breaking the good girl contract

because I'd rather be dead than cute

I like to think of myself as someone who challenges the rules.
The ironic part? I can’t remember the last time I actually broke one.

I've always been the responsible girl, the mature daughter with good grades, the woman with decent manners, the overachieving employee, the girlfriend with good taste. On paper, it sounds like I had it together. In real life? It was a fast track to burnout.

Before you know it, you are wired for performance. You confuse admiration with love. Approval with belonging. Resentment with guilt. And eventually, feeling not exhausted starts to feel like you’re not doing enough. The worst part is that no one really gets to see the real you — not even yourself.

Good girls might be a lot of things: pleasant, reliable, kind.
But I’ve never met one who was truly happy.

We know what happiness looks like, we just don’t have the time to enjoy it. Every decision feels like a checklist. Every conversation, an audition. Every mistake a crisis of self-worth. And of course, there’s the gold star we all secretly hate: being the go-to people pleaser.

We wanna to do everything perfectly, but we can't bear the risk of failure, so we end up doing nothing at all.

Which makes me wonder: what’s the worst that could happen if I stopped performing? Would the world walk away or would I breathe a sigh of relief?

The other day, I went back to The Bell Jar — still one of my favorite books since my 2013 tumblr girl era — and the fig tree metaphor struck me again. It just hits different in your late twenties, when you realize the women who kept their chaos and possibilities hidden never made it into the history books. They were polished, predictable, constantly referred to as “cute”. And honestly, I feel a little sad for them, more than I do for Sylvia Plath.

At least she was provocative, creative. The ones we remember always are.
They don't wait for permission. They aren't chasing perfection. They eat their figs before they rot, even if their hands are dirty.

And for someone who’s always tried to be “good,” that kind of freedom feels… rebellious. At first, it’s scary. You feel like your whole life is slipping through your fingers, but then it clicks: you never really had control to begin with.

That’s when you stop obsessing over how things look and start asking how they feel. You realize that taking yourself too seriously didn’t protect you, it just made everything heavier. It was a form of self-abandonment in disguise all this time, and you question who you are underneath all that superficial effort.

But the good news is: you can unlearn the good girl thing.
The point isn’t to be “bad.” It’s to hear your own voice for once, or maybe for the first time ever. This isn’t about chaos for chaos’s sake either, it’s about being real and unapologetically yourself.

Oh, and don't say I didn't warn you: it's going to be a mess.
You’ll grieve and be angry with your old self at the same time — not to mention constantly feeling like the worst person in the world. (Especially if you’ve recently found Jesus, like I have. Good luck figuring out whether you’re disrespecting God or just disappointing someone’s idea of who you should be. But that’s a topic for another post.)

For now, and for the first time in my life, I'm comfortable sitting with the contradictions. This is, finally, where I figure it out as I go.

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