her quest for power and control, she definitely made a lot of mistakes, but she actually got a lot more right than she gets credit for – both in her understanding of how her world really works and in the ways she had to learn to grow as a person. So let’s take a look back at Blair’s outlook on life and relationships, how she changed (or didn’t…,) and the most important lessons she can teach us.

POWER IS A BATTLE (THAT ISN’T ALWAYS WORTH IT)

Blair Waldorf isn’t content with just being powerful, she wants to be on top at all times. Growing up in Serena’s shadow and under the thumb of her judgemental mother, Blair came to have a very shrewd understanding of what her world rewards. She understands that, no matter how hard she tries, she’ll never be an effortless It Girl like Serena, beguiling people with her shiny hair and mysterious need to always be somewhere else. And so she instead set her sights on gaining power through things she can stake out influence in like grades and fashion. With the help of her minions, who she keeps on a tight leash, she always knows what’s going on and is able to find ways to flip situations to her advantage – and she’s not afraid to be very ruthless in her pursuit of her goals.

“You can’t make them love you, but you can make them fear you.”

She’s able to take a step back and look at the larger picture to pull together a deeper understanding of predicaments that befall her to make sure that in the end, she wins no matter what.

“Leave it to Blair Waldorf to know that bitches don’t just happen, they’re made by parents even more wicked than their offspring.”

She also struggles to rule over her romantic relationships, first trying to force herself and Nate to be the ultimate high school power couple no matter how unhappy they both were, then going on to get stuck in a never ending back and forth with Chuck.

Of course, her biggest battle for power is with frenemy Serena. We first meet the pair after Serena has disappeared for an entire school year and Blair took the spot of queen bee in the resulting power vacuum. Upon Serena’s return, Blair is clearly aware that her time on top is under threat and so works harder and harder to try to hold her ground. But in this battle we can also get our first insight into what really drives Blair: her deep sadness and insecurity. Sure, she’s mad at Serena for coming back and stealing the spotlight yet again, but she’s really upset at the fact that her best friend disappeared without a trace for a whole year without even letting her know what was up.

“Do you know what it was like calling your house when you didn’t show up for school and having your mom say, ‘oh, she didn’t tell you that she moved to Connecticut?”

And over the course of the show, we continually see how Blair has a hard time coming to terms with how hard she has to work to feel like she has control over her life while it seems like everything comes so easily to Serena. Because she doesn’t have the easy influence of Serena, she instead feels the need to rule with an iron fist. While she’s technically not wrong about this being an effective means to garner power over the others around her, it also means that her rule is very tenuous – everyone’s always looking for any reason to knock her down a peg. And even she often feels crushed under the weight of her own persona, even if she tries to deny it.

“Not everyone wants to be Blair Waldorf.” “Not everyone can be.”

But Blair’s struggle for power with Serena is so particularly interesting because it’s also one of the biggest parts of her life where she is at times able to truly let go and accept not being number one. No matter how much they fought and schemed against one another, at the end of the day they had a deeper connection that was more important than silly social power, and even Blair learned to put her need for dominance aside and focus on being a friend. And this is all part of one of the most important lessons Blair learns over the course of her story…

LET GO OF THE CONSTANT NEED FOR CONTROL

Even though Blair was incredibly rich and at the top of the social strata of the Upper East Side, she constantly felt like her life was slipping out of her control. So much of her life had been plotted out and molded by other people who did not have her best interest at heart.

“My mother just decides everything. Everything is totally up to her.”

And so in every aspect of her life she could, she sought out any way to at least feel like she had control over her situation and the things that were happening to her. This played out in a number of self-destructive ways, including her disordered eating – which was borne out of her mother’s quiet cruelty and because food was one of the few things she felt that she could always control. In addition to her mother’s treatment, Blair feeling abandoned by her father led her to feeling completely unmoored. This made her take an even tighter grip on everyone who was still in her life, which usually led to her trying to control them in an effort to make sure that they could never leave her.

Over time, Blair honed her need for control into a finely tuned weapon. But the real thing she eventually got right was learning when to use this power and when to relinquish control. Her ability to scheme and run into battle against anyone certainly helped her and her friends get out of several sticky situations, but the fact that it was a compulsion for her meant that it also caused her a lot of grief. And so over time she came to better understand that even she, queen bee Blair, can’t control every single thing in the entire world, and that’s okay. And it’s through this growth that she’s able to begin finding real moments of happiness and connection with those around her.

BE THERE FOR THE PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT

Blair is, of course, capable of being vicious to anyone, even those closest to her. But underneath the mean shell she uses as armor is a very loyal, caring person. She doesn’t always show that side of herself in the best ways, especially since it often presents as an effort to control the people she cares about because she thinks she knows what’s best for everyone.

“Serena is so grateful because she likes to see the best in people. I like to see the truth.”

But she is willing to drop everything for the people she holds dear, and even comes to defend others that she never thought she would see as equals. Blair certainly does not always go about being a friend in the best way, but deep down she understands how important it is to have people in your corner, and how that means that you need to be there for them, too.

She’s able to step out of her ice queen role and be a real friend when she can tell one of her friends is really down, and is especially always willing to find a way to help Serena out of a bad time.

“What are you doing tonight?” “Feeling sad and eating takeout.” “No, you’re coming to Paris.”

It’s often in the most dramatic, sometimes dangerous, moments in her friends lives that her willingness to be there for them no matter what really shines.

“We’re sisters. You’re my family, what is you is me. There’s nothing you could ever say to make me let go. I love you.”

One of the most melodramatic moments of the show’s first season was the iconic “All About My Brother” cliffhanger. Naturally, one might assume that mean girl Blair would immediately use this information to blackmail Serena and make her life hell, but she instead chooses to stand by her friend and make sure she knows that she’s not alone.

APOLOGIZE (EVEN WHEN IT’S HARD)

It can be difficult for anyone to own up to being in the wrong, but for an ultra-controlling queen bee like Blair, it can feel nearly impossible. But even with her penchant for bad behavior, she did often manage to come around and realize when she went too far, and was often even willing to apologize. A major source of her growth in this area was learning to be more upfront about what was actually wrong – what she was truly angry about – so that issues could really get resolved instead of just continually escalating. And as she started to become more aware of what was really driving her anger, she became more able to have these more truthful conversations and reach new levels of understanding with the people she cared about, even if she still needed a little push. Given how often she was unkind to others, she probably never really apologized as much as she should, but the fact that she was willing to at all does separate her from a lot of other on screen mean queens.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF CHANGE

Initially, one of the things Blair feared most was change. Her abandonment issues and her constant concern that she would be totally left out of power and become a pariah combined to create a constant undercurrent of fear that any change in her life would only lead to negative consequences, and so the status quo must be maintained at all costs. But not even Blair Waldorf can stop the natural ebbs and flows of life. Over time, however, she comes to accept that this isn’t always a bad thing – sometimes the things you weren’t expecting aren’t disastrous but instead amazing, and sometimes it is worth the risk to find out.

“You have to decide what’s important: keeping your pride and getting nothing, or taking a risk and maybe, maybe having everything.”

Serena was constantly working to get Blair to relax and go with the flow and shake her out of her inclination to let her fear of change stop her from taking big leaps in life. And sometimes things don’t work out, and that’s okay, too.

Blair comes to understand the power of accepting change in many of her relationships, like accepting that her mother’s new husband Cyrus is actually pretty great. She goes from battling Jenny for high school dominance to working with her on a fashion line. Probably her biggest change is opening herself up to a relationship with Lonely Boy himself. Initially she and Dan were constantly at odds – he saw her as an elitist meanie and she saw him as a sneaky interloper – but even early on they found that they actually had more in common than they thought. They eventually realized that they shared a lot, from tastes in books and movies to having a real drive to go after what they want in a way their other friends didn’t. Her time with Dan allowed her to access her more human side and focus on things she cared about outside of her relationships. And because they weren’t constantly in a battle for power within their relationship, she was able to feel a level of security. Over the course of the show, Blair again and again came to realize that change doesn’t have to be the end of the world, and can in fact be the start of a wonderful new one.

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately Blair didn’t get to totally have the arc that she deserved – in the later seasons a lot of her growth was undone in service of forcing her back into her relationship with Chuck and keeping her as a more stereotypical mean girl. But even in spite of that, there is a lot of interesting personal evolution and even good to be found in her story. She exemplifies both the dark reality of the elite world and the fact that there can be a lot more going on with a mean queen bee than meets the eye.

“Somewhere in between getting sold for a hotel and selling out for a tiara, I lost myself. But I want to be found.”

She shows us that no matter how much we might want to control everything in the world, letting go can actually be the most rewarding thing of all. (But also there’s nothing wrong with bringing out your Queen Bee side every once in a while!)