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Why You Will Never be “That Girl” (Spoiler Alert: it’s Because She Doesn’t Exist)
How many videos have come up on your feed that present themselves as harmless guides to becoming “That Girl”? If your answer is zero, consider yourself lucky. For those of you who don’t know, That Girl is not one existing girl, despite the label. She’s more of a concept – the mindset of somebody who rises gracefully from her satin sheets at 5:30 a.m., hits the gym in a matching workout set, comes home and downs a green juice (which doesn’t taste good no matter how pretty the mason jar is), showers and completes her 19-step skin care routine, journals and proceeds to outline her tasks with three different highlighters. At 8:30 p.m., she lights a candle, snuggles up with a self-help book and is asleep by 9 p.m. She’s clean, she’s productive, she’s self-sufficient and she has you completely fooled.
We’ve all been batted over the head with the idea of social media as simply a highlight reel, but That Girl knows how to blur this. She creates the illusion that we’re truly seeing what she does from the minute she wakes up to her last waking moment (and it’s all somehow on video). It honestly feels a little invasive – like, what am I doing watching from the corner of your bedroom as you wake up?
But it’s easy to forget that we’re not watching her wake up. We’re watching the part that came after she woke up, carefully balanced her phone on her dresser against a lamp (or for the super That Girls, on a tripod), set a timer, awkwardly sprinted back to her bed and crawled under the covers before that timer went up, and performed the act of waking up. We are not watching her life, we’re watching a strategically choreographed performance. We don’t see the mistakes, the indulgences or the struggles. And if we do, they are the ones that she decides to share with us. We know that social media does this in general, but the boundaries get obscured when we’re supposedly watching somebody’s day hour by hour, step by step.
That Girl may really think she’s helping you become the best version of yourself, but the likely truth (and possible intention) is that she’s hurting your self esteem. We can’t help but compare our own lives, the ones we actually see all sides of, to the pieces of That Girl’s life that she records. In our eyes, That Girl has a strict agenda and her life deviates from it just about never. To live a life that is forever aesthetically pleasing and simultaneously productive – it’s simply not human.
So why is she so popular? Other than the fact that she’s a feminine aesthetic fantasy, how have we not caught onto the dangers of believing that any divergence from your minute by minute routine means you’re unproductive and not worthy of the That Girl title? The answer isn’t that we haven’t caught on, it’s that self care product brands caught on way before us.
That Girl harps on our unattainable desire to be unwaveringly productive, clean and healthy and markets it back to us. She is a capitalist dream. The idea that we need to spend copious amounts of money on things like anti-aging cream, green juice, gut health vitamins, a lululemon workout set and a membership to our town’s most boujee gym in order to be valuable is entirely contemporary. In simpler terms, Queen Elizabeth wasn’t gua sha-ing her jawline at 6:30 a.m. and journaling her daily affirmations before going about her written out monarch duties of the day. What’s more, the idea that any time we spend doing something that’s not deemed as “productive” is wasted time reduces our humanity to how we benefit society. We are NOT well-oiled machines – we are people!
I’m not trying to say that self care isn’t important. I’m just trying to reframe it for those of us whose ideas of it have become entirely polluted by social media and market economy. Self care is about embracing human relationships, doing things that make you feel good and maintaining a healthy work-life balance – however that looks for you. If the That Girl routine works for you, that’s totally fine! But if it causes you to fall into a mindset where one slip-up during your day makes you spiral, or if you’re an average college student who can’t afford to spend $110 on face serum, you’re probably in the majority.
True self care is being gracious with yourself. Once I started scrolling past the 5:30 a.m. wake-up daily routine of the self-proclaimed That Girl TikToks, I was able to truly make peace with my own life and what works best for me. For example, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be a natural early riser, and trying to force myself into an extensive early morning routine actually makes me feel worse, resulting in me being less productive throughout the day. Instead of feeling lazy and awful about myself, I’ve learned to listen to my body and make it work. The most productive thing you can do yourself is quit comparing your life to polished highlight reels of the lives of strangers and let go of the unachievable aspiration of becoming That Girl.