An honest, first-person account of one woman’s journey along the prescribed path to perfection
— and how she stepped off it to live a life where ambition and success don’t have to mean struggle.
I’m Jo, and I am a Good Girl.
I hesitate to say ‘recovering good girl’ because that immediately casts everything about being a good girl in a negative light, as something you have to get away from.
Aspects of being a good girl helped me succeed through school and university and climb the corporate ladder to Vice President and Senior Vice President positions. It’s a lot of what drew my husband to me, which means it’s a founding part of my marriage and the joy that I find in our two kids.
And being a good girl is also what took me to rock bottom. To endless headaches, panic attacks in the mall, withdrawing from my family and friends, and not knowing what to do with my body. It took me to six weeks off work, and a realisation that I couldn’t go on like this any longer.
I was fortunate to have the personal circumstances where that rock-bottom moment could be a catalyst for change. I was secure enough financially, and supported by key people in my life so that I could take the opportunity to reimagine my life, look at how I’d got myself to this point, and make different choices moving forward.
I’ll always be a good girl at heart, I think. So rather than trying to get away from it, the journey is more about learning how it shows up, when it leads me into negative behaviours, and how to heal the younger versions of me that are stuck — that don’t even know I’m a grown-ass woman who doesn’t need their protection anymore.
Want to join me on the journey? Help me design a delicious, supportive, safe, uplifting, often hilarious, community for us, by answering a few short questions!
Are you a Good Girl?
To help you decide whether you’re a good girl, I’ve listed my good girl traits below. Some are in present tense, because I’m still working on them, and some are traits that I have largely managed to understand and move away from.
I worked really, really hard and was regularly complimented on my work ethic (it’s a good girl trait as it was done from a place of lack and scarcity — I did it because I didn’t think I was enough, and was using hard work to prove that I was, not because I loved what I was doing)
I think it’s my responsibility to make everyone else’s life better
I feel the need to step in and ‘save’ when others are failing, even when it’s kinder to let them fail and learn
I shoulder the vast majority of the load at home, even though my husband is amazing
I said yes to every request of me, even if I didn’t think I was the best person to do it
I put my hand up every time someone needed something done
I never had enough time
I kept saying, “I just need to get through this busy period,” and slogging on
I didn’t ask for help
I sourced my value in what I could do for others and in the opinion of others
I put my own needs last, so I was always too busy to fulfill them
The Good Girl Community
I envision a Good Girl community where we all support each other while we heal the damage we’ve suffered as we’ve tried to be good for so long.
It’s a space where we learn and uncover things about ourselves, have aha moments, make steps forward, then fall down, to be picked back up by the community, so that we can keep going. It’s not a place where we’re trying to show our best selves, but where we’re learning to find those selves under all the layers of stories and lies we’ve been told and have told ourselves.
It’s a place we go to ask questions like, “Why is it always my responsibility?”, “What’s wrong with me?”, “How am I expected to manage all of this?”, “Do any of you feel this way <insert undesirable feeling> sometimes?”, or “Is there any easier way?”
And in response, we’ll be held, we’ll learn something new, we’ll feel connected, and we’ll start to learn that we are enough. We. Are. Enough.
We’ll make new friends. We’ll hear from experts and people further along the journey than we are, who can shine a light into the darkness ahead, and we’ll create.
Imagine what we can do as a community of fully embodied women! We can literally change the world!
Help me tailor the community to your needs
by answering a few questions:
I wrote The Good Girl is Burned Out
(and thank f*ck for that) as part of my own journey to understand how I’d got to burnout
It was a sense-making exercise that allowed me to look at all that had happened and find the thread that wove it all together. It was also the first courageous step into a new way of being. It was the right thing to help me expand into the next evolution of me.
In the book I walk through what it was like to be in burnout and how it led to identifying my good girl story. I go back to the beginning and trace back my good girl origins, how that led to success in my career, and how everything was great, until it wasn’t.
I talk about the steps I took to get out of burnout and how I’ve lived my life since. I weave personal anecdotes with learnings that they gave me, in the hope that other good girls will feel seen and understood, make a change in their own lives, and then perhaps they won’t have to hit rock bottom, like I did.
Zoë Pawlak is an artist and industrial designer born and based in Vancouver.
A serendipitous conversation with my coach put me on to Zoë’s work and it was love at first sight with this beautiful piece. Then I saw the name, and I knew it would be the perfect compliment to my book.