Good Girl or Villain? I’m Choosing Neither

The other day I found myself doomscrolling at night after putting the kids to bed and kept seeing different versions of the same argument. “Stop being the good girl and step into your villain era.” And I admit, I stopped my scroll to watch. Because the idea of de-conditioning myself from feeling like I have to be a “good girl” is one I’ve been grappling with for ages. 

But as I watched this type of content, I kept thinking, but what if I don’t want to step into my villain era? what if I just want to be me?

Are good girl or villain really my only options?

As my algorithm decided that this is the type of content I wanted to watch, I kept seeing more and more of this content and I saw one thing happening repeatedly: it felt like we were just trading the label of “good girl” for a new label of “villain.” It felt like everything was being presented as a dichotomy. A “good girl” cares for other people and never cares for herself, but if you step into being your “villain” self, you always put yourself first no matter what. 

The problem with trading “good girl” for “villain”

But neither of those options felt right to me. Caring about and caring for other people is part of who I am. And I’ve definitely been working on caring for myself by setting boundaries and finding time to prioritize my needs, but at the end of the day, sometimes I will delay that self-care because one of the kids needs me at that moment. 

It’s not like I have any hard and fast rules about when to care for someone else and when to care for myself. It really is looked at the needs of everyone involved at any given time to see who needs the care the most at the time and how much capacity I have as an individual.

I know it’s not as exciting or evocative to say “I don’t want to be a good girl anymore, I just want to be me” instead of “I’m letting go of being the good girl and I’m becoming my villain self” but that’s how I actually feel about it. 

What I’m really doing is evaluating if the desire to be kind, caring, or helpful actually belongs to me or if it’s just good girl patterning that I’m defaulting to because I want to feel useful. Because on the outside being a good girl and being me can look exactly the same, it’s the inside that feels different. 

So how do I tell the difference between what’s good girl programming and what’s mine?

It really is about pausing and asking myself where this impulse comes from. Because for me, it feels different. If someone needs help or comfort and I feel that ache in my heart for them, or a literal drawing forward of my body towards them, that’s me, that impulse to care is mine. But if I find myself feeling heavy, have a constriction in my throat, or physically feel like I want to move away, but am still feeling the voice that I should help them, that’s probably that good girl patterning.

And sometimes, I’m still going to choose the good girl patterning over the thing that feels like me. Because sometimes I value the relationship I have with someone else so much that I will override the thing that feels more like what I want to actually do because I love that person. But that’s the exception now, rather than the rule. 

I’d love for it to be as simple as “I don’t do anything unless it feels truly good for me to do because I’ve let go of all impulses to be liked or a good girl” but that’s not true, that’s not who I am. 

So if in a social media era of pitting the “good girls” against the “villains” I choose neither, then what? I choose me. It might be boring, but it’s true, and I’ll take true and boring over not true but exciting any day. Because the work isn’t about learning to be someone different, it’s about learning what’s actually yours underneath what you’ve learned. It’s about making the choice that’s actually yours even if it might look like conditioned behaviour from the outside. 

If something in this landed for you, the “Find What’s Actually Yours” quiz is a good place to start. It takes about five minutes, and it might name something you’ve been circling.