Being a good girl let me down. In my pursuit to be the good girl as defined by my family and the society I grew up in, I had accumulated a college degree and two master’s level degrees, but I did not know how to be safe in this world. I didn’t know how to avoid danger and dangerous people, and I didn’t have the vocabulary to name the bad things that were happening to me. With my good girl mostly naïve mindset, I was always expecting people I met to have the same value system as I did, and do no wrong.
Nowhere in my formal education I had been taught how to be street smart, and how to practice healthy discernment. I was taught “Good girls don’t judge.” I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. I was told “Good girls don’t argue”. I was adviced to be patient in bad situations “Good girls are always nice and patient”.