Hello and welcome back to The Thoughts that Bind! I’ve been thinking a lot about comparison lately, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you all. And so, I figured it would be nice to dig into this subject. Because as I’ve realized, it’s not as straightforward as we might think.
Comparison
I think the first lesson I ever heard about comparison came in the well known saying, “comparison is the thief of joy”. When I first heard that I remember being in awe, thinking how true it was. I tried so hard to assimilate that lesson into my being.
I remember it being a revelation. All of a sudden, I realized that I am an individual worthy on my own merit, and it was like the whole world broke open to me. I vowed to leave comparison behind and focus solely on cultivating my own sense of self. And that was pretty good, for a while.
Comparison, a reawakening
I don’t know when it began to happen, but slowly I started realizing that demonizing comparison wasn’t the answer. If I was going to improve, I had to have some metric to measure it by. Meaning, I had to compare myself to something or someone. If you don’t have a picture of success, how are you ever supposed to get there?
Not to mention, when you ask great people they often champion comparison. Often, their advice is to find people you admire and compare yourself to them. Use them to pave your way and emulate them in what they say and do. And hearing this put me in a tough spot. I wanted to be myself, not someone else. But also, I wanted to get better. I wanted to be more skilled in my art, in blogging, in writing, in all sort of things! And it was clear that none of the people who were very successful were avoiding comparison.
Soon, I came upon the advice of Bob Proctor, a self-help guru and very successful man at that. He said that what he did was find mentors everywhere he went for everything it was that he wanted to do. Operating under the assumption that everything is a skill and if they could do it, so could he, he began looking for new people to emulate. Whether it was how they talked, how they walked, how they thought. Essentially, he decided that if he could compare himself to the successful people in the field and realize where he was falling short, he could learn how to recreate their success for himself.
And the more I think about this, the more substance I think it has. When we’re young, we learn everything by emulating what we see others doing. As we get older though, we miss this part of the comparison process and get stuck in toxic comparison.
A new look at an old problem
So if all comparison is not inherently “the thief of joy”, what is the problem we truly run into when we find ourselves burnt out and unhappy? This is what I’m going to broadly call toxic comparison. Toxic comparison, for the sake of our conversation here, is really just whenever you compare yourself to someone else and get a negative emotional result. So what does toxic comparison look like and how does it differ from emulation?
And I think the answer is really quite simple. It all comes down to purpose. Emulation begins with purposeful comparison. It may be uncomfortable to look at other successful impressive people and realize that you’re not doing everything that they’re doing. It may make you feel defensive and crabby. But at the end of the day, this sort of comparison is run to generate a to-do (or to-be) list for later.
Toxic comparison, however, is what I’ll call emotional goading. You already see yourself for who and what you are, and you poke at your faults until you get that coveted and sadistically addictive emotional response of “I’m not good enough, woe is me” (or worse, trigger a self-destructive streak). Emulation is comparison assuming your worth, toxic comparison is assuming your lack of worth. There is no escape when you trap yourself in toxic comparison.
Even if you manage to somehow do better than the person you’re toxically comparing yourself to, that awful feeling doesn’t go away. Because the problem isn’t the comparison itself, it’s the fact that you’re devaluing yourself. If anything, it can make matters worse. Because previously you had a reason for telling yourself that you weren’t good enough. Once you take that reason away, you’re left with the feeling that you’re simply not good enough inherently. This is because the illusion for “earning your value” has been obliterated. Since you thought it laid in that objective, but now it clearly doesn’t.
So, what do you do?
The solution for this problem is simple, while not “easy”. Stop devaluing yourself. And stop blaming comparison for something that is not its fault. That awful feeling in your gut when you’re stuck in toxic comparison is your fault, not comparison’s.
It’s time we start seeing our own worth, and starting off from that place, instead of hoping that if we can be more like someone else, then we’ll earn it. There is no way for us to earn our value, because we are already valuable. We just have to learn how to believe that and step into it for ourselves. I recommend you look into your own journey of self-love in order to achieve this. You can read about mine here if you feel lost on the subject. And as you progress in self-love, you may find that you compare yourself to others less. But don’t be surprised if you come back around full circle and realize that comparison wasn’t so bad to begin with.
Thank you for reading my thoughts. Please consider subscribing to the blog for email updates when a new post goes live. And tell us, have you found the difference between emulation and toxic comparison? Where are you at in your own self-love journey?
