We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying This is too much, and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle. - Anne Helen Petersen

So-called Tiger Moms have often been demonized in the press, framed as crass, domineering, and un-American for their single-mindedness in preparing their children for college. Yet “good” Americans — which is to say, upper-middle-class white Americans — do the same thing. They simply cloak conversations about college in the rhetoric of “happiness” and “fit” and “fulfilling one’s potential.” It’s less crass. But it’s still bullshit.

Many Hollywood stars have committed versions of the long suicide. Biographies of Clift posit that he drank because he couldn’t be his true self, because homosexuality was the shame he had to shelter within. But if you look at his own words, his testimonies about what acting did to him, you’ll see the culprit. His perpetual question to himself, as he once scribbled in his journal, was, “How to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable, and still alive?” For Clift, the task proved impossible. Clift once said, “The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.” He took himself to that precipice, but he fell straight in. And so he remains frozen in the popular imagination, circa From Here to Eternity — those high cheekbones, that set jaw, the firm stare: a magnificent, proud, tragically broken thing to behold.

The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up.