The great Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Comparison is the thief of joy." I honestly could not agree more. Growing up, I constantly compared myself to others. In elementary school, it was about who wore the smaller size. In middle school, it was about who had the most name brand clothes. In high school, it was about who got the most likes on Instagram. All my life, there has always something about myself that I compared to everyone else. Sometimes it made me feel better about myself, I'm not going to lie, but most times it made me self-conscious. As it says in "Desiderata," "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."
When I first got to college, the constant need to compare myself to others was actually quite crippling. All though I knew a decent amount of people and was doing well in my classes, I felt like I just didn't add up to everyone else around me. I was sitting in my room doing homework as I could hear people in the hallway talking and making friends. When I'd go to fill up my water bottle and see the common room full of people, I thought, "Why can't I be more like them?" I had it in my mind that, compared to everyone else, I was awkward and too shy to make any friends; I even considered transferring for my second year. The more that I had these thoughts, the more I let them control me and morph me into that person.
Eventually, I met people and made friends. While I was much happier, I'm not going to say that the comparisons completely stopped. Even once I made friends, I compared their relationships with each other to mine, thus letting myself continue to be a slave to the joy-sucking practice of comparison. The times when I didn't compare myself, though, I felt a sense of joy like no other. As Cady Heron says in "Mean Girls:"
Now I know that you're not going to read this and automatically stop comparing yourself to others; it's not that easy. I mean, the first time I read "comparison is the thief of joy" I didn't simultaneously become the most confident and happiest person on Earth. I just want you to be aware of how much of a toll comparisons can take on a person. The more you are aware, the easier it is to notice when you're doing this and stop yourself. Just because you may think that someone else has better hair than you first, does not mean that they do and second, does not make you any lesser of a person. You are exactly who you are supposed to be.
