Actually, I am not just a girl

Social media has created a strange kind of social currency: mostly insignificant in the grand architecture of a life, yet consequential enough that we are all forced to be aware of how we appear inside it. For a long time, I found that deeply uncomfortable.

I had this strange association in my head that if a woman looked too polished or too attractive, people might assume she was less serious. And if someone was exceptionally successful, surely she should look a little unwell from it. Tired eyes. Bad hair. No time to care. As if achievement needed visual proof that you had suffered for it.

There was something reassuring about looking exhausted when I was working hard. At least then the outside matched the story.

So I became overly conscious of contradiction in myself. The woman posting from an airport was also reviewing agreements between flights. The girl interested in skincare could also spend six hours revising language in a contract. I could write about heartbreak at midnight and still keep up with the markets, regulation, structure and work.

For a long time, I thought I had to pick which version of me was the real one.

I don’t anymore.

David Epstein writes about range, and about the advantage of moving between domains rather than becoming legible through only one. Breadth is often mistaken for lack of seriousness because specialization is easier to categorize. But some of the most capable people I have met are difficult to summarize precisely because they have learned to sustain several modes of being at once.

They can be analytical without forfeiting imagination. Ambitious without becoming emotionally illiterate. A daughter and a partner. Someone with a corporate job and an artist after hours. Logical and creative. Ruthless about a deadline and soft with the person waiting at home.

Most people think contradiction means inconsistency. I think, increasingly, it can mean range.

The logical mind can sharpen the creative one. Beauty can coexist with rigor. Softness does not invalidate authority. Caring about how you look does not make you intellectually unserious, just as neglecting yourself does not automatically make you profound.

Eventually I stopped trying to make all of my pieces fit neatly enough for strangers to assemble me correctly. And that was unexpectedly freeing.

Because most people will only ever receive fragments anyway. A photograph from a trip. A paragraph about heartbreak. A professional title. A stupid joke. A dress. A deal. A room I redecorated for no reason other than wanting the light to fall differently.

They will very likely arrange those pieces incorrectly and I no longer find that catastrophic.

There is a particular peace in understanding that being misunderstood by people who only have fragments of you is not actually a failure of communication. The important people in my life know what the pieces belong to. They have seen the work beneath the photograph, the discipline beneath the softness, the doubt beneath the certainty and the person beneath whatever version happened to make it online.

Perhaps maturity is partly losing interest in making yourself perfectly legible to everyone. You stop sanding down contradiction simply because other people prefer a cleaner narrative. I used to want everyone to understand the puzzle. Now I am more interested in living all of its pieces. So long as the people I love recognize my value, and so long as I finally recognize it myself, I no longer need the rest of the room to solve me.