comparison is a construct; i have my own battles to face.

An Ode to a Longing Heart | 03

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The voices ricocheting within the hollows in my head, the words spoken by motivational speakers and philosophers alike below the ornate proscenium, and the letters embedded in every self-help book on my shelf and in positivity posts spamming across the seemingly endless corners of the cyber world, all say the same thing: Comparison is the thief of joy.

I can’t recall how many times I’ve tried to console myself with that phrase whenever I found myself drowning in the depths of my own despondency — one that stems from constantly deprecating my capabilities. My capabilities that, when pit against others’ prowess, appear dull in comparison.

I’ve always thought — and believed — that I was special. Gifted. Full of potential. It’s always the same words spoken to me by the people around me — my family, teachers, friends, mentors, even strangers I just met. And I guess when you’ve been constantly subjected to such flattery and affirmations since you were young, you tend to make that your whole identity. It’s as though you’ve been programmed to instill those beliefs in your system.

It became my truth for a while. For years, to be exact. The environment I was in made it seem almost natural, like things were in their perfect places, like I was where I was supposed to be, like it was the truth after all. I was renowned as the kid who was “wiser beyond her years”.

Then came a new juncture in my life. The estrangement, alienation, and sudden awakening all came crashing toward me in biting, ice-cold waves, wrecking my barely burgeoning dreams and my once-sturdy belief in myself.

I was surrounded by just as bright, talented, and gifted — if not more — young dreamers, each of us carrying our rose-colored hopes and the pressure that came with them on our backs. I was but a speck of dust in an ever-competitive universe of blessed ones.

The only thing that set me apart from them was the withering aspiration within me, while theirs were blooming in both graceful pace and beauty.

That was when I started wondering, doubting, asking questions I’m afraid of finding the answers to. The same list of words kept replaying in my mind, again and again and again, spiraling with a force so strong every movement hurt me beyond relief. Sometimes they take on the form of a question, sometimes a statement’s. One serving as the answer to the other.

Am I truly special? Were those words ever true?

I was never special. Whatever I can do, someone else could do it better.

All of a sudden, I wasn’t the kid who outwit her age anymore. Instead, I earned a new title: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” What a fancy way of saying I am not the best at anything despite being good at everything. Perhaps the word “good” is an overestimation itself — a weak appeasement wrapped in a generous and fancy articulation that my real capacity’s undeserving of. Perhaps the more appropriate term would be “passable,” “mediocre,” or “adequate”.

This disconcerting realization made my mind constantly circle back to a quote I read from Tim Burton’s Big Fish years before:

“You were a big fish in a small pond, but this, here, is the ocean and you’re drowning.”

How do you cope with this sudden unveiling of the truth, with the realization that you’re struggling to maintain the title you once prided yourself with when everything seemed so effortless then?

I used to think that the people who were better, brighter, and more talented than me destroyed my dreams. I painted them as villains, and myself the victim. I cried to God, to my family and friends, to the whole universe, asking why was I built the way I was, why didn’t I get the things I wanted, why were others given the opportunities I wasn’t. Because of these, I believed they had it easier than me, that they had some sort of “advantage” in this imaginary rivalry I established between myself and them.

But my older years, along with the passage of time, bestowed me with the wisdom to finally understand that there was never a competition — that no one had it easy; that we all had our own battles to face. It was wrong of me to depict them as my rivals, when in truth, we were all just striving to make our dreams come to pass. In this aspect, I realized, that we were not that different from each other after all. We were one and the same—yet our attributes still made us uniquely ourselves.

Villainizing them was my weak and childish attempt to shield myself from the hurt of being dawned by reality — by the truth. I didn’t know how else to cope, but that doesn’t exempt me from the wrongness of my thoughts.

Comparison is a mental construct.

I realize that now.

It took me years, and a few hard-fought battles, to finally understand that we are the heroines in our own stories — that there was never a need to compare because we’re all coursing through this life on our own paths, each laden with different hurdles, and at our own paces, each step taken distinct from others’.

Conventional wisdom tells us that comparison is the thief of joy.

But for me, comparison is merely an instrument. The real thief is my mind. After all, these merely happened inside the hollows in my head — in this destructive mind of mine, the most destructive part of me. And this is one of the battles I have to face on my own — no comparison, no other rival but my own thoughts.