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Young adulthood can sometimes feel like a cycle of existential crises. While you’d love to chat about your busted relationship or your poor career choices with friends, one look at their Instagrams plastered with happiness will make you think twice.
For women (sorry guys), there’s an upcoming safe space to share your every anxiety and gain a sense of support. Double X - a startup based at the Harvard iLab - will be giving young females the opportunity to gather and spill about what’s going on in their lives that’s terrifying them.
Jessica Kahlenberg, a student at the Harvard Kennedy School and the founder of Double X, told me all about her venture’s journey so far - and where it’s headed in the next month.
A startup creating a sense of sisterhood
Prior to coming to the Kennedy School, Kahlenberg spent time abroad in countries like India, Uganda and Guatemala, helping women find access to health services. Drawing from those experiences overseas - as well as her grandmother’s stories of dealing with divorce when many other women weren’t - Kahlenberg came up with the concept for Double X. The startup will be providing an app and platform through which women - grad students and young professionals - can meet and discuss their personal, day-to-day struggles. It's a discussion group meeting for the digital age, of sorts.
“At the end of the day, we crave connection, sisterhood,” Kahlenberg told me. “It’s really powerful to sit down with a group of women and have deep, meaningful conversations about the things that keep you up at night.”
At first, Kahlenberg would scope out the Harvard T Stop, asking random everyday women what issues are afflicting them. She then decided to narrow her focus on millennials and has been testing out Double X’s model at the Kennedy School. According to Kahlenberg, young women could benefit from having these open vent sessions.
“We’ve been lacking a grassroots-level of peer support,” she said. “I wanted to provide a safe, confidential space where women can meet up and share their problems. It’s a chance to really get in touch with yourself, to have an opportunity for personal reflection.”
“These aren’t conversations you could have over lunch or in class,” she added.
Letting the driven express their doubts
Not surprisingly, a lot of young women are seeing this startup’s meetings as a means to bond over the quarter-life crises they’re all internalizing. With most of us - especially in a city like Boston - going through life at a full sprint, there are days when we’re plagued with doubt and insecurities about what we’re doing. And Double X is reflecting that.
“So far, a lot topics have been along the lines of, ‘I feel like everyone around me is so driven and smart. I feel like I’m falling behind,’” Kahlenberg explained. “There’s often a sense of guilt like, ‘I have such an amazing opportunity, so I shouldn’t be complaining. But I feel lost. I don’t know what I want to do or where to focus.’”
“It’s a time of transition for many women,” she continued. “So many of them are questioning a lot of things in their lives.”
Professional and educational life choices are only part of the worries that young women want to share. As you can imagine, relationships come up in conversation. Female millennials are also dealing with the changing love lives of themselves and their peers, which prompts an extreme amount of contemplation and internalization.
“They’ll say, ‘I’ve been with my boyfriend for a certain amount of time, but now I’m questioning this,” Kahlenberg began. “Or, ‘I’m in my late 20s and I’m starting to feel the pressure. A lot of my friends are getting married, and we don’t have the same things to talk about anymore.’”
“It may seem trivial, looking at gender issues as a whole,” she went on. “They’ll admit, ‘It feels silly, but this is really bothering me.’”
And that’s what Double X is all about. With its app and website - which are coming out in a month - the startup hopes to give women a place to look each other in the eye, say what’s honestly bugging them without any judgement and recognize that so many other ladies their age are going through the same thing.
“To see other women nodding along with them makes them feel like they’re not alone,” Kahlenberg said.
Image via Jessica Kahlenberg. Photo credit: Harvard Innovation Lab/Evgenia Eliseeva.
