Harboring Black Holes

"Anna Quindlen, in her 2005 short book aptly titled Being Perfect, wrote: 

"Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be."

At the center of most of the young women I now today are black holes. Next to the brilliance, and the creativity, and the idealism is a bubbling, acid pit of guilt and shame and jealousy and restlessness and anxiety. [..] We try to fill these gaping holes with food, blue ribbons, sexual attention, trendy clothes, but no matter how hard we try, they remain. We have called this insatiable hunger by many different names – ambition, drive, pride – but in truth it is a fundamental distrust that we deserve to be on this earth in the shape we are in."

Courtney E. Martin - Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters