Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

From the very beginning, I have eaten the damn cake.

I love reading Kate Fridkis' blog, Eat the Damn Cake. She writes about body image and beauty culture and, through those lenses, personal worth.

Today, I saw her post, "Women's Work," and I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop thinking about the power of one negative comment. I can't stop thinking about how easy it is for an outside opinion to touch and taint a perspective.

It's interesting to watch the humans goad one another into lives that I'm pretty sure nobody wants, lives consumed with constant work and climbing.  As Kate writes,

I am realizing more and more that I am intensely afraid of appearing to not be throwing myself into my career, the way every self-respecting, educated, enlightened twenty-something woman should be. God forbid, I should look as though I am not doing enough. God forbid I should fail to scramble up higher and higher on the ladder of life until my accomplishments speak so clearly for themselves that I never again need to explain that, yes, I am working. I am always working.