A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.
Growing up, I was easily swayed by the opinions I watched on TV, heard in movies, or read in books. I was convinced I was starring in my very a YA novel, or the protagonist of a quirky sitcom, often comparing my successes and my failures to those of fictional characters – to a fictional reality. Everything I did; everything I wanted, I fashioned it after delusions of grandeur that didn’t exist. I wanted my life to be a carbon copy of the lives I thought to be more adventurous, more exciting, more interesting, more relatable, funnier, prettier. I blurred the lines between who I was and who I wanted to be, the latter being someone who would never exist. My world wasn’t scripted; there were no writers to fix my plot holes.
I found myself disappointed with my reality because it didn’t measure up to my expectations.
It’s embarrassing that for the grand majority of my life, I found myself believing that my problems would solve themselves in a few chapters or a few episodes. I was constantly awaiting a novel worthy epiphany that led to self-realization and enlightenment, or that the boy I was pining over would spontaneously fall in love with me, or both (naturally, I was expecting both to happen). I can’t help but cringe at the knowledge that I made all my decisions based off of what a character would do, in hopes that I would have a similar outcome. It got to the point where my mom hid my books and grounded me from certain TV shows and movies for a while.
My only consolation is that I’m not alone. Everyone is trying to level their expectations to their realities in their own way.
They say imitation is the best form of flattery and I generously disagree, especially when imitation is so easily mistaken for comparison. We lose who we are trying to be someone we aren’t; we try so hard to be a better version of ourselves that we forget that we’re already the best version of ourselves. Whether it’s a friend, a family member, a stranger on the internet, a celebrity or, yes, even the main character in your favorite movie, the common denominator is our false sense of reality. A warped reality that we begin to expect, no matter how implausible.
I’m not a thirteen-year-old kid anymore. I don’t expect my life to play out like a movie. I don’t play pretend, comforting myself with fabricated notions of truth. But that doesn’t mean I don’t compare myself to anyone. I closed the books and finished the movies, but I couldn’t seem to stop the bad habit they set in motion. I still find myself comparing myself to others, weighing my reality against theirs. I thought I’d solved my problem, but all I’d done was replace it.
I thought that if I compared myself to something fictional, it wouldn’t hurt as bad if it didn’t work out. I thought it would be harder to lose myself because at least at some level I knew it wasn’t real. But the longer I let myself live in a fantasy where comparing myself was okay, the more I let it bleed into my painfully real life.
The solution isn’t as simple this time. My mom can’t just forbid me from the people around me, no matter how much I wish it was that easy. It’s a solution that requires hard work. It requires acceptance and love. It requires looking for yourself and being okay with who you find. It means appreciating who others are, but understanding your differences. It doesn’t mean lowering your expectations. It doesn’t mean you can’t have goals and aspirations.
It means fitting your expectations to who you are and what you want, not to who you think you should be and what you think you should want.
