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The Cost of Perfection: Our Time, Our Sanity, Ourselves?
By Maggie Saylor '07
STAFF WRITER

I was not surprised to read in a recent issue of The New York Times about the pressure cooker in which today’s teenage girls find themselves—a societal atmosphere that demands perfection and participation in all things.

The bad news is that it doesn’t end in high school with a name-brand college acceptance letter. It never ends.

As a student here at Sweet Briar, I have learned that these “amazing girls” must quickly learn to be "amazing women." Students here are expected to complete multiple majors, speak a foreign language, study abroad, participate in student government, sports, and community service, all in addition to obtaining high-powered internships. What’s more, we are expected to be fashionable, sophisticated women who can dominate the work force, yet still manage to maintain social relationships. While our résumés may seem astounding as a result, most of us still struggle in the competition for jobs and grad schools.

Our experience at Sweet Briar is no different from that of women across the country. How do I feel about being a superwoman? I don’t know—I haven’t had time to think about it. But Sara Rimer’s story clarified one thing for me: by almost any standard I am an accomplished and successful student, but I sometimes have the scary feeling that nothing in my life is my own, and I have no idea how to set myself straight or where to go next.

The system perpetuates an ever-growing paradox. We attempt perfection and are applauded for our efforts. Success, however, only bears the demand for more success; we must continually aspire to greater goals in order to satisfy the demands of our teachers, our parents, or our employers.

We soon realize that our potential is in fact our curse. We stock our transcripts with the recommended courses, our résumés with the appropriate internships and activities, our personal lives with the correct sense of style, but we lose our individuality in the process. Suddenly it’s no wonder that the competition continues to be so great. Every applicant meets the requirements, but they are all the same. There is no room for originality among the perfect.

Such rigorous competition can be effective in encouraging excellence; high-schoolers (and college students) who take on everything from Statistics to Socrates face continually growing challenges in their curricula. Yet we are given little time to examine the consequences of such writers’ ideas in our own lives. Rather we follow the prescribed method for analyzing a work and producing an appropriate response.

There is little opportunity to internalize the world around us, allowing it to shape us into the people we wish to become. We must follow the required course for success. The article references a girl who decided to take advanced Latin courses against the advice of college counselors that she would appear better rounded if she chose a science course instead, regardless of whether she would have gotten more out of the Latin class. Here at Sweet Briar, science and math students are often discouraged by their advisors from studying abroad, despite the fact that there are plenty of programs that offer comparable science classes, simply because internships look better on a résumé.

We are encouraged to be ourselves, but often that message in fact asks us to define ourselves by our accomplishments. Our mentors, though usually well-intentioned, often do not encourage students to develop their individuality. They too subscribe to the supposed formulae for success. Professors and career counselors shake their heads in disappointment at the bright young government student who chooses not to go to an Ivy League law school but opts for non-profit work instead.

In addition to the stress brought about by our incredibly high goals, we must deal with the guilt of letting down those whose opinions matter most to us. We find ourselves aspiring to their dreams instead of our own, to an abstract cultural standard that equates success with happiness. How much meaning can be derived from a set of such arbitrary and universally applied expectations? The situation continues throughout college and on into the professional world, where we are encouraged to seek ambitious promotions and put in overtime so that we might “fulfill our true potential.”

I have been fortunate to receive a challenging, interesting education from a well-reputed institution that has provided many opportunities for me. I have certainly been offered the skills needed to pursue an acceptably successful lifestyle. Sometimes though, I look at my résumé and I wonder if my attempts at perfection will ever be enough to satisfy the norm. We suffer eating disorders, insomnia, migraines, psychological and emotional illnesses of every stripe, but even beyond that is the terrifying suspicion that our desperate attempts to do it all might have denied us the most important thing: the time we needed to find out what really matters.