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

by Elise Loehnen

It’s a strange experience—to appear to the world as calm and sedate, sleepy really, while contending inside with consuming anxiety. I felt a bit like a duck, paddling frantically beneath the surface, while appearing to glide with little effort on top.

I could feel something primal and angry, something rebellious and pissed, break free. I was trying to be good. I had always been trying to be good. I ran myself ragged; cared dutifully for my family, friends, and colleagues; punished my body so that it stayed a certain size; kept my temper in check. What would happen if I just…stopped?

its unfurling would cost me a lot, but it would give me back my life.

it’s only when we attempt to break free that we can feel just how tightly we’ve been restrained.

our tradition and culture have decreed that women are inferior in all ways: physically, spiritually, and morally. This social mythology has kept us desperate to prove our basic goodness and worthiness.

Women—the instigator for the fall of men—are at a notable disadvantage as a result: We are compelled to prove our virtue, our moral perfection. But we will never be able to prove our virtue, as the word itself is out of reach for women: Its etymology is Latin (vir), for man.

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

Now, in our secular culture, we turn to parents, critics, partners, bosses, even strangers on Instagram. We are easy to shame, eager to prove our worthiness, to seek validation from some power outside of ourselves.

We have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.

If I don’t unshackle her from these oppressive ideas of goodness, that part of her will slowly asphyxiate and I will never know what it will feel like to live fully as myself—not diminished, not bound, not scared.

When we overlimit ourselves, we become complicit in denying ourselves a full existence. We force ourselves to lead narrow lives. We fear crossing a line we can’t see. We don’t want to be perceived as wanting too much, or being too much; we equate “self-control” with worthiness.

We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be.

We are giving away our power and accepting exhaustion, resentment, despair, and disconnection instead. We deny ourselves joy, our rightful inheritance. Meanwhile, the world needs us, just as we are.

We have been led to believe that something primal and essential, our relationship to the universal force—God, nature, true self, whatever you want to call it—must be forced through the prism of an interpreter. And so we go there for approval, rather than trusting in ourselves.

fixating on proving ourselves worthy of it prevents us from recognizing that maybe this is the thing, and this is the place.

this directional guide is for our own use—nobody can or should decipher it on our behalf.

We’re trying to construct a new era of peace and equity from tired and worn-out materials, methods, and energy. But we cannot get to where we need to go by using the same old ideas.