Liz Funk lived it. She breathed it. She couldn’t get away from it. So she decided to write about it.
Funk, 20, recently graduated from college and published her first book on the phenomenon of the so-called supergirl — the girl who has the brains, the beauty, the work ethic and a dangerous desire to achieve.
By closely following five overachieving young women and interviewing nearly 100 more, Funk explores the psyche of these girls who have it all in “Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls” (Touchstone, $15).
Funk, a freelance writer, has had articles published in USA Today, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post, among others. She also maintained a blog on the Albany Times Union website, where she discussed feminism and pop culture.
She achieved more at the age of 14 than most men and women have at 30.
But as intelligent, ambitious and intriguingly precocious as she is at 20, she is more self-aware than anything. She realized her reckless addiction to achievement about two years ago, so she decided to examine and explore this obsession. And in doing so, she has helped shed light on the supergirl phenomenon, as she calls it, through getting her book published.
Funk says a supergirl is a young woman who feels validated only by her accomplishments and believes she is only as valuable as what she’s achieved. Supergirls feel pressure to be good in academics, extracurricular activities and sports, and be beautiful and skinny. On top of it all, they make it look easy.
“I write in the book about how beauty is a really interesting factor,” Funk said. “For guys to be considered overachievers, it really doesn’t matter what they look like. Whereas for girls to be overachievers, you have to be beautiful, too, and ultimately, it’s really unfair.” Funk didn’t learn about these expectations solely by following her main characters around and watching their lives as a spectator.
Most of her knowledge comes from her own life. Funk is a supergirl.
In high school — Funk doesn’t want her hometown revealed — she put pressure on herself to jump-start her career. She wanted to write articles. She wanted a book deal. She wanted to go to an Ivy League college. And she didn’t take time for “normal kid stuff,” she said.
When she arrived at Pace University in New York City, she simply did more.
By her junior year of college, Funk said she had to sit down and really look at the way she was living. “I think you hear of a lot of girls who had to adhere to some very demanding expectations their whole lives and just came back to square one and really figured out why they mattered.” Funk thinks this question of worth in young girls comes from media saturation of beautiful, perfect women. Whether they’re on TV shows or in commercials, young women are forgetting these women on TV are not real, she said.
“They take it to school and work and other girls see how much attention and positive reinforcement these so-called perfect girls get,” she said, “and they try to imitate it themselves.” The stereotype of the apathetic youth is slowly being replaced by that of the ambitious youth. And while Funk understands we need more Hillary Clintons running for president and more women coming out of their long-held marginalized place in society, she thinks when the desire to achieve is for the wrong reasons, the supergirl phenomenon is no longer a good thing.
“I found the highest-achieving girls didn’t have a strong sense of intrinsic worth, outside of what they look like, what they accomplished and how people perceived them,” she said.
The book doesn’t read like a lecture. She doesn’t come off as a modern-day philosopher, but rather someone who has been through what she is talking about and is eager to share advice about how the supergirl addiction can begin and how to slow it down once it does.
She wittily talks about how to be a kid when you’re a kid, instead of already setting your sights for high achievement.
Without sounding like your mom, she discusses the importance of accepting your body and not going to all lengths to look perfect.
She knows from experience about feeling the need to jam-pack your schedule and suggests that young overachievers just slow down, instead of trying to work twice as hard and twice as fast as others.
“I think that in order to have a better sense of self, teenagers need to live less- complicated lives. We’re so distracted by all the technology and media we have, and it prevents us from developing a relationship with ourselves. We need to spend more time getting to know ourselves and have a relationship with ourselves. That’s the ultimate defense against society’s pressures and demands.”
Funk said she wants to start two more books on women’s issues this summer, before she heads to graduate school in the fall. Her life is still fast-paced and she still harbors some supergirl tendencies. But now she takes time to slow down and ask herself who she is. And she’s figuring it out.
