Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls - Softcover

chapter one

The Supergirl Manifesto

Since When Is Being "Super" a Bad Thing?

What makes the perfect girl?

-- A Seventeen.com article that shows guys weighing in on the personal and physical traits that create the "perfect" female

Jenna was supposedly perfect. She was the valedictorian of her senior class -- the girl whom the guys wanted to get with and the girls wanted to be. There were rumors going around that she had an almost perfect GPA from all four years of high school, that the hottest guy in the senior class had a blatant crush on her, and that she spent her vacations in Cancun tanning in a thong bikini. She was always playing sports -- she skied and ran avidly -- and she led lots of school activities. Pretty much everyone in her town knew about her: even parents who never actually met her knew of her personal prowess.

But it's not like she was one of those mean perfect girls: she was shockingly nice and kind to everyone, even to the losers and the unpopular kids who talked to her, hoping to get that buzz from just conversing with her. She smiled constantly and dressed as though Abercrombie and Fitch's senior designer lived in her closet. She had been accepted at one of the best colleges in the country, yet rumor had it that she didn't have a major planned, because she wanted to stay open to being a doctor or an engineer or something within the humanities: she was smart and seemed interested in every subject! Plus, just to reiterate, she was one of the most beautiful young women most people had ever seen, with glossy hair and a perfect body and a kind of relaxed glow to her that made everything she did look effortless. Unfortunately, to the contrary, a week or so before graduation, she was admitted to the local psychiatric hospital for some combination of bulimia, depression, and exhaustion. And no one really knew what to say except, "I thought she was perfect."

Supergirls: they're the girls with the perfectly blow-dried, shiny hair who sit up perfectly straight while taking notes during their fourth AP class of the day, or who walk across the campus quad in perfect outfits, hand-in-hand with their fraternity president boyfriends and iPhones glued to their ears. Or they're the young women who take on extra projects at work, yet still manage to win over all of their coworkers at the watercooler and grab their boss a latte on the way in to work. And while doing all of this, there is an unsaid pressure to make it look like they're airy and energetic, like they "just wanna have fun!" Supergirls seem to have everything: the education, the boyfriends, the friends, the looks, and the awards...but they're probably missing something, too. After all, is it really healthy for young women to aspire to appear effortlessly perfect?

As predicted, all really isn't perfect in the land of perfect girls. As poor Jenna demonstrated, the young women who appear to have it all are often about to lose it all at any given moment -- or at the moment that their minds and bodies say, "Sorry, I just can't do it anymore!" While our society puts a high premium on young women doing it all and making such overachieving look easy -- or, ideally, effortless -- our bodies and brains can only take so much.

Growing up as a girl is a kind of weird tango today. It's about being smart, well rounded, and successful -- someone your parents can brag about at family reunions and someone your friends can give glowing introductions for at dinner parties -- but also still being all the things that we've understood girls to be for the past hundred or so years -- amenable, self-effacing, sweet, and, of course, pretty. Trying to be powerful gets a little confusing when you have to apologize for it and make up for it...and making up for it is doing all the things that are considered feminine.

What makes things ever more complicated is that there's no official role for girls today: we see women as sex objects on MTV, and we see young women as professionally powerful but picking catfights and obsessing over guys on TV (ah, Grey's Anatomy), but most girls I spoke with said that girls were most often class president, and women now outnumber men at most of the best universities in the country. Despite women's progress, girls are raised to be "good," but because no one has any clue what "good" is today -- an old-fashioned term to describe the female ideal -- young women feel the push to be good at everything. So, what's a forward-thinking gal to do? Because of the media saturation in our generation, there has been a high premium put on making adolescence look fluffy and pink; college being exclusively about drinking, hookups, and getting addicted to your hair straightener; and the twenties being about wine in a box and buying throw pillows for your first apartment. It's not considered appropriate to be exploring your issues or even having crises. It's about trying to have all this confusion under control.

This perplexity gets wrapped up in the Supergirl dilemma. Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage," and young women are really taking that to heart, trying to act as though doing everything is something they enjoy and something that comes naturally to them. They try to be occupied every minute of the day. But they're generally always in the process of fending off some serious struggles...and it's a secret. Girls like Jenna -- and many more who you'll meet in this book -- pulled it off for a few years, doing everything, pleasing everyone, and making it all look easy. Suddenly, their bodies and brains gave out on them, and they had anxiety attacks, mental breakdowns, and some severe physical problems. Whenever I chatted with a girl for my research in this book, I tried to ask her if her constant overworking ever resulted in a breakdown or a health issue...and almost half said yes, whether it was developing anxiety from feeling like they had so much to juggle or being urged by their therapist to pare down their activities after having a mental breakdown at school.

But if girls aren't popping Adderall or dieting for the sake of dieting, it seems like, for them, waking up in the morning just welcomes another day of agita: as one girl put it, "I hate relaxing. It's not something I do well." But what's the point of living if life is such a chore? Well, Supergirls may have answered that question in September 2007 when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control released the results of a study that found rates of suicide among girls had risen exponentially, with a 32 percent increase among 15- to 19-year-old girls and a 76 percent increase among 10- to 14-year-old girls.

One of my good friends is a perfect girl. She's pretty, she graduated from an Ivy League college, she's skinny and well dressed, and everyone likes her. The only weird thing about her is that she doesn't drink coffee or eat spicy food. Why? She has ulcers from being so stressed! But you'd never know it looking at her. When we meet a "perfect" girl, we often wonder, "What's her secret?" But we should really be looking for different kinds of secrets: not what hair products she uses to get such shiny tresses or how she balances all her activities without ever seeming spent, but what she's trying to make up for or what she's trying to hide.

Meet the Supergirls

At 8am, in the heat of summer at Syracuse University, 16-year-old Katie, a Rome, New York, native, takes notes feverishly in a journalism course aimed toward high school students. She is working on a story for the class about an upcoming speech that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is giving at Syracuse University in the fall, and she feigns being awake in class even though she was up late for the past few nights chilling out with the other kids in the dorm. In between the seven hours of daily classes, she balances chasing down sources for her article, keeping tabs on her overcaffeinated friends, and calling her boyfriend back home.

A few months later, Allie, 19, is dodging puddles on I Street in Washington, D.C., guarded by a bubble-like clear umbrella. It's past dinnertime -- she's been going all day at classes and internships -- and she is still energetic and friendly. Not to mention, she has hours' worth of studying to do...and her focus is not even tempted by the sound of laughter from the pubs we pass where students are drinking beer. With a goal of becoming a top Washington lobbyist, nothing seems to distract her from her work.

A few weeks later, at 11am on an unseasonably cold Monday in October, Yolanda, 27, takes a break from her fancy banking job in midtown Manhattan to grab an early lunch at a nearby restaurant, where she picks at a sweet potato and chicken breast. She's attractive and curvaceous, and is checked out by several guys who are probably her peers in the industry; she doesn't notice them and is probably too busy to care. The streets outside buzz with life and activity -- I'm pretty sure I saw a pack of models leaving their hotel down the street -- but Yolanda is relatively focused on talking about one of her best accounts. Yolanda's job is kind of swanky: she exclusively handles private banking for individuals worth over $35 million.

In early November, Pegah, 15, eats a slice of pizza without getting grease anywhere on her outfit in a quaint pizza parlor down the street from her school in Valley Stream, New York. Her friends, virtually all in some combination of North Face fleeces, tight jeans, cheerleading skirts, and UGGs, talk about the events of the day and tomorrow's football game against the school's biggest rival. Pegah listens and tells an occasional joke, but also skims through her notes at the crowded table; this is pretty much the only time she'll "relax" the entire day, given that hours of studying are to come...on a Friday night!

Meanwhile, 18-year-old Leah, who chose SUNY-Albany over her pick of prestigious colleges for financial reasons, has kept busy for her entire first semester at college, filling time between classes with the Student Senate, Spanish clu...