A few months ago, while hanging out with a friend, she made a comment that continues to stick with me to this day, and that I still struggle to understand, “The best thing about our friend group,” she said, “is that we all look different, so there’s no competition for guys.”

Looking back, I realize how much is wrong with what she said, how it implied that our worth is based on our appeal to men and that we’re ultimately competing against our own friends. Still, in the moment, I completely agreed with her. It was nice that it felt harder to compare my physical appearance to my friends’ when we didn’t share most of the same features.

As irrational-- and even depressing-- as it may seem, I felt better about myself when I didn’t feel inferior to the girls around me, and the fact that we looked different made me feel like we couldn’t be compared. Even more so, it assured me that guys would pay us equal amounts of attention, so there would be no competing between us. Not only did my logic expose how I thought of my friends, men, and even myself—it shows how I viewed all the other women in my life, and how I had been viewing them for years.

These toxic thoughts of comparison and competition had been a part of my subconscious for as long as I could remember. Besides being a reflection of my own insecurities and feelings of inadequacy, it had been instilled in me that if I wasn’t the prettiest, smartest, nicest girl in the room, then there was something wrong with me. When I saw another girl with a positive quality, my first instinct was to believe that she was better than me in every way, only making me feel worse about myself. It was as if all I could see when I looked at someone else’s strengths were my own flaws.

Not only did thinking in this way destroy my own self-esteem, but it also affected how I acted towards other girls I knew. I remember being in middle school, a time of heightened insecurity for me, and going through the Facebook profiles of girls I had never met with my friends as we picked their photos apart, only focusing on what we could deem imperfections. I remember consoling my friends when a boy they liked was with someone else, reassuring them that they were prettier than her. I remember not liking someone solely because a lot of guys thought she was attractive. I was convinced that if another girl was pretty, it automatically meant that I was ugly.

For many years, I was consumed with jealousy towards other girls—and I know many of the women I know have felt and still feel the same way. Not only was I harboring my own insecurities, I was putting myself down while bringing other women down with me. It was as if I was basing my entire worth on how I was perceived by others, focusing more on whether a boy thought I was more desirable than another girl rather than being comfortable in my own skin.

Since gaining more confidence over the years, I now realize that I was treating not only girls I had never met as my enemies, but even my own best friends. Today, I know that my own worth is not defined by comparison and that it is far more rewarding to uplift other women in my life than to tear them down for my own benefit.

In fact, it was only when I started to see the beauty in others that I began to see more of it in myself.