about Caralena
Caralena (Cara) Peterson is a speaker and writer educating students, parents, teachers, and administrators on the “Effortless Perfection” Myth and the mental health crisis it has spurred on campuses across the United States, especially amongst women. Known as the Effortless Perfection expert, she has written about the Myth for places like Inside Higher Ed, The Week, Teen Vogue, She Knows Media, Ms. Magazine, and Bustle and dives deeper into all of its effects and solutions in her book, The Effortless Perfection Myth: Debunking the Myth and Revealing the Path to Empowerment for Today’s College Women (September 2022).
Caralena earned her B.A. in Women’s Studies and Public Policy at Duke University and her M.A. at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. She has spoken to audiences including TEDx (12K views), Cornell, Duke, Elon, Harvard, Tulane, Amazon GoodReads, and the National Women's History Museum, among others. She has also had the honor of appearing on news programs like Good Morning Washington and PIX11.
Caralena served as a visiting professor at Middlebury College for the 2024 Winter Term, and will be returning in 2025. She has five years of teaching experience at the middle and high school level in English and History. She is also a mixed-medium artist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Washington Life Magazine.
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MY mission
Effortless Perfection is a term that was coined at my alma mater Duke University in 2003; it’s “the sense that one must have the perfect grades, perfect body, perfect social life, all without any visible effort.”
I have seen far too many young collegiate women chase after and eventually get crushed by the notion, not only that this way of being is possible, but that anything less constitutes a personal failure — myself included.
My book is A forthright, firsthand look at how impossible expectations surrounding achievement, assertiveness, body image, and belonging are harming the mental health of today’s female undergrads by forcing them to believe they must earn the love they receive via a never-ending pursuit of perfection.
this phenomenon creates a campus environment wherein it feels like fitting in requires having no flaws, so nobody shows any hint of struggle even as those struggles – particularly in the realm of mental health – grow larger and more dangerous by the day.
The Effortless Perfection Myth dives past this gilded front, showing parents, administrators, mental health professionals, and students, themselves, what is really happening beneath the surface so that they can move past the deceit and overcome this destructive aspect of the cultural climate on college campuses.
