Comparing Yourself To Others
Think about the last time you heard news about someone you know. How quickly did you turn it into a contest nobody asked you to join? I do it without meaning to. Somebody mentions that a friend dropped a lot of weight, and before the sentence is even finished I am measuring their number against mine, wondering who weighs less now, feeling the sag of coming up short. Maybe losing weight wasn't even on my mind that morning. Now it is. And the person who made their good fortune into a race was me.
The alumni newsletter is a reliable trap. You page through updates from people in your graduating class, people who had the same major you did, and somewhere around the third paragraph you decide you have gone nowhere. Your pulse picks up. You catch yourself bracing, as if standings were being posted. And on the rare page where it looks like you came out ahead, ask who you are actually glad for: the person whose achievement you just read about, or yourself for landing a notch above them.
So which matters more, the finish line or the walk to it? If a person never publishes a stack of books, does that cancel out the years they spent writing one they cared about? There is a version of success that lives entirely in the scoreboard, and another that lives in whether the work meant something while you were doing it.
The scoreboard version isn't universal. In plenty of other countries, what you do is folded into a group effort, and the group's aims outrank any one person's. Your value is what you added to the whole, not a private trophy you carried home alone.
Measuring my days against some invisible ruler drains the pleasure right out of them. As a kid I loved being on a team even when I was no standout, even when I was among the last ones picked. The excitement was in the air no matter what, and the buzz of it stayed with you after the final whistle whether your side won or lost.
Competition can spark something creative, too. I remember sinking into a project so completely that the hours vanished and I forgot to eat or sleep. There was no prize waiting and no loss hanging over me. I was simply pulled in, lit up, lost to everything outside the thing in front of me.
The flip side shows up as anxiety when the winning stops. For a stretch I had to sweep every game at a bridal shower or a baby shower. I had to be the lone A in the class. Gracious in victory I was not, and in defeat I was worse.
That reflex to size things up still fires in me today, and I feel it unless I stop and ask why I am turning the moment into a match. There is room to be the best version of yourself without pretending the end makes any means acceptable.
Look at the children in a single family. Does one child's win have to register as another's loss? Brains, looks, athletic gifts: we talk as though there were a single ration of each, enough for exactly one kid to claim it.
Only one daddy's girl, one mommy's boy, one grandparent's favorite? The whole setup assumes a shortage. As if admiration ran out, as if love had a cap.
On one side, rivalry can push people to try harder. On the other, it can make them quit when the attention and pride and money and fame all seem spoken for. Have you ever let go of something for that reason? It took me until after high school to understand that what reads as beauty is often knowing how to dress, how to do your hair and makeup, how to walk around certain you look good, with the confidence that follows from it.
None of that came free. It ate up time: putting the look together, tracking what was in style, hunting it down. And there was a pecking order among girls in that arena, with the ones at the top guarding their spot by nudging others off theirs.
I saw for myself that I could look the part when an occasion called for it, hair and makeup done, the right clothes on. What I figured out much later is that the girls I assumed had everything handled were frequently less sure of themselves than they looked, pouring hours into dieting and outfits and hair and nails just to hold the image in place. Living under that kind of constant appraisal wore on them, and the confidence I envied was often thinner than it seemed.