The Power to Debunk the Effortless Perfection Myth

Cara Peterson is the author of The Effortless Perfection Myth.

By Cara Peterson

I started writing my book, The Effortless Perfection Myth, my final year of college because I struggled so much more than I had ever expected to as an undergrad and I wanted things to be different for the women coming after me.

The term “Effortless Perfection” was termed at my alma mater Duke University in 2003 and has since been used to describe the cultural climate on campuses all across the U.S. It is the expectation that one should have the perfect grades, perfect body, perfect social life, but none of it is supposed to take any visible effort. 

Effortless Perfection tends to create environments where people are so set on making it seem like they have all things put together at all points in time that when they do inevitably struggle, they look around at their seemingly flawless peers and think they are the only ones struggling, causing them to feel very isolated and alone. As a result, they are less willing to ask for help, lest they be labeled the one who “couldn’t keep up,” so the issues they are struggling with become much more intense than they might otherwise be.

The majority of female undergrads are leaving college with less self-esteem than they came in with. An estimated 10-to-20 percent of us develop eating disorders during our college years. We are experiencing depression at twice the rate of our male peers. And nobody is catching on because all this is hidden beneath a gilded front of Effortless Perfection. The act many of us are putting on is too convincing. 

I wrote my book to change that – to provide women with the vocabulary to understand and describe their experiences, raise awareness among their support groups (parents, administrators, clinicians), and provide a roadmap to empowerment.

““I wrote my book to provide women with the vocabulary to understand and describe their experiences, raise awareness among their support groups and provide a roadmap to empowerment. “ —Cara Peterson, author, speaker, educator
#PowerToChangeStories”
Power To ChangeComment