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

by Elise Loehnen

all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of ourselves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear. We wonder: Who am I? What do I want and need? How do I find my purpose and serve? Our greatest imperatives are to belong, to love and be loved in return. Yet life gets in the way. Sometimes interference comes from tangible constraints that are outside our control—traumatic childhoods, systemic injustice, natural disasters—but more frequently, the barriers that keep us from full expression of our potential are intangible. These are whisperings of self-doubt, limiting beliefs, or social constructs of roles and responsibilities: What’s appropriate for each of us to want, and to do? These gossamer threads tie us up or pull us along like marionettes. They are the long tails of cultural programming, a legacy that clings to us as we move throughout the world.

Centuries ago, the people mediating between supplicants and God were priests. 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.

I recognize that the ways in which I want to be seen do not align with who I know myself to be. There is a deeper, more real me. I keep her largely hidden, mediate her through these filters, make sure she remains in check. I always believed it was dangerous to let her out. But now I’ve come to understand that it’s more dangerous to keep her bound: 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.

In worrying about everything we do not want to be, in suppressing our instincts and impulses out of fear or shame, in attempting to be “good,” we’ve forgotten who we are—all special, all “divine” in our own individual ways. We’ve gone unconscious and, oddly, unnatural. We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be. We are so fixated on an authority “out there,” we’re missing the miracles inside, all the moments that illuminate our connection to something bigger within ourselves. 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 were always going, we would never get stuck. If we contributed—had important jobs—then we could anchor ourselves to some bigger idea of belonging, of security. To this end, we could do anything we wanted with our lives, so long as we did something, and did that something with unyielding insistence. If we stopped moving, perhaps she feared, we would get used to the stillness, turn lazy.

Kristin Neff, who studies self-compassion, this approach fits a common worldview: the belief that being kind to ourselves is the gateway drug to indolence, that we will become lazy or self-indulgent unless we propel ourselves forward through hate and judgment.