Why Comparison Only Hurts You More
Comparing yourself, your progress, or your lack of progress with other people’s is a surefire way to multiply discouragement and depression in your life. We often do it without even realizing what we’re doing. In today’s world of perceived or curated happiness thanks to how we often use the internet, it can be so easy to compare what we know to be true of our inner most darkest thoughts and pains with the polished and filtered display of our friends and acquaintances.
I personally believe that it is never productive to compare yourself with others. Although I like to think of comparison a little differently than I find most people do. If I’m going to compare, I might as well compare where I started out in my progress with where I see myself ultimately ending up, so long as that change in between is a positive and hopeful thought.
Everyone perceives pain differently and pain is so subjective. Sometimes I read other people’s descriptions of their pain and imagine myself living in their body for a brief moment. Often times I quickly try to think of something else, imaging that it would be so terrifying to live in their reality that I must immediately return to my own. But you know what? We each learn to “get used to” the pain we’re in, along with the descriptions we give.
Just because you can imagine that living in someone else’s reality would be far less or far more suffering than you currently experience does not mean that your experience isn’t perfectly valid. We can only operate in the truth we are living of the lives we have and the challenges, advantages and experiences that come as a result.
In the words of one of my favorite authors, Bob Goff, “Comparison will rip your sails, sink your boat and blame the weather.”
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