“It’s Handled”: How To Be Your Own Top Priority
Sometimes a show will just come along, grab your attention, and not let go. It has everything you’re craving and you can’t get enough of it. For me — when it came to drama, intensity, and flawless fashion — Scandal delivered every time.
For folks who were a little less obsessed, here’s a quick reminder: the series revolved around a high-power Black woman, Olivia Pope, and her role as a “fixer” for the political elite in Washington DC. From the White House to her own firm, Olivia was a master at protecting secrets, averting crises, and making other people’s problems go away. Her iconic phrase “It’s handled” summed up her status as the best of the best in her work. What’s not to love? nd out
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For a lot of us, Olivia was more than a character. She was an aspiration! Her outfits? Immaculate. Her confidence? Unshakable. Her results? Undeniable. She was daring and ambitious, and practically dared anyone in the room to say something about it. (They often did, in the form of regular verbal abuse. But that’s water off a duck’s back, am I right?!) Who among us didn’t want to be more like her? That would be life-changing!
Here’s the problem: we’re already too much like Liv. But perhaps not in the ways, you might think, and surely not in the ways you’re going to like. Olivia Pope was superwoman. It was baked right into her character. She reached for the highest ceiling and shattered an untold number of them along the way. Utterly unapologetic, Olivia both embraced power and embodied “success”. She was the epitome of professional “success”. And she was a total mess.
Thinking of Olivia as GOALS tells us a lot about the traps we fall into when we’re not intentionally designing our careers. One common trap involves taking the appearance of “success” as the pure, uncomplicated truth. Another involves limiting our idea of “success” to a surface level cliche, without interrogating what we actually want for ourselves deep down. Liv’s appearance of “success” seemed to check all the boxes. And that’s the point: We are so often enthralled by one image of “making it” that we don’t ever pause to determine our own.
For all her outward “success”, Olivia was miserable. She had no support system — no relationships with family, friends, or community that didn’t revolve around her being a total “Gladiator.” She had no space or time for her own well-being psychologically or emotionally, and the abuse and defamation she suffered was constant.
On top of all that, Olivia was beholden to other people’s mistakes. Handling her own life was last on her list — if it was even on the list at all! Being a “fixer” allowed her to wield huge amounts of power, but none of that resulted in her own happiness. Instead, she got stuck with a long list of personal compromises and little to no actual power to define herself outside of priorities that weren’t her own. With all that power, did Liv have her own life “handled”? That’s a no for me. Please don’t confuse what I’m saying with outdated assumptions on what makes women happy! I am not anti-ambition. I am the literal opposite. I thrive on working with powerful, ambitious clients and championing their achievements and potential. But I will always push you to pause and question what you actually want — to get out from cookie-cutter notions of “success” that restrict you, harm you, or run counter to your genuine values.
So this week I challenge all you superwomen to take a break, take a breath, and imagine what you would do if you were your own top priority. What would it be like if you could look yourself in the face and say “It’s handled”?
