Unpacking Our Personal Perfects

Cult of Perfect

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Unpacking Our Personal Perfects

Sara and Virginia make a podcast!

Virginia Sole-Smith

and

Sara Petersen

Nov 08, 2023

This is a limited run podcast about the intersection of motherhood, public performance, and bodies.

We are

Sara Petersen

and

Virginia Sole-Smith

, two moms and writers who are trying to figure out what our addiction to the idea of perfect says about us—and the world we live in.

Sara writes

In Pursuit of Clean Countertops

and is the author of Momfluenced.

Virginia writes

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

, hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast, and is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.

You can read more about each of us here. Or read/listen on for today’s episode, which is coming to you for free.

Then subscribe (it’s just $5 per month or $15 for the whole series) to get full access to our next five episodes, plus commenting privileges and our biweekly live threads.

We’d also love you to add us to your podcast players—and if you really love this, please leave us a rating or review.

PS. Even if you’re usually a transcript reader, make sure you listen to catch Good Mom, our awesome theme song by Farideh. Her album The Mother Load is out now and spectacular!

Cult of Perfect Episode 1

Virginia

So we are doing this!

Sara

We are finally doing this.

Virginia

It’s very exciting. Sara and I have been talking about doing a podcast together for a long time—pretty much since you came on Burnt Toast, I think. We have a lot to say to each other. So, we are taking our two worlds and merging our two worlds, which are actually very similar worlds in a lot of ways.

I write Burnt Toast, which is a newsletter about diet culture, anti-fat bias and parenting. That’s also the focus of my new book. I have been doing this work for most of the last decade. While I have been a parent, I’ve been also on this personal journey—although I hate that phrase—of divesting from diet culture, understanding the role of anti-fat bias in my life, and how it shows up in parenting.

I am someone who has a health journalism background and spent many years reporting in a very pro-diet way about weight loss and health and then has been doing a ton of unlearning and understanding about what the research really tells us about those things.

My job involves hearing from parents pretty constantly, like I get emails, DMs, comments on the newsletter from parents all the time. They’re talking about how do you get a toddler over picky eating? And how do you help a tween through the puberty body changes and all these different stages, but the underlying theme of all of those is discomfort with bodies, and discomfort with the fact that their bodies, their children’s bodies don’t measure up to this ideal. In order to be a good mother or a good parent, you have to be feeding your child perfectly, you have to be adhering to all these external standards, which are very hard to attain, and you also somehow have to be thin while doing it. That’s a prerequisite of being a good mom. So the perfection thing comes up a ton.

It’s also something I have been reckoning with personally quite a bit. I would say I opted out of diet culture five to eight years ago, pretty consciously. And yet, I’m still seeing vestiges of the standards, like my house has to look a certain way, my kids have to be dressed a certain way. All this perfectionist bullshit is still showing up for me personally.

Sara

When you were explicitly and deliberately divesting from diet culture, were you still actively freelance writing pieces that were pro-diet culture? And was that just the biggest mind fuck?

Virginia

It was a big mind fuck. I wrote some pieces that, looking back now I’m like, That is straight up diet culture. But at the time, I was like, I am exploding the system with this story.

Like, I did this one piece for Self magazine when my older daughter was like a year and a half, two. Certainly at a point where I was like, I am no longer dieting. I am done with dieting. I am not going to do that anymore to myself and I don’t want to write diet stories. Like, I don’t want to write “Your Best Beach Body.” But I took this assignment from Self on the science of detoxing, and part of the story was me working with an integrative medicine doctor and doing her detox. And so I did the detox as part of the story and reported out the science of detoxing, and was like, I’m really critiquing the system.

Sara

Yeah, totally.

Virginia

There was certainly a part of me that was like well, it doesn’t matter if you don’t lose weight, but maybe I’ll lose weight doing this. I might lose some weight during this! And wouldn’t it be great to have more energy and that’s what I’m doing it for, obviously.

I was being really critical about the lack of research behind it, but—the magazine really loved this doctor. The editor wanted me to work with her. It was obviously also good marketing for that doctor, for the writer to be doing her diet. So yeah. That was a murky time.

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Sara

Another thing that’s particularly fraught about your work and the whole good mother ideal is that not only should you be a thin mom to be a good mom, but your kids’ bodies also reflect your supposed “good motherhood?”

Virginia

Yes, you are measured by your kids’ bodies which is ridiculous because you really cannot impact your child’s body size. It’s primarily determined by your family’s genetics. There are a whole myriad factors we don’t understand that drive body size, but the largest driver is genetics.

So, if you come from a long line of small fat, apple-shaped people, like I do, even if your kids are thin now, the odds are very good that they’re going to grow up to be small fat, apple-shaped people. I’m using apple and that’s that women’s magazine language. I want to be clear, I don’t identify as an apple. I reject that label. But it is a shorthand way to describe my body.

And then you encounter that pressure at the doctor’s office, family conversations about this stuff. That’s where parents can feel really judged and really experience straight up discrimination if they are “failing” to produce thin children.

Okay, that’s enough about me!

Sara

So I have written about the intersection of motherhood and feminism for several years. Not surprisingly, that eventually led me to an obsession with momfluencer culture. Momfluencers are people who have utilized their identities as mothers on social media to monetize their platforms. That’s one way of looking at momfluencers and probably the most traditional way. Another way to look at momfluencers is really any mom on the internet who is at all invested in sharing about her motherhood, talking about her motherhood. Every time we post something about our mothering experience we’re going through several different value judgments. We are thinking about how we want to be seen in the world. We’re thinking about our supposed fitness as mothers. And there’s always a layer of performance. Often we’re performing for really problematic audience markers.

Virginia

Wait, say more about what that means—problematic audience markers.

Sara

When we’re thinking, Okay, I’m going to post this picture of the stainless steel snack containers with the little compartments or I’m going to post this picture of my kid’s lunch on the day that it has pomegranate seeds, cheddar cheese slices and broccoli. And the cheddar cheese is going to be cut into star shapes.

Virginia

Some gluten free crackers, the kind with lots of seeds on them that are actually a choking hazard—but carry on.

Sara

And then there’s going to be a handwritten note. So I’m showing that I’m a good mother because of what my kid is eating, because of the packaging of what the kid is eating. Because I’m the type of mother that took the time out of her day to create a whimsical drawing and—

Virginia

Use flower-shaped cookie cutters on my cheese.

Sara

Totally, totally. That is just one tiny, tiny way to measure one’s motherhood. And it’s reliant on an external gaze. If we derive internal satisfaction from making cute star shaped cheese slices, that’s great. Do your star shaped cheese, whatever. But I think it gets complicated when we only get that “Oh, I’m feeling good about myself and feeling good about my mothering” feeling if somebody else has seen it.

Virginia

Could you make the star-shaped cheese and not post the photo of that? Would it be just as valid?

Sara

Exactly. Would it be just as meaningful? So many of the markers of good motherhood were explicitly created and determined by white men in power, to forward very specific agendas that have harmed so many marginalized groups throughout history. The more you dig into ideals of good motherhood, the messier it gets. And the more apparent it is that there is no such thing as the Ideal Mother. She was created. She was invented. She was not created or invented by women or mothers, particularly not women or mothers of color, or other marginalized mothers. She’s really serving no one and actively harming many others.

Virginia

Which is just like the development of our body ideals, right? The thin ideal was not created by fat folks, was not created by women. Was definitely something that white men came up with, in a concerted way to control people and cause harm. So that’s the overlap right there. Patriarchy, white supremacy. We’re both attacking it in slightly different ways. I’m interested in how we perform bodies, Sara is interested in how we perform motherhood. You often are performing both simultaneously in this culture, because the expectations for both are so intertwined.

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I do have a funny lunchbox story for you. I am really anti-packing lunches and I retired last year.

Sara

Congratulations.

Virginia

Thank you. When my younger daughter was only three I did pack them, because I’m a “good mother.” I was like, I will pack your lunch, three year old who can’t open containers. And I kept doing it through the end of preschool. But she started kindergarten this year and so now I have both kids in public school with a lovely cafeteria and I was like, “you can buy your lunch! This is great! I’m retired.” But they don’t want to buy lunch every day. Even with my many speeches about how great school lunch is, they don’t buy it.

So I was like, “Alright, if you want to pack sometimes you can, but I’m not packing it for you. You have to pack it yourself.” And so my fourth grader has been running with this and she’s been packing her lunch all year. Most days. She buys a couple of days a week. She has gotten it down to a science. She knows what she wants.

But the kindergartner, I kind of didn’t even give that option because I was like, can you pack your lunch? You’re five, you seem like you will be bad at this. Will I end up packing it for you?

Anyway, long story short, she finally was like, “yYou know, mom, lots of kids bring their lunch. They don’t all just buy.” And I was like, “Oh, did not know that.”

So I explained the policy and she’s been packing her lunch for the last two weeks. And she was so happy with her lunch today. We have the little bento box lunch boxes, because, I mean, I am a millennial mother so of course I bought the rainbow stack of them. And she had put in Pirate’s Booty, cheddar cheese, and two orange bell peppers. And she was like, “isn’t this a great lunch? Everything is orange!” And I was like, “It’s an amazing lunch. I’m so excited for you.” And I just thought, what if I posted this as a performative lunchbox? People would lose their minds because, where’s the rainbow? Where’s the green vegetable? Where’s the homemade whatever?

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Sara

I love that so much.

Virginia

Andshe’s so happy and I could care less. Because she’ll eat and it’s fine. I was just like, huh, maybe I’ll get content out of this? Or maybe I don’t need to perform? Even that right there, the fact that I’m like, Do I get content out of this? So I can make a comment on the performance of lunchboxes by performing my child’s lunchbox? Oh, we’re in the matrix.

Sara

I feel the same way when I’ll see a funny mess or a kid mess that can be constructed as clever somehow, if I come up with the right tagline. It’s exhausting.

Virginia

But that’s what we’re going to do on this podcast. We’re going to interrogate our own participation in these systems. We’re going to explore what this performance means, how it serves us, how it harms us. We’re going to look at what it means to be a less perfect mother and how we achieve that without forcing ourselves to achieve that.

Sara

Because that is also a pursuit of perfection, in a different way. It’s so fraught.

Virginia

Sara, do you want to help us define some terms? Shall we start by defining what we mean by “perfect?”

Sara

I would say I have identified as someone who is anti-perfection for several years. Because I think I’ve long looked at perfect as almost like some momfluencers, their houses are all white, they’re all beige, there are no toys, there’s no clutter. The meals are bespoke, the nurseries are Restoration Hardware-esque. You know, where no kid has ever lived or will ever live. Right? So I’ve long been like, “that’s bullshit.” It has never felt like a struggle to me to see that as bullshit.

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But if I’m looking at the ways perfect shows up in my own life still, it’s how can my mothering, my house, my wardrobe, my skincare, my exercise, my friendships, my relationships be the best version for me specifically. It’s almost like I’ve shed the stereotypical version or definition of perfect long ago, but I still hold on to finding my own Sara version of perfect.

Virginia

Oh, interesting.

Sara

Which will be totally customized and totally suited to my individuality. And because I’m so thoughtful about it, it’s really going to make my life full and creatively meaningful. I think our personal definitions of perfect shift depending on where we are at in life and I think that’s kind of interesting to track. I think a lot of people could easily say, especially after having kids, the jig is up. That version of perfect doesn’t exist. So I’m interested in how we define personal perfects.

Virginia

I definitely resonate with that idea. I think of myself as someone who has rejected a lot of perfection. And also, there is the fact where I feel calmer when my countertops are clear, you know? I go around and tidy up my house every morning after my kids get on the bus, not because I’m going to put it on Instagram but because somehow my brain is quieter when it is like that. But also, is my brain quieter when it is like that because I am aware of the potential for judgment if it is not like that? My own judgment as well as other people’s. It’s very hard to tease out what is actually a personal preference because I fundamentally think we don’t have personal preferences in this culture. We’re so influenced by messaging and social pressures that your own straightforward personal preference can be very hard to hone in on.

Sara

Yeah, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We’ve both talked to KC Davis and something she said to me really resonated. Because so many people say, “I do feel calmer when my house is put together, when my countertops are clean.” Like, I do, too. I think many people would resonate with that. And KC was likening it to being at the beach. Like a lot of people say, “I feel very calm at the beach,” but they don’t not feel calm when they’re not at the beach. Like the absence of being at the beach is not a trigger.

Virginia

I wonder if it’s because I don’t have to create or maintain the beach. I get to just show up on a beach day. I mean, I had to pack a ton of shit to get my car to drive my children. But the beach itself is this beautiful gift that I just get to appreciate and then walk away from. Whereas the countertops are something I expect myself to achieve and sustain. So I don’t feel like a failure if I’m not at the beach, because I don’t have to make the beach. But I feel like a failure if the countertops aren’t clean, because that’s on me. Mother Nature is not gifting me beautiful countertops.

Sara

Well similarly, if I go to a hotel by myself, I am a complete disaster. Just, everything everywhere because there’s no looming pressure to maintain. I’m just going to pack it all up and fucking leave.

Virginia

Yeah.

Sara

So there is something about when we create these spaces, we have to maintain these spaces. What does our success or failure of maintenance say about us? Even if it’s just internally.

Virginia

And again, because the internal is so connected to the external, your internal judgment is actually a voice from outside.

Sara

Totally.

Virginia

I never make hotel beds, but I’ll make my bed most every day. Like, if I’m feeling a little anxious, I’ll often make my bed as like, “okay, I got that done.”

Sara

We’re talking a lot about home maintenance and house decor, which people relate to in different ways. I am curious how the pursuit of perfection shows up in motherhood that isn’t aspiring for an all white, minimalist home. Because I think it creeps in in ways that we don’t always immediately recognize.

I’m thinking of even like how we parent. Like, my mom raising us in the 80s and 90s did not have access to hundreds of Instagram accounts modeling gentle parenting scripts, for example. She could talk about best practices with her friends and her family and get a book if she really wanted to. But she was not bombarded with hundreds sometimes thousands of voices saying, “if Tommy has a meltdown, you need to validate his feelings.” There is just a lot more noise in terms of how to be a mom.

Virginia

And then you’re really set up for the guilt spiral when you actually do lose your shit and scream at your kids. I think it’s very easy to start feeling like, “it’s me, I’m the problem,” to quote Taylor Swift.

Sara

Of course.

Virginia

It’s very easy to feel like all these other parents, all these other moms, are able to effortlessly do this somehow. How come I am so triggered by my child’s moods? I’m trying very hard not to take tween moods personally right now. This is a journey I’m on. And like, I just can’t! I am so immediately knee-jerk annoyed when I’m getting the eyeroll and the rudeness. I have read all the things about how this has nothing to do with me and this is just a stage of life she’s going through. And I want to respect that, but I’m also so annoyed in the moment.

Layered on to that, there’s the thought like, oh God, my kid can’t be this rude. I have to teach my kid not to behave like this! So often the narratives we’re getting about what “perfect parenting” looks like really conflict with each other. Because it’s like, am I supposed to hold boundaries and not accept certain things? Or am I always supposed to make space for their feelings and validate them and have like have zero emotional reaction of my own to this?

Sara

Right, even though the rest of the world will not do that. The rest of the world is not going to gentle parent our children.

Virginia

No, they’re really not. They’re really not.

There was some interview with Dr. Becky, who is someone who talks a lot about this and does have a lot of very useful strategies for folks that I’ve certainly tried diligently to employ. And she said, “My kids don’t have Dr. Becky as a mom. That’s not who their mom is,” and I was like, Oh, I feel so much better. I’m glad to know that. I think it was on a Glennon Doyle podcast or something. She was like, “I lose my shit with them all the time. And then some percentage of the time, I’m striving to do this validation and modeling.” But that nuance gets lost so fast in the larger discourse around this stuff.

Sara

I am developing a theory as we speak that some of it has to do with—at least for me—if I am armed with knowledge, then I feel as though I have no choice but to act upon that knowledge. Like if I know that losing my shit on my kid is going to inflict psychological damage.

Virginia

Or just not be productive. Like, it doesn’t get you out of the meltdown faster.

Sara

Exactly. Something about the weight of the knowledge feels connected to my internal struggles with perfect. In the moment, I’ll be having a power struggle with a kid and I feel like a dog with a bone where I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing, even though I know, I should stop. This is not effective. This is not productive. There’s something about having the knowledge, but still failing.

Virginia

It feels worse.

Well, I think, too, we’re at a really interesting larger cultural moment where so many moms are articulating this feeling of like, this is too hard. I mean, certainly, we’ve seen this through the pandemic. We don’t have these larger social supports that we desperately need. When our struggle is so invisible, so much of the labor we do is invisible to our families, but also to society. It’s like this expectation to have all this knowledge, be doing all this research, have these best practices in mind, when a lot of that doesn’t even apply in the moment. It makes no space for the struggle that so many of us are facing. Not enough childcare, not enough mental health support, etc, etc. It’s like we’ve been given all this information, but really not any of the tools needed to execute much of that.

Sara

100 percent. Well, and I think it’s also connected to the fact that American individualism still reigns and the cult of the nuclear family is still held up as what we should all aspire to. That puts all the onus and pressure on individuals rather than communities which is why we all completely cracked up during the pandemic. Because at least if our children go to school or have child care, they are being parented by teachers, by sports coaches, by daycare providers, by neighbors by our friends, their friends’ mothers and fathers. We are not the only parents in their lives.

Virginia

Right. They’re getting all these other models.

Sara

Because of the institute of American motherhood, we are expected to be nutritionists, we are expected to be parenting experts. Even though you don’t know how to parent just by having a kid.

Virginia

No.

Sara

We are expected to be home designers. We are expected to be teachers. Everything is expected of mothers specifically in a way that it is not of fathers which is of course wrapped up in gender essentialist bullshit.

Virginia

Another thought I’m having is how parenting is so much better in community. We need that. We need those additional supports and that sense of the village and all of that. But this narrative around motherhood today sets us up to be at odds with our own community. So much of my anxiety around being a good mother is how I will be perceived by my peers. Like if my kid is the one having the meltdown in the preschool drop off line, what are other people thinking?

There often is, certainly among my close friends, a lot of shared commiseration and “I see you and you’re doing a great job.” And I’m grateful to have that. But I think, again, this performance aspect comes in where you see the kind of overachiever parent mother stuff, or the sort of social class striving piece of it getting mixed in.

Sara

I wanted to quote a piece in Salon about women and the science of perfectionism that I thought was really illuminating.

What a lot of us call perfectionism may actually be "functional pursuit of excellence" or "adaptive perfectionistic striving." Of true self-oriented perfectionism, Natalie Dattilo, Ph.D., the director of psychology and the department of psychiatry at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said: "It's debilitating. It's terrible. It's awful, despite its benign-sounding name."

And then the article goes on to say:

It's perfectionism if your sense of self is so tied to your performance that a mistake threatens it; it's more like adaptive striving if you can fail and still feel capable of tackling the next challenge.

Virginia

Okay. “Functional pursuit of excellence” feels like violence to me. I just really got told something about myself. When is it adaptive? And when is it functional and adaptive? When is it threatening? That line is hard to draw.

Sara

I wanted to just go deep and see if we could talk about when we’ve both felt like our sense of self is so tied to our performance that a mistake threatens it. And maybe find some examples of “adaptive striving,” where you can fail but still feel capable of tackling the next challenge.

Virginia

The big one, which is a story I’ve certainly told plenty of times but I’m always happy to go there again, is when my older daughter was born with a congenital heart condition and she stopped eating. We were thrown into intense medical trauma for three years while she had many surgeries. It was a very difficult time in our lives. I was very aware of wanting to get an A+ as a medical mom. The bar felt so high, right? Because it felt like my daughter’s survival was tied to it.

But also, there was a way of getting the respect of the doctors when they would do rounds in the morning outside her ICU room. They would be like, “let’s have Mom,” and they always just call you Mom, so you’re stripped of any other identity. But it would be like, “Oh, Mom has important things to say.” And I could tell them something about my daughter’s condition that none of them knew and they valued that. I could explain some specific aspect of what we were dealing with. And that would validate me, because I was like I’m doing such a good job as a medical mom.

And I needed that, right? Because I was scared out of my mind. I had no fucking clue what I was doing. This was my first child. I had never so much as taken care of a newborn with a cold, let alone a major heart condition. So I was absolutely fucking terrified. I really needed to feel like I was getting it right all the time and that created a ton of fallout stress. I mean, that was then really wrapped up in when breastfeeding, “failed.” Feeling like I completely let her down.

So I do think what came out of that experience for me was some adaptive striving. It did make me appreciate how much lower the stakes are in other ways. I think I was a much more chill mother to my second child, as everyone is. But in my case, it was also like you literally just have a cold. So that’s one kind of dark example, but I think really it was a crucible in which my motherhood was formed.

Sara

I pursued motherhood without really knowing what the labor of mothering entailed. Which is awesome. I wanted to be a mother with a capital M. Like, I wanted to dust off my little Beatrix Potter hardcovers and put them in a cute little bookshelf. I wanted to buy flowy floral pregnancy dresses. I even wanted to like obsess about what type of products I put on my body, what I put in my body. I really wanted it to be a day filling endeavor. And so, I nailed pregnancy. That all went great. And I was like, okay, I’ve made the right decision to become a mother and to become a better version of myself.

Then I had my baby and nothing went wrong. I was checking all the boxes in terms of the boxes we’re taught we should check. But a couple of days in I was just feeling a deep absence of all-consuming joy and transformation, which is what I had signed up for. That is what I had wanted.

Flowy floral dress - check. Motherhood is easy!

Virginia

You were like, I was doing this for the euphoric wave of love. Where is my euphoric wave of love?

Sara

And so when I was bored out of my mind, just going through the monotony of newborn care, which, you know, it is monotonous!

Virginia

It’s so boring.

Sara

I was finding myself just miserable and completely unfulfilled. I was just like, shit, there is a deficit within me. This should be completely fulfilling me and making me a self-actualized person in the way that I was told it should. And it’s not. Therefore, I’m the problem. It’s not the conditions surrounding motherhood or the lack of support, or the lack of transparency around what’s entailed. It’s me. And that was definitely a situation where my sense of self was intrinsically connected to my pursuit of perfection.

It took a long time for me to figure out who the hell I was as a mother, and outside of motherhood. But that was definitely a textbook, my sense of self was tied to my ability to succeed or fail in my pursuit of perfection.

Virginia

Yeah, and it was impossible to step out of it and say, wait, I was sold a totally unrealistic bill of goods here. In fact, I’m sold the idea that I will innately connect to this and have this experience because if we convince women that that’s what motherhood should be, then we don’t have to do shit for them. Right?

Sara

100%. Isn’t it all within themselves?

Virginia

You are this self contained vessel of maternal love. And you can just do it all.

Oh man, that’s so fucked up.

It sounds somewhat similar to what I went through. You didn’t have the medical drama. For me, there was almost no time to be forming that euphoric love situation. But I definitely had no blissful newborn days. Zero. Zero blissful newborn days.

My mothering was also public almost immediately, because we were in the hospital with a one-month-old being scrutinized by doctors all the time. Her first stay was three weeks, and then we were home for several months. But during that time, we were running a feeding tube and we had to weigh her every single morning and check her oxygen multiple times a day. We had to file reports with the doctor every week with all those numbers. If you are someone who has measured your worth by data points, if you are someone for whom the SAT scores loomed large, it is not a great feeling to be like, how are we doing? Are you tracking right? Is she going up and is she gaining enough?

Sara

Oh my God. That’s so awful.

Virginia

And again, I internalized all of it as I’m not doing something right if this isn’t working, feeding isn’t working. This is my failure, as opposed to being able to step outside and say, This is impossible. This is just trauma upon trauma. This is survival. The fact that I’m still in the house is a real thumbs up.

And I want to be clear, I feel that way about anyone with a newborn. Just the fact that you’ve stayed is, like, you’re doing great. You don’t need the dramatic story. The conditioning to go within and blame is so powerful.

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Sara

I’m thinking about the adaptive striving, on the other end of the spectrum. I think the sense of self stuff is so prevalent in so many ways. I mean, even the way we think of work, like our identities being tied to what we do if we do it well, which is also tied to performance. It’s really hard to just intrinsically feel fulfilled and completely remove that from somebody saying I’m doing a good job. Somebody outside of me is saying that what I’m doing it’s worthwhile.

Virginia

I think about that a lot. I’m sure you do, too, as a writer. I pretty much never, at this point in my career, write something that doesn’t get read, which is obviously the dream as a writer. You want your work to be read. But I don’t write just for myself. Like I don’t do morning pages. I don’t just have some little piece of fiction I’m noodling around with the way I might have when I was a lot younger and less established in my career.

I feel very creatively fulfilled by my work, but it is also always immediately going into the newsletter. It’s a piece I’m writing for someone else, it’s immediately put out there to be consumed. And so my whole sense of myself, career-wise, is tied to performance for sure.

So another piece we wanted to talk about, this ran in The Atlantic. The headline was “How Confidence Became A Cult.” I’m going to read a little snippet of this.

Whatever the problems faced by women or girls, the implied diagnosis offered is typically the same: She just needs to believe in herself. (We use women to include all who identify as such, including trans and gender-nonconforming individuals.) Inequality in the workplace? Female employees need to lean in. Eating disorders and poor body image? Girls’ empowerment programs are the solution. Parenting problems? Let’s make moms feel more self-assured so they can raise confident kids. Sex life in a rut? Well, loving yourself is “the new sexy!” Each of these messages reframes features of our unequal society as individual problems; according to confidence culture, we need to change women, not the world.

Okay. Yeah. All that. As someone publishing a book about how to help kids love their bodies, like . . . although I’m pretty clear that we need systemic solutions and it’s not an individual problem to solve. But for sure, we also talk a lot about how to have conversations with your kids and how to foster these things.

I mean, this is such a tricky one, because I don’t know, I’m having like a physical reaction to the idea that we don’t need self confidence, like, how would that even work?

Sara

Of course.

Virginia

But it is very much the let’s avoid looking at systemic issues and just put the onus on you to solve that.

Sara

I interviewed Rina Raphael about her book The Gospel of Wellness and she had interviewed nurses who were working during the pandemic, and their mental and physical health was obviously on the rocks. They had been told via workplace wellness programs to just do yoga more.

Virginia

In what downtime, right?

Sara

Yes, we are, of course, as individuals responsible for many aspects of our own quality of life. But I do think in perfection culture and in wellness culture, there is too much emphasis on picking yourself up by your bootstraps. I’m thinking of like Rachel Hollis rhetoric.

Virginia

Girl, wash your face.

Sara

#NoExcuses and that completely ignores and negates the very real structural imbalances in power that many people are facing. Like, if you are working three jobs and you’re a single parent and you have to get up at 4am to take public transportation to work, it’s not your fault that you’re stressed out.

Virginia

But why aren’t you doing yoga?

Sara

Right. And it’s not your fault that you don’t feel great about yourself, maybe you don’t feel great about yourself for very real, concrete reasons that have nothing to do with your sense of inner worth.

Virginia

We see this really clearly in the way the body positivity movement has gotten watered down to nothing pretty much. That started very much as an activist movement, driven by queer, fat, Black women to drive systemic change to look at how healthcare demonizes marginalized bodies. And now body positivity is a white, small fat woman being very proud of herself for wearing a bikini in her hourglass body. It is very much just focused on well just love yourself. Just love yourself.

And I mean, I hear this from fat folks all the time. Loving myself doesn’t make the doctor look me in the eye, loving myself doesn’t make the airplane seat fit. Loving myself doesn’t mean I can go into a restaurant and know that I’ll fit in the booth. It doesn’t solve any of those fucking problems.

And yet, I also fully acknowledged like I buy into a lot of this.

Sara

I know, same.

Virginia

This is one that’s hard for me to detach from.

We were going to wrap up by talking a little bit about where we are detaching from perfectionism. Again, very much framed under you don’t have to do these things. There’s no pressure to detach here. You’re not failing if you haven’t detached yet. We’re not going to reverse that. But Sara, what are you striving to detach from?

Sara

One thing that just popped into my mind, you know the massive cultural imperative to eat meals together as a family?

Virginia

Mm-hmm.

Sara

Um, yeah, so I bought into that. Even if we don’t eat meals as a family, I’ve often sort of felt shitty about that.

My oldest kid is very much like me. I remember, as a kid, I would always be reading. Every time we were sitting down as a family, I would just always have something I was reading and he has kind of always done that. For awhile, I was like, This is a problem, we should be connecting about our days. Like, I’ll try to force conversation when clearly this is like a calm downtime for him. And frankly, I’d rather be doing a crossword puzzle, sitting right next to him eating my meal.

Virginia

Parallel play is so soothing!

Sara

So I’ve just found myself with little examples like that. Like, we can have nice together time and it looks different from what I’ve been taught it should look like, I guess.

Virginia

I remember having a moment in the pandemic when obviously we only had together time and the happiest day I’d had in several weeks was an afternoon where I was reading a book on the couch and both my kids were plugged into their own iPads.

I was like, We are not having family together time. We are not playing a board game. We are not sitting around the dinner table. But we were all so chill together. And like, look at all those rules I was breaking! Like, daytime screen time for hours! But also it let us all relax together. That was actually super needed in a very non-relaxing time.

The family dinner pressure is something I looked into for the book. Number one, we not only think we have to have dinner together, but we also think it has to be hyper nutritious and home cooked. But the research is actually very clear that what you eat is not what contributes to the benefits of family dinner. It is time with your kids. So if the only goal is time with your kids, that doesn’t have to happen at 6pm around a dinner. You know what I mean? You can have other ways of connecting as a family.

The meal is a useful one because you all need to eat anyway. Like, you’re all there. But if you’re not all there because your schedules don’t make that work or one of your kids needs to eat early and go to bed, you can do it some other way. I think a lot of it has to do with our romantic visions of the Norman Rockwell kind of family dinner.

Mine is definitely work-related. Over the last two years, I have pivoted away from being a full-time freelance journalist, which meant I lived and died by every editor who I worked for, and many of them are brilliant and wonderful and good friends. But it still meant there was this illusion of self employment and control over my schedule, but actually, if a revision came in at 5pm, I had to blow up dinner in order to go do that.

And I have so many really dear friends who have been doing that same kind of work for so long and there is a performative element to it, right? Like there is a performance of making sure to tweet when you’re on a late night deadline so everybody knows that you are filing a big story. Like, Can you believe that I’m working on this till 11? And I definitely think I was pursuing excellence, but by excellence I just meant working all the time and defining my work through bylines in fancy places and being needed in that way. It felt really good, the urgency. But—I don’t do breaking news. I don’t report on the war in Ukraine. Nothing I published is ever urgent.

So it’s actually just inefficiencies at major media outlets that make it all a last minute crisis. If these places were better run and adequately staffed, and people were supported in their jobs, we wouldn’t be doing it this way.

So switching to newsletter writing has helped me see how much that was messing with me. To the point that when I did do a recent freelance assignment, I was a complete mess. I basically had a trauma response, like, Oh, God, I can’t do it again. I can’t go back.

That’s a big shift, suddenly going from, “I am Virginia Sole-Smith calling from The New York Times” to “I’m Virginia Sole-Smith calling from Burnt Toast.” Like, yes, there’s a big ego shift. There’s a big like leap of faith there. There’s a lot of letting go of certain expectations of myself and my career. And I just want to underscore like, obviously, there’s a lot of privilege in everything I just said, but that’s been a really important one to detach from.

Well, this was great. This is making me super excited.

So we should say again: This episode was just me and Sara chatting it out, to get you on the same page with what we’re doing. We have five more episodes coming up with different guests. You’re going to hear a lot of me and Sara chatting and also conversations with other folks working on these questions in a whole variety of different ways.

Sara

I’m also really excited as we interview guests and as you and I talk about ourselves, to identify ways that we might still be struggling to detach from ideals and so called perfectionism. Because I’m happy to celebrate where we have succeeded, but I think it’s also useful to look at where we’re still struggling and why we’re still struggling.

Virginia

Yeah, we are works in progress. If you are listening, feeling like you are also a work in progress, we see you. We’re with you. Tell us about it.

Next week is a deep dive into the performance of pregnancy and fat bodies.

I’m talking to two awesome researchers, Maggie Quinlan and Erin Basinger, who have published a great study looking at the messages that fat women get around their bodies, all the way from even thinking about getting pregnant and trying to conceive, through pregnancy and delivery. We talk about how all of those external expectations are causing so much harm to wellbeing, to ability to function in the world, and to the outcomes of those pregnancies.

It’s definitely a heavy conversation at times but I think it’s so important because when we think of perfectionism around bodies, so much of it is often tied to you’re doing this for your health. I think Erin and Maggie’s research really shows how much health is not the goal when it comes to policing pregnant people’s bodies.

Sara

I’m so excited about that. I did a little research into that for Momfluenced and was just really enraged about so many things.

Virginia

Next week, all of that rage!

Sara

Can’t wait.

Thanks so much for listening to Cult of Perfect!

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