“I am so nervous for next semester.”
“I know! I’m freaking out!”
“I’m sure you’re more nervous than I am. I remember my last semester of high school”.

Whether it’s pain or nervousness, the amount of sleep we got last night or the grades we have earned, we, as human beings, almost always compare anything with those around us. And while a simple comparison seems superficially harmless, it has been proven that these comparisons are actually more destructive to ourselves and the people surrounding us than first anticipated. Now I'm not going to ignore the fact that sometimes comparing your situation to another's can be beneficial in helping a person realize the gravity of someone else's situation; however, more often than not our comparisons create more harm than good.

In 1954, a social psychologist generated the Social Comparison Theory to explain this constant need to compare ourselves and our situations to others. According to Psychology Today, a website run by psychologists, “the social comparison theory states that we determine our own social and personal worth based on how we stack up against others. As a result, we are constantly making self and other evaluations across a variety of domains.”

The continuous need to evaluate ourselves and others based on immeasurable factors, such as accomplishments and defeats, often leads us down a path of destruction where we might hurt ourselves as well as those around us. According to the Social Comparison Theory, what is most troubling is that we often do not realize or fully comprehend how we have arrived at this dreaded path; we are often unable to recognize the damage the comparisons have made to our perceptions of previous situations where we may have succeeded or struggled.

Three summers ago, I was talking to a friend about Alzheimer’s stealing my Grandma from my family and me and replacing her with someone I did not know when my friend mentioned that she, too, had lost a loved one. My friend had lost her younger brother in a tragic accident three years before.

I immediately regretted what I had said, after all, my Grandma was still alive and up until her diagnosis, had lived a life full of adventure while my friend’s brother is gone and did not even get the chance to graduate from middle school. I told her that her situation must be more painful than mine; I compared the loss of my Grandma to the loss of her brother without even partially understanding that I had made the detrimental mistake of damaging my perception of my own situation with my Grandma. I minimized the pain and distress that my own situation had caused me, ultimately making me feel as if my situation was nowhere near as painful as hers and that I had no right to be complaining about my situation.

Disappointment lit up my friend’s face as she told me that feelings are immeasurable, especially those of pain and hardship, of success and joy, and this makes judging our circumstances against someone else’s simply impossible. Now it was my turn for disappointment- only my disappointment was in myself. Through my embarrassment and slight humiliation, I nodded at her in agreement, but I did not truly grasp what my friend had been trying to say to me until recently.

As I was nearing the end of the first semester of my senior year of high school, I began to feel somewhat panicked. I did not know where I would be next year, I did not know who I would be with. It felt like all I knew was that I knew absolutely nothing about my future; the unknown variables in my life just kept adding up. My mom suggested that I reach out to my cousin, a junior at Northeastern University, to talk to her about how she dealt with the difficulties her senior year of high school entailed and how she continues to deal with adversities in college.

Recently, my cousin faced a particularly troublesome tribulation. After losing her best friend to suicide, her grandfather to cancer, her grandmother’s mental and physical state to Alzheimer’s, and then meeting her biological father, my cousin reached a breaking point; she decided to take a semester off from college to focus on her mental health and wellbeing. Over winter break, she told me how nervous she was to return to school. She didn’t want people to ask questions about where she was and what she did during her semester off.

However, when I told her that I, too, was nervous for next semester, she told me that I must be more nervous than she is because it’s my last semester of high school and soon I will be off into the real world of adulthood. In that moment, I felt discouraged with my cousin like my friend was with me. Similar to my friend, I tried to explain to my cousin that she cannot compare two situations of adversity because one person’s bump in the road could be another person’s mountain.

But at that moment when my cousin suggested that I was probably more nervous than she was, I couldn't find the right words to explain to her our inability to measure emotions, such as nervousness. So I did what I always do; I went to literature to find a quote that summarizes what I was trying to say.

I have a penchant for quotes. I have my favorite quotes written all over my bedroom walls in sharpie ranging from song lyrics to a Swahili phrase. While I was trying to explain the Social Comparison Theory and its effects on my cousin, I found a quote that epitomizes what I was trying to tell her. Nicholas Sparks wrote in his 2006 novel Dear John that “when you’re struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it’s just as hard as what you’re going through.”

While this quote doesn’t exactly explain the often negative effects of the Social Comparison Theory, it does explain that everyone has their struggles and no matter what someone’s struggle is, it can be just as painful and tough as what another person is struggling with. Simply, the pain of one person’s adversity cannot be compared with the pain of another’s.

You know in the movie Mean Girls when the random girl comes up on stage and says, "I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy"? Well, I sort of wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles that would make everyone happy. Or I at least wish that people would realize how amazing and loved, exceptional and spectacular they truly are.

We always wait for someone else to tell us how wonderful we are, but for some strange reason, our doubts only span as far as ourselves. We never seem to doubt our own friends and their outstanding abilities, and while our everlasting faith in each other is remarkable, so is our lack of faith in ourselves. Once again, I have decided to rely on literature to summarize my thoughts.

And as cliché as it is to repeat A. A. Milne’s famous quote from Winnie the Pooh, I think that it is necessary: “if ever there is a tomorrow when we're not together… there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think”.

Stop comparing your successes to someone else’s successes and stop comparing your defeats to someone else’s defeats. You are all only as successful and defeated as you believe yourselves to be. Please try to stop minimizing your own successes and emotions by maximizing someone else’s and stop maximizing your own successes and emotions by minimizing someone else’s. It seems to have become our natural tendency to judge our success or failure against others’, but it's essential that we be conscientious when we do so and remember that we are the only ones who can judge our own successes and failures as well as our levels of pain and joy.