Why I Resent Margot & Taylor
...and how Chilli Heeler healed me
For a long time Margot Robbie and Taylor Swift have had one major thing in common in my mind, I have resented them.
I feel bad writing this. It’s a reluctant admission in an age where women are only supposed to lift each other and celebrate one another’s achievements. But I’m sharing it on the off chance anyone else has ever felt this too.
See the reason these two celebrities in particular spark my jealousy is because we all share something. We are 33 years old and look what they’ve achieved in those years!
I saw Barbie at the peak of the zeitgeist in July and came away from it both; mulling over its powerful, humour-coated message and feeling deeply angry I hadn’t written, starred in and produced a movie by now. It left me grumpy and insecure all day. I couldn’t get out of my own head. Until after dinner when I lay down in a beaten-up heap on our living room play mat, letting my toddler and five year old crawl all over me as I read them Bluey’s ‘Baby Race’.
It tells the story of mum, Chilli, and how she constantly compares and competes with other mums after having her first baby, Bluey. At the end of the book a mum of nine pups takes Chilli aside and validates her worth, assuring her she’s doing a great job. Chilli then realises she’s been missing all the magic moments in front of her by wanting them to be something else.
I cried at the end. “Happy tears,” I told my surprised daughter. What relief in 32 pages! In an instant my Barbie-funk was broken and I could see clearly again. I pulled my two babies close and thanked my husband for the roast dinner and tidy up.
I agree with Barbie’s unsung leading lady America Ferrera who says despite the positive messaging we are seeing all around us we need to know we are enough, “I have deeply struggled with my own sense of worth. And as much as I want to say that I escaped that, that I’ve evolved past that, those stories are so deeply ingrained,” she says in an interview with the LA Times, “and it’s not easy for me because it can’t shift in the culture until it shifts inside of us.”
As published in Village Voice 2023