Danielle Prescod On Overcoming The Pressure Of Perfectionism
In this Incredible Women essay, DANIELLE PRESCOD explores her journey to understanding and expressing her identity, and breaking free from the parameters of stereotypes and judgement
Deciding who you are going to be is a complex lifelong project. Your identity and self-awareness evolves slowly over time, both subtly and overtly in how you decide to show up in the world. But it can also be dictated, unfairly at times, by how the world sees you, especially if you find yourself to be a woman – and even more so if you find yourself to be a woman of color.
For me, deciding who I was took a lot of precise navigation. I detail that journey in my debut memoir, Token Black Girl, which is about unlearning messages from the media and reprogramming myself to become the woman I wanted to be, and not the woman everyone else wanted me to be.
Growing up, I got conflicting messaging about what a Black girl should be, and I did not know who to take my cues from. Were my parents right? What about authors like Ann M. Martin or Francine Pascal? Was the news right? Or magazines? Or the people on Twitter? Were my friends right? Teachers? Sports coaches? Who best captured the criteria of who I should project myself as? As you can imagine, all these sources had completely inconsistent ideas. This left me searching – for answers, but most tragically for validation in all the wrong places.
When I then became a member of the media with a career in fashion magazines, I received, and doled out, a lot of advice on what women “should do” or how they “need to look”. It took me a long time to figure out that being dictated to made me also want to dictate. I also didn’t really understand how much of a mechanism developing a static idea of womanhood is for the lineage of toxic systems of power like white supremacy and the patriarchy.
Ultimately, who we are and who we become should be up to us. In the most literal sense, it is a very individual quest, but for women, particularly for Black women, figuring that out can be extremely isolating, especially when you are not given the same time, space and grace to explore that. Because of the way that racism functions in our society, it forces people of color to be held to separate standards, sometimes of impossible height, all while fighting for the right to be human.
“Token Black Girl is about unlearning messages from the media and reprogramming myself to become the woman I wanted to be, and not the woman everyone else wanted me to be
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Giving yourself the grace to be human is an incredible gift and one that can only come as the result of essentially not caring what other people’s expectations of you are. It became much easier for me to flesh out the parts of my identity that I found murky, simply because I gave up on attempting to please everyone I could. Additionally, I recognized that there are systemic obstacles in the way of being able to access the kind of confidence, strength and balance that we say we want all women to have, while at the same time keeping them confined by a narrow set of parameters that place far too much emphasis on how they look.
The essence of feminism, in the non-commodified definition, is for women to achieve equality in all areas of life. Equality meaning equal status to men in political, social and financial ways. One of the most poignant struggles for feminism is working towards women having complete bodily autonomy and not being judged for those choices either way.
“Dressing yourself is empowering. Period. It is an emotion that I hope everyone gets to experience… Making the decision to wear what you want should be up to you alone
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As someone who has spent over 15 years working in the beauty and fashion industries, I know how much of someone’s identity can be communicated in their clothing. One stereotype that I am consistently fighting against is the idea that fashion is “frivolous” and has too much to do with projecting a superficial image. While there are aspects of the industry that reflect a reality some of us would be more ashamed about, the demand on women to embody perfection and the simultaneous work to convince them that wanting to look good is dumb, is diabolical. The ways we express our identity can be aided by clothing. Dressing yourself is empowering. Period. It is an emotion that I hope everyone gets to experience. So much of our story is told by creative expression in dress and style, but even that can be controlled, monitored and regulated by the powers that be. Making the decision to wear what you want should be up to you alone; the opinions of other people, which they will undoubtedly feel compelled to lob, should not influence you either way. Everyone will have opinions on what a woman “should” look like. While we sort that out with the patriarchy, in the meantime, it feels really good to adorn yourself however you choose.