We’re all pretty lucky that there are a lot of kick-ass female role models out there now. Forget the movies, even in real life you don’t have to look far to find powerful women absolutely crushing it; through their careers, their families, their political and social impact. I feel genuinely proud to see so many amazing women succeed and knowing that, just maybe, that might be me one day. On one level all that greatness is really, truly inspiring. But on another, watching all those Super Girls succeed only seemed to point out all the ways I wasn’t.
The Super Girl Dilemma is a term coined back in the 2000s; a plucky description of the immense and crushing weight women and girls feel to maintain a sense of perfection. It focused mostly around the struggles of high school and puberty but I’ve always thought the pressure for perfection sizzled away well into female adulthood. There are now so many ways to measure success (or, as the inner-critic would put it, lack thereof) whether its based on academic performance, your somewhat barren LinkedIn profile, the perpetual need for more extra-circulars to add to that resume…. The list goes on.
The Super Girl solutions are focused on all the ways you can have it all. Whether it’s making a to-do list or tackling tasks in a special order to maximise efficiency it seems there’s a neat new way to tackle everything. But the dilemma is, at some point, things get stuck. There’s only 24 hours in a day and only so much you can do. There’s a point when the best laid plans, the most aesthetic bullet journals, just don’t work and stuff gets missed. When you set the expectation that you need to be perfect, to always be succeeding and progressing, failure can hit really hard. Especially when you look around it seems like everyone else is doing so much better than you.
American author Nora Roberts explained it pretty well when she described the pressures placed on women like juggling a lot of different balls. Maybe one is finishing up a uni assignment, another is meeting a deadline at work, catching up with friends, keeping on top of your emails. There are tons of them and, because we’re all only human, there isn’t really a way to catch them all. But as Nora explains some of these balls are made of glass and some are made of plastic. Some are crucial and shatter everywhere if you drop them, others bounce and there’s no harm done. The trick is learning to tell the difference.
It’s not an easy thing to learn. It takes more than just learning to prioritise things. There’s a second step — learning to let things go. It takes letting yourself mess up, drop the metaphorical ball every now and then, and — crucially — forgiving yourself for it.
Overcoming the Super Girl Dilemma isn’t going to happen overnight. Like any habit, self-love and self-forgiveness can take a lifetime to truly master. But it can start with the simple reminder that you are enough. I’m sure you’re juggling a lot right now. Maybe everything will stay in the air, maybe not. No matter what comes crashing down just know that you can always pick it up, and start again.
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