On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

by Elise Loehnen

What’s me, versus the me I think I’m supposed to be?

If sins are intended as an internal compass, this directional guide is for our own use—nobody can or should decipher it on our behalf.

The naturalist E. O. Wilson said about the problem of humanity: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

Women, she had noticed, “are very cautious about feelings they believe are unacceptable.”

I thought about how shameful it is for women to express desire, in all parts of our lives—and how many of us would rather clip the bud of our ambition than experience the humiliation of being exposed for thinking we’re worthy of adding something meaningful to the world.

Gilligan asserts that to achieve full women’s rights, which we still haven’t done, we must enable “women to consider it moral to care not only for others but for themselves.”

We are trying to get to a place where we can assess our lives without feeling triggered by the ways in which our needs subjugated the lives of those who were required to tend to them.

When we shame another woman for dreaming and acting “big,” for daring to think she’s something special, we oppress our own potential.

My body said no because my throat wouldn’t open to say it for me.

Ego becomes an issue when it surges toward primacy and dominance rather than communion and co-creation.

We also rush to point out all our potential shortcomings to others before they’re pointed out on our behalf. After all, you can’t hurt us when we’ve hurt ourselves first.

How nice it would be to exist in a system where we value people not by how well they fit in but by what they uniquely contribute, how accurately they achieve the work of being who they are meant to be.

“The less you need to be to the world, the more you can be to yourself.”

It is a denial of source, or the universe, when we try to be something less than what we are.

What is it to want instead of merely responding to being wanted?

A friend once offered that she never cries because she’s convinced if she starts, she’ll never stop; I worry that once I start screaming, I’ll never shut up.

There are repercussions: We struggle to exist in discomfort without rushing to paper it over, to make everything OK. We are so eager for reassurance that we are worthy of love, that we are good.

In all this caretaking, we backburner our own needs, never lending them any heat, hoping, perhaps, that someone will notice our selflessness and reciprocate by taking care of us. This is often futile: It’s impossible not to feel resentful, to take that anger and turn it toward ourselves.

Fear of losing our relationships is the nut of it for women: If we push, self-define, and assert ourselves overtly, will we still belong? Will someone stick with us if we prioritize our own needs and desires first? It’s terrifying to contemplate.

Instead of “I am angry because they…,” he urges us to flip the script and say: “I am angry because I am needing….”

I demurred for months, knowing I would rush to make our relationship easy and comfortable rather than honoring my own pain: I didn’t trust myself not to abandon myself.

Leaning into honesty requires facing our fears of relational loss. It requires relinquishing the desire to please. It requires advocating for our own interests and needs, without apology.

To love requires that you will lose. But it is our one human imperative to wager it all, constantly. We must accept the prospect of grief and anguish in exchange for love.

Sadness is the most existential of all emotions—it is the death of connection—and its only cure is grief.

Getting on your knees is paramount to being able to get up again, an essential component of resurrection—to die to little things like hope, dreams, relationships, and jobs, again and again, to feel the loss, to understand that it meant something to you, it mattered.

what we currently perceive as “goodness” is just an adherence to external constraints: It is learned behavior. We have become so enslaved to ideas about how we should behave that we are tuning ourselves to the wrong radio station, pulling ourselves away from who we are. Ironically, our attempts to be “good” sever us from “the Good.”

perfectly human, already divine, on the road back to wholeness.