Perfect Girls
© Marie HaldIs there thing as perfection? I’m not sure I believe there is.
Yet we strive for it, me and my girlfriends. A lot of people tell us this is just what being in your twenties is like. You’ve had a hard time figuring out your place in the world and are now starting to earn what adulthood is about.
But when I look around, I see something happening.
My friends are dropping out of their universities, taking sick leaves for stress and anxiety.
It has happened to at least six of my friends in the last couple of years.
Their doctors prescribe them anti depressants and order them to take a break. It's the overwhelming need and demand to be perfect that tortures us.
When I look at my parents’ generation, it was a different story. The demands from society weren't that imminent. And at the same time they had a common struggle: The hippies, the women's and the gay rights movements. With my generation, it seems like we’re just fighting ourselves, solo.
The expectations of us – the kids of the late eighties, early nineties - are enormous. Living in rich welfare countries, we have all the possibilities in the world to become successful. To look successful and beautiful like the people we follow on social media, to develop careers, have the “X Factor”, become famous, marry whoever we want, and be perfect mothers.
But what happens when the pressure becomes too much for us?
The women of my group of friends are tired of the pressure. They want to make a riot or at least do something, so that the same thing doesn't happen to their own kids.
In the following portraits you will meet them and hear what they have to say.
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