Learning to give it 85%
When you’ve been told to live a 100% have it all/do it all life
All my life I was led to believe you had to give 100%. And even that was slacking. What was important wasn’t to win (yeah, right) but to try. To know in your heart of hearts that you’d given it your all. Plus a bit. What mattered, what always mattered, was the effort you put in. That was the mantra everywhere you looked: at home, at school, on children’s TV, in books and the media. The gold star for effort, was worth far more than the 10/10 for accuracy. (Although obviously I wanted both.) If I sound like a nauseating ginger freckly swot that’s because I’m pretty sure I was.
Gradually it became engrained that as long as I tried hard enough, anything was possible. (No thanks to the careers teacher who, when I was 14, told me that “girls like me” shouldn’t get ideas abov…