Rory Gilmore is perhaps the most ideal pop culture character of the TV show series ‘The Gilmore Girls.’ An epitome of the girl aesthetic, before we even had a word for it. She was shown as the perfect beauty with brains. I remember watching as a 14-year-old and thinking, I want to be her. That effortless image quickly turned into a facade. Her character was not only romanticised due to beauty and aesthetics. She came with a delivered promise about the world: intelligence combined with discipline is the key to success. If you were good enough, smart enough, and disciplined enough. The world would simply open for you. We believed and built ourselves around it.
Most success stories start with a perfect child with perfect goals and determination. A life set in motion towards perfection. We are told to believe that the gifted are exempted from rejection. So you label yourself. smart, introvert and quiet. That’s all you think you’ll ever be. And that’s all you become. Never forced to become something else. You are put in a box and never dare to step out of it, and why would you? You are excelling inside it. We are taught to become like Rory Gilmore, rewarded for the exceptional. But that system fails the moment an exception becomes an expectation. Suddenly you are not exceptional for achieving it. You are simply expected to be exceptional.
Being the best before 18 is the worst preparation for being 22. A psychologist said, ‘If you haven’t achieved anything by 25, you have avoided the most destructive illusion of youth.’ We all find ourselves walking in Rory’s footsteps. Until life finds a way to humble those who think that could never happen to them. The ride is expected to be smooth — straight A’s and dream child — until life catches up to you. It happens to the best of us. We fake it, hoping we will make it. But a misstep from the curated path sends you tumbling into a void, because you built your entire identity on the path you were supposed to follow. We raise achievement-orientated young people to mistake validation for ability. When the validation stops, they assume the ability has too.
I never understood why they ruined Rory’s character, but her trajectory is the most realistic of all. We find ourselves running parallel to her life, and we finally understand. Rory’s character wasn’t bad writing. It was accurate. It was simply what happens when illusion meets reality. This phenomenon is known as the Gifted Child Syndrome, outlining what happens when a child conditioned for exceptionalism enters a world that no longer hands out gold stars just for showing up.
Construction of identity around one label: top student, best artist, and it all comes tumbling down once the rhythm is broken. You don’t know who to be anymore. We borrowed identity from our efforts and actions. The moment they disappear, so does our identity. When the gifted stop reaching their expected potential, they do not know who to be anymore. Their efforts were supposed to turn into something. That constant validation disappears. Their efforts ending as null. You are unable to answer a simple question: “What are you doing now?” The burden of failing everyone and your own expectations breaks your back, and you feel stuck. Unable to move. When you aren’t excelling in academics, how do you introduce yourself? Who are you, without the labels? Your choices slowly stop being about what you want. They become entirely about what is expected of you.
Perhaps Rory’s downfall unsettles us because it forces us to confront a possibility we spend years outrunning: that we may not be extraordinary. The problem with being Rory is not failing but not knowing who to be when you aren’t.