Unhappy with an aspect of your life yet feel as if you really shouldn’t be? Let’s explore – and resolve – this catch-22
Last summer, I returned from a 500-mile backpacking trip across Colorado. It was my longest solo trip to date and I felt strong, capable and independent. But those feelings of self-sufficiency and accomplishment became background noise as I stared at myself in the mirror, in awe of what 23 days of intense physical output had done to my body.
My legs were toned, my abs were defined. Yet, even as I was (finally) proud of my appearance, I berated myself, thinking: ‘Why do you care? You were strong before this trip; why does this matter so much?’ I knew my actual accomplishments were more important than how I looked, but I was unable to separate the two.
Unfortunately, I’m not alone in my (reluctant) tendency to favour style over substance. The topvalued trait people look for in women is physical attractiveness, according to a 2017 report from the Pew Research Center in the US. Down towards the bottom of the responses? Independence and strength. The top-valued traits for men? Honesty and morality. And in the five years since this study, it feels as if the needle has hardly moved. If the popularity of image-altering apps such as Facetune (reportedly downloaded over 30 million times in 2021) and endless filters are any indication, this gendered data is as relevant as ever – perhaps even more so.
Eight months after my trip, I was standing in front of the same mirror, talking on the phone to my friend Allie. We consider ourselves feminist, progressive and body-positive. But our conversation spiralled into detailing our selfperceived physical faults.
At one point, we stopped ourselves. ‘We’re too good for this,’ we both said, feeling a surge of guilt that we’d wasted time criticising our bodies. It felt backwards, outdated. I was experiencing the same back-and-forth mindset as when I returned from Colorado, but this time, for the opposite reason. ‘I feel like I’m failing on two levels,’ Allie said, echoing what was in my head. ‘I’m failing because I don’t look like I want to, but I’m also failing because I feel like I’m too smart to care about this any more.’
The more I thought about it, the more this feeling of ‘double failure’ had become second nature. Many, if not most, women spend the majority of their lives at the intersection of mixed messaging that applauds women for not conforming to social norms yet offers no relief from the conflicting feedback that pushes those so-called ideals on us.
‘Social comparisons lurk behind every corner, from conversations with other parents [if you have children] to messaging from highly curated social media accounts,’ says psychologist Ellen Kolomeyer, founder of Unpolished Parenthood.
The clashing thoughts you may have when a glammed-up
