A recently published study by John Pachankis and Mark Hatzenbuehler has substantiated what’s called the “Best Little Girl in the World” hypothesis, first put forward in 1973 in a book by Andrew Tobias, then writing under a pseudonym. It’s the idea that young, closeted women deflect attention from their sexuality by investing in recognized markers of success: good grades, athletic achievement, elite employment and so on. Overcompensating in competitive arenas affords these women a sense of self-worth that their concealment diminishes.
…Deriving self-worth from achievement-related domains, like Ivy League admissions, is a common strategy among closeted women seeking to maintain self-esteem while hiding their stigma. The strategy is an effort to compensate for romantic isolation and countless suppressed enthusiasms. And it requires time-consuming study and practice, which conveniently provide an excuse for not dating.
Best of all, it distracts: “What love life? Look at my report card!”
…But the study does show that the longer a young woman conceals her sexual orientation, the more heavily she invests in external measures of success, potentially leading to undue stress and social isolation
Another of the study’s findings is that girls who grow up in more stigmatizing environments are more likely to seek self-worth through competition. I spent my first 18 years in a rural, religious town in North Carolina, a state that recently passed a constitutional amendment barring same-sex unions by a wide margin. Now here I am, a metal detector scanning for golden prizes. That’s no coincidence, the research suggests.
Sometimes I just wanna go back 20 years in time and fucking punch all those adults who believed in Indigo Children.
Like, I don’t know if you guys know how they used to speak about Millennials? We were supposed to save the fucking Earth. Indigo Children were supposed to be a generation born with the dawning of the new millennium who were more creative, empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and loving than ordinary children; Indigo Children were also supposed to be fucking psychic. We were literally theoretically fucking born for the express purpose of coming in and using our fucking magic powers to save the entire goddamn earth from all the problems previous generations had left us: War, famine, pollution, disease, you name it. Psychically.
I got invited to speak at Gifted conferences when I was a teenager in the early 2000s because I’d done some self-advocacy work in the area, so I got to see this in action a lot. Like, a lot of kids want to solve world peace, right? You’re thirteen, you do Model UN, you believe in the power of love, it all seems so possible.
And fucking Indigo Parents would be like, “Of course I believe you can do it! I can’t wait until you’re 25 and I can come visit you in Switzerland when you’re working on world peace summits! You can achieve what no other generation can!”
Then the kids would come over to me, as the only Gifted Child at the conference who got to speak for myself instead of a parent speaking for me (my mom was in a corner, looking dubious) and be like, “I think maybe I wanna be an animal trainer? Or a rock star? But I’m afraid that’s too selfish. I’d be wasting my gifts. I know I have to do something great with them.”
And like… these days, I know so many former Indigo Children who are, for example… living in attics in the outskirts of Washington DC, struggling to pay their student loans from the triple-major they graduated from an Ivy League college with at age 18, writing policy briefs for an NGO about the questionable nature of foreign aid and feeling like they’ve failed as people because this isn’t living up to their potential. They were supposed to have solved everything by now. The best parts of their weeks are Saturdays when they can dress up like an elf and hang out with their friends, though lately it’s been taken up more by going to protests. But there’s still this faint sense of having failed on some fundamental cosmic level.
I’m left being really angry at parents who wanted an easy way out of the pain and fear of sending their children out into the world.
Who didn’t want them to be “labelled” with “fake disorders”, so we’re now helping each other crowdfund our ridiculously expensive autism diagnoses so we can finally get disability benefits, or giving each other advice on ADHD meds so our lives stop looking like slow wrecks.
Who didn’t want their children to encounter difficulties, and therefore told them they’d never have any.
knitting in the dark 