Everyone says you shouldn't play the comparison game. Yet, everyone does it.
The sneaky little thing about it is that you don't think it causes much harm. You don't think about the walls it builds and the hurt it creates. Your subconscious slowly starts to feed into those feelings of inadequacy, unfairness, bitterness, and sadness.
Slowly but surely, it starts to take over the way you see things. It places a sort of tinted lens on life, on your situation and in contrast to others.
They say the grass is always greener on the other side. Comparison plays into this metaphor and makes it seem like reality. I know when you feel sad you tend to play the pity party game, at least, I know I do.
It's funny though, the comparison game I was playing wasn't even a fair one. I was comparing myself to those whose situations weren't even similar to my own. I was setting myself up for a lose-lose situation. No matter how hard I tried to rectify my own situation, it was never going to happen because I am not in the same place as the girls I was comparing myself to. Unless I want to lose who I am and the people I have been blessed with, I would never be like them. Unless I wanted to wipe my slate clean, that was never going to happen.
And the question I never even asked myself was "Is it worth it?"
It seems like the situation is always worse than it really is. I have a tendency to focus solely on whats wrong and not pay much attention to what is right, what is good, what is a huge blessing in my life. Rather, I see the one small speck of something in my life I want to change and I work to rectify it. That tiny speck becomes the log in my eye.
It wasn't until I was told that I was playing the wrong comparison game that I truly discovered how fruitless my endeavors would be. I stopped wasting my time wishing for things to be different, because in reality, they weren't that bad. It was out of my reach, and that's OK, because what I have is so much better, I just didn't see it.
I wish for people and society to stop telling me how my college experience should be. I wish there wasn't this invisible pressure to act a certain way, live a certain life, say the correct thing that people expect, and do what is the norm. No college experience is worse or better than another. The way I choose to live my life should not be seen as wrong. College is what you make of it. No matter what others say, or do, or live, that's the way they decided to go and you decided something different. That's not wrong, that's just being true to who you are. I have loved everything about my experiences up to this point, and I don't expect it to change. Yes, it hasn't been perfect, yes it has been hard, yes at times I wish I could have done things differently, but in the scheme of things, it's only a small bump in the road. A tiny crack in the entire picture that will be my life. And I intend to live it with joy.
