I'm over trying to find the 'adorable' way to state my opinion and still be likable. ~Jennifer Lawrence

I admit I am not a huge Jennifer Lawrence fan. I enjoy her movies but I never truly “got” what the big deal was about her. However, when I stumbled upon the quote above, I started to change my perspective. She’s struggling with the same stuff so many of us women and girls are, I thought. Just one more girl trying to figure out how to be authentically herself while so many people around her want and expect her to act a certain way.

Their version of the perfect girl.

Their version of the polite and humble celebrity.

Their version of what is appropriate for a girl to stand up and ask for.

J. Law has had 25 years of “programming” from the outside world telling her she must act in a certain way and say certain things. Add her celebrity to the mix and what happens...kaboom!

Take what happened with the Golden Globes/Phone fiasco. J. Law got so much heat for speaking unkindly to a reporter after the Golden Globes Award show. The reporter was reading from his phone to ask a question to her. He was foreign. She wagged her finger at him demanding, in a bold voice, that he get off his phone. The reporter then went on to make a mistake and refer to that evening’s award show as the Oscars and not the Golden Globes. Oy! Her frustration and most likely her theory that the phone was the cause of his distraction escalated. Who knows the real reason why the reporter was using his phone. People are saying it was because he was foreign and needed it as support in the stressful press conference (hello, isn’t that what you do for a living?) or maybe, like so many of us, he rarely looks up from his phone to see what is right in front of him. Quite often it’s the answers you seek. In his case, he would have seen a shiny gold Golden Globe award in J.Law’s hand. The mistake would have been averted.

Yes, J. Law should have taken a breath and thought about a better way to get her point across. BUT, she didn’t. And we should forgive her for that. She’s human. As so many of us women know, it’s very hard day after today to sound perfectly cute, funny and humble. Always afraid of being too bossy or too meek. Being respectful to other people is the baseline to start from and everything else is a bonus.

It’s exhausting trying to be so perfect all the time.

Maybe we should let ourselves (and her) off the hook a bit more.