Self esteem for girls
by Molly C
At work, I hear variations of the word “independence” so often that it almost stops registering. At a panel I sit in on each month – a day-long video call – my colleagues ask whether young adults aged 19 and over are ready to “live independently” (i.e. to move into their own council flat). As part of the discussion, we skim through a checklist of ‘independent living skills’. I am there because I help to commission supported accommodation, a type of housing which tries to prepare people for, again, independence.
“Supporting vulnerable people to live independent lives is just about the most important help we can give,” the minister for local government and community cohesion told a conference on supported accommodation back in 2006. “Vulnerable people” is a loose term. He was likely imagining the elderly and disabled people who have historically been pushed into and prevented from leaving institutions, rather than the cohort our services support: young people who have experienced local authority care or homelessness, and who are figuring out the lives they want to have and the kind of adults they might become. Here, independence from institutions blurs into the independence of adulthood – something which we demand from “vulnerable” young people much earlier than others.
I struggle with these discussions sometimes, because independence does not sound like an unqualified good thing to me. It sounds to me like being alone. I think this way because I associate both concepts with my mother, a woman who is resolutely, unshakably, her own person. My mother has lived alone for twenty-two years, since she separated from my dad and left the family home. “Of course, it’s a terrible thing,” she tells me two decades later, unprompted, “to say to your child that you don’t want to live with anyone.” I can’t remember her saying anything like that to me at the time. But she must have worried about the impact of that decision, how it gave my dad an uninterrupted influence over the person I would become. The self-help books wouldn’t make sense otherwise. I found the first one as a teenager, when I was visiting her house. It was called Self Esteem for Girls: 100 Tips for Raising Happy and Confident Children. She explained that she had bought it as “a precaution against the way your dad is” (hypercritical; staunchly opposed to praise, celebration or ceremony; impossible to impress). She gave me other self-help books later, aimed at insecure and unhappy adults. For my most recent birthday, my thirtieth, she gave me a handwritten list of things which I should like about myself.
My mum’s story about her own independence is clear. When she was a child – even before she was effectively orphaned, with one parent dead and another estranged – she learnt to trust only her own judgement and understanding. The adults around her, she slowly realised, projected their own “weird psyches” onto everyone else. Their advice was about them, not you, and so could not be helpful. From this perspective, it was best to avoid groups and obligations, to take pride in not fitting in, and to keep other people at a distance. Skimming back through Self Esteem for Girls, I am struck by how far the tips from the book clash with a worldview like this. Girls need support from people close to them to become sure of themselves, the book asserts. “Parents don’t make their daughter independent by disappearing from her life and letting her fend for herself, but by being there for her.” As a parent, you ought to “build up your daughter’s inner strength; trust her; see her as competent; let her have some autonomy over her life; tell her you love her; and respect her view of the world”. From this perspective, independence is not about separating yourself from other people and their strange and self-serving ways. It is a self-assurance which comes from knowing that you are recognised and loved.
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As a child, I spent a lot of time on my own. Though I failed to develop any practical independent living skills, I did learn to create my own little world. I didn’t have siblings, there were no family friends, and I lived too far away from other children to play out. Even at school, I used to confuse other children by skipping up and down the field on my own at playtime. But for most of primary school, as far as I can remember, I was happy to be alone. My diaries were written from the perspective of a child who lived cheerfully in her own head. In 2004, as a nine-year-old, I wrote most entries either from a fictional perspective or about fictional events: “Today, I finished my airship. I am now aviatrix of the Starry Sky… Kim is dead jealous, I can tell.” “It isn’t every day your headteacher comes in in pyjamas!” “Today a vicar came in from St Gabriel’s. Ben says you might have special food for a funeral, which made me remember the special feast we were having last Christmas, when Auntie Esma suddenly keeled over and died.” Even in my 2005 diary, which was written from my own perspective, I kept breaking out of writing about myself because I wanted to tell a story, or decided to describe something I had read. “My name is Molly and I am ten years old (eleven on the tenth of July). I will write more about me later but now I want to write about the god Ra.” Even the things which I liked in the real world were about my imagination: the school drama group, reading and writing stories, making up maps based on real landscapes which I visited with my dad.
I stopped finding joy in my own inner life later that year, when I became self-conscious about the things that marked me out as different. Though I (inexplicably) had a best friend who was widely liked, and though I spent playtimes with her, I had begun to realise how odd I was. That summer, I fixated on chapter 27 of the children’s book Knife Edge, where a white man – the marginalised ethnicity in the world of the book – murders a black woman because he cannot cope with the fact that she understands him. The story stuck with me partly because of my unresolved feelings about being mixed-race (it prompted me to write a list of racist things which people had said to me). It also taught me that you could be proud, in a miserable, destructive way, of relying on nobody except yourself. Around the time of my eleventh birthday, I decided that I could cultivate a deliberate detachment from everyone. I wrote out a series of rules about not having feelings, and, for the next year, I tried to follow those rules in my day-to-day life. In the first term of secondary school, when my best friend started to ostracise me, I used the story to police my own feelings about being left out.
In my diary, I documented everything in painstaking detail – how I was being excluded, how I felt about it, how I tried to avoid those feelings. I recorded exact interactions and my attempts to deflect the difficult or upsetting parts. I wrote about learning to think of myself as “the odd one out”. I described trying to “play – sorry, walk” with my old best friend and her new friends, and about my best friend asking me whether I was following them. (Playing was for primary school.) I explained how I had developed a “story-like way of not caring”, based on what I had taken from Knife’s Edge. In one entry, I wrote in detail about refusing to allow two other girls to comfort me: “I felt like my throat was clogged up, and I was on the verge of tears but I forced myself not to cry. I swore to myself I would never cry again and I won’t. [One of the girls] followed me, said she was on my side. I just wanted to be left alone.” Later the same day, I wrote about the “throat-cloggedness” coming back when my old best friend tried to talk to me. “I think she thought I was in a huff[,] but I thought I might start crying if I spoke.” With a child’s dramatically skewed sense of proportion, I equated this with the murder scene in Knife’s Edge – i.e., with the unbearable vulnerability of being understood. In my head, I had become an independent person who dealt with everything on her own and who could not expect to be listened to or cared about. Sympathy threatened my new perception of myself.
Looking back, I am struck by the fact that child me felt that there was something impossibly scary about expressing how I felt and hoping that it might be understood. I found it safer to obsess over how well I was controlling my emotions, rather than getting angry or upset. I had written a serialised, melodramatic fantasy story immediately before that term. Most of the scenes made their way into my diary, and they were as preoccupied with feeling and not-feeling as the other entries: “most of me just feels an awful hollow sensation”, “I feel as if I’m watching myself from above, unconnected to the parts of myself that feel things”. In a typical scene, the main character started out feeling nothing and then became consumed by anger and sadness. Her internal monologue was largely addressed to her mother, who she deeply missed and wished could be there to comfort her. At the end of the story – intended as a happy ending – they were reunited through death.
I am sure I was largely imitating stories I had read, rather than confessing my deepest feelings about not living with my mum. But it’s hard to escape the sense that I looked around me, realised that I was on my own, and tried to make sense of my experience through fiction. In stories, and in the examples set to me by my family, I found evidence that being alone could be a good and desirable thing. At one point, I wrote a list of fictional characters who avoided opening up to other people and created an acronym to describe myself and them. At the same time, I was writing compulsively about wanting to be understood – there are some truly dreadful poems on this theme in the 2005 diary – and, through the story, about the loneliness of missing your mum. I didn’t want to be on my own, but I felt that I ought to want that, and also, I think, that I deserved it. Independence from other people was both aspiration and punishment.
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I stopped pretending that I didn’t care about anything the year after that, when another girl took pity on me and adopted me into her friendship group. It was only years later, in my late teens and early twenties, that I again tried to teach myself that it was bad to (a) need other people and (b) react emotionally when they did hurtful things to you. I became especially preoccupied with it after a not-quite-relationship with a man twelve years my senior, who told me that he couldn’t cope with the way I behaved when I was upset. My intolerable behaviour had included crying a lot and pointing out times he had lied to me. At some point in the fortnight after that conversation, I read and copied out by hand an advice column titled Why Am I Always Too Much for Men? In the column, a woman has written in after being rejected by a man who was unable to commit to a relationship and found her feelings for him frightening. “I have another person who initially was totally enchanted by me ending up totally resenting my existence,” she wrote. “It hurts so much, and I feel so humiliated.” This, I thought, exactly captured how I felt. In the response, which I forced myself to reread whenever I drifted into not blaming myself, the columnist offers no reassurance. Instead, she says that the woman is not “letting in reality”, and that:
Any human being would turn on you under those circumstances. You are pushing people until they turn on you, as if that’s your real goal. You are hurting yourself and using other people to do it.
At the time, I took this advice very seriously. Looking back, though, I can’t help thinking: but isn’t that even more true of the man? According to the column, he had abruptly, forcefully turned against someone who he cared for and enjoyed spending time with, because he found emotional intimacy so frightening. What is that, if not “hurting yourself and using other people to do it”? But the man was not represented as a problem, because he wasn’t asking for reassurance or validation. He just wanted to be left alone.
Even now, my social media feed tells me that it is bad and shameful to want things from people who let you down. It is aspirational, or at least enviable, to want nothing at all from anyone. “We all know the two main types of insecure attachment, right?”, the comedian on my phone screen asks. “There’s anxious attachment, and then there’s – say it with me – the cool one.” The cool one is aspirational because it means that you don’t need other people, you don’t like to feel needed by them, and you don’t care what they think. The algorithm feeds me videos like this (it does not know that I am in a long-term relationship). Some are light-hearted and based on mutual recognition. Others feel harsher, taking me back to the brutal, binary logic of that column: he’s just not that into you; stop being delusional; how embarrassing to think that just because a man shows you affection and sleeps with you and likes your company, you can read feelings into it. The worst of this content is only a few steps away from pathologizing any expectation or emotional demand.
If I had maintained the emotional detachment which I tried to create in myself as an eleven-year-old, I might have ended up seeing it as a good thing, a quality to be proud of in myself. In and outside of the work that I do, I hear people speak in a very different tone about coping mechanisms which involve desperately seeking reassurance, and coping mechanisms which involve determined self-sufficiency. One is treated as difficult, the other as resilient. “[I]n some cases,” warns a helpful critique of the concept of resilience by a clinical psychologist, “perceived resilience might be just how well a person can mask the impact of trauma.” Resilience and independence can, at their worst, mean never reaching out or admitting that you find things hard. They can also encourage us to interpret coping mechanisms which are not good for us as strengths. Someone who wants nothing from friends or partners or family members is likely to be trapped in a very old pattern of behaviour. It is not aspirational: it is a loss for everyone involved.
We can instead think about who people become when they are understood and cared for, in childhood and afterwards. The social philosophers Joel Anderson and Axel Honneth focus on autonomy rather than independence, and argue that a person’s capacity for autonomy is shaped by their social relationships. Someone who is marginalised and hurt by other people will struggle to hold onto the self-respect, self-trust and self-esteem which they need to act autonomously. Self-trust is an “open and trusting relationship to [your] own feelings, desires, impulses, emotions”. It develops through close relationships and is disrupted by interpersonal trauma. To have self-respect, self-trust and self-esteem, you need to be aware of and able to access your rights; you need love and close friendship; and you need “networks of solidarity and shared values” within which you can be acknowledged. It is not far from the advice which I found on my mum’s bookshelf all those years ago – from the type of care which she wanted, in the abstract, for me.
“Girls should be helped to become strong enough inside to defend themselves against any assault or intrusion on their physical or mental integrity,” the opening pages of Self-Esteem for Girls advise. “Meeting our daughters’ need for intimacy, succour, honour and autonomy will take time and considerable effort. But if we don’t put in that effort, we are likely to have to work much harder later on picking up the pieces of their consequent emotional distress.” The language conjures up a specific type of emotional problem, or at least a specific way of expressing it: distressed behaviour, someone visibly falling apart. But we might have to work even harder to unpick a lifetime’s worth of independence, once we have forced someone into it.
Image by Venus for Pexels
Molly (she/her) lives in London and writes both fiction and non-fiction. She recently published a short story in the Wells Street Journal, and she is currently working on a series of interlinked historical essays about families and institutions.