Why Comparing Yourself to Others is Just Intellectual Masturbation!
Why I Named Another Woman 'Better Me' and Other Stories of Self-Torture
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The summer I turned twenty, I developed a habit of swimming laps at the university pool near my apartment in Trinidad. Three mornings a week, I'd slide into the chlorinated water alongside serious athletes, retirees doing water aerobics, and the occasional professor getting in exercise before class.
In the lane next to me, a woman roughly my age swam with perfect butterfly technique, her shoulders carving through the water with machine-like precision.
I named her Better Me.
For weeks, I watched her from the corner of my goggles, counting her laps against mine, noting how she never stopped to rest at the wall like I did. My own crawl stroke felt gangly and lame by comparison. To put it bluntly, I flailed through the water like a drowning giraffe.
Sometimes, I'd push harder when she was watching, then feel my lungs burn in protest. Once, she smiled and nodded at me in the changing room. I nodded back, too intimidated to speak, convinced she could somehow sense my inferiority.
We humans have this remarkable talent for collecting evidence of our own shortcomings. It's like we're all working for some cosmic prosecutor, building an airtight case against ourselves.
We create elaborate filing systems in our heads:
People Who Can Eat Carbohydrates Without Experiencing Moral Crisis
People Whose Faces Look Good Without Makeup and Proper Lighting
People Who Make Money Doing Things They Actually Enjoy
People Who Seem to Understand What Bitcoin Is
People Who Own Plants That Are Still Alive
The Weather Report from Hell
I've spent years honing this particular talent, this ability to locate precisely where I fall short. Some might call it realistic self-assessment. I called it intellectual honesty. The truth was, it felt like fucking control.
My grandfather used to say that comparing yourself to others is like trying to grow watermelons in Alaska.
"Different soil, different sun," he'd tell me, practicing his ninja-like chef skills on the kitchen counter while I watched.
"You can't judge your garden by someone else's climate."
I'd nod sagely while secretly cataloging all the ways his grandson, my cousin, with the perfect report card awards, was flourishing in his particular climate. My soil felt perpetually rocky, my growing season too short.
What Grandpa failed to mention was how addictive comparison becomes. It creates its own weather system that follows you around like a personal storm cloud. It starts innocently enough — a casual scroll through social media, a friend's promotion announcement, the neighbor's lawn that looks like it was manicured by landscape architects. Before you know it, you're standing in a torrential downpour of inadequacy, completely soaked in evidence of everything you're not.
See, we've built elaborate structures around these comparisons, justifications, explanations, and plans for improvement. We become archaeologists of our own perceived failures, brushing away at layers of ourselves with increasing precision, looking for artifacts that explain why we haven't achieved what others have.
Still Keeping Score?
Last fall, I ran into an old colleague at a bookstore. She was browsing gardening magazines, her gray hair longer than I remembered from when we worked together five years ago. Back then, she'd been one of those people who color-coordinated their desk supplies and actually read the memos that the rest of us used as coasters.
"Still keeping score?" she asked after we'd exchanged the usual how-are-yous and what-are-you-up-to-nows.
I laughed because she'd nailed me completely. "I've gone digital," I admitted. "Much more efficient tracking of personal failures. I can now disappoint myself in real-time."
She smiled with the expression of someone who'd been through her own version of competitive self-hatred and lived to tell about it.
The silly thing about constantly measuring yourself against others is that even when you win, you somehow manage to lose. It's like winning the lottery and then complaining about having to pay taxes on it. You become a professional goal-post mover, always finding new ways to disqualify your own victories.
Published an essay? Well, it didn't get decent reads.
Got the contract? Well, it took me long enough to get there.
Participated in a fitness boot camp? I got tired halfway through.
It's a special kind of logic that allows you to build a game where winning automatically disqualifies the victory. Like reverse psychology, but stupider.
Social media has transformed comparison from a local sport into an Olympic event with infinite categories. We now have unprecedented access to the lives of strangers, careers, relationships, travel destinations, home interiors, and morning routines. The volume creates an impossible standard, not just one person who writes better than you, but thousands.
Putting Down the Measuring Stick
I have a theory that comparison is mostly about storytelling. We're comparing our raw footage to someone else's highlight reel. Of course, the lighting looks better in their version.
But it's worse than that. We're not just comparing different edits of the same movie -we're comparing completely different films. It's like getting upset that your indie documentary about depression didn't win the same awards as someone else's big-budget action movie about success.
I remember watching my colleague receive an award I'd been nominated for. As he gave his acceptance speech, I mentally cataloged all his advantages - better connections, more resources, institutional support that had somehow bypassed me entirely.
What I failed to consider was that we were making completely different movies. His projects asked different questions, used different methods, and reflected different values. He was making Transformers while I was making The Blair Witch Project, and I was pissed that mine didn't have the same special effects budget.
My grandfather would have laughed his ass off. Of course, my watermelons weren't growing in Alaska. That's not how watermelons work, you silly girl.
The Pool Epiphany (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Inner Drowning Giraffe)
When I finally worked up the courage to talk to Better Me, I learned her name was Talisha. She'd been swimming competitively since childhood but quit the team in her senior year of high school.
"Too much pressure," she explained, adjusting her swim cap. "Now I just do it because the water feels like home."
I nodded, suddenly understanding that we'd been in the same pool but swimming in completely different oceans. What looked like discipline from my lane was joy from hers. She wasn't counting laps or comparing times or wondering if her technique looked sufficiently impressive to the aging giraffe thrashing around in the next lane. She was just fucking swimming.
Recently, I found a notebook from high school. Page after page was filled with variations of the same themes: not good enough, should try harder, why can't I be like [insert name of person who seemed to have their shit together].
The handwriting was mine, but I could barely connect with the person who'd gripped that pen so tightly she sometimes tore through the paper.
Three things happen when you finally let go of the measuring stick:
First, you realize how much mental real estate this shit has been taking up. It's like finally cleaning out that junk drawer that's been driving you crazy. Suddenly, you have space for things that matter.
Second, you discover that what felt like "honest self-assessment" was really elaborate procrastination. A way to explain why your life wasn't what you wanted without having to do anything about it.
Third, you start to suspect that what you want might be completely different from what you've been measuring yourself against all this time.
The Water Holds Us All (Even the Drowning Giraffes)
What would happen if we just put down the measuring stick entirely? Not replace it with inspirational Instagram quotes or vision boards, that would be like replacing cocaine with crystal meth — but really question whether this whole framework makes any sense at all.
Maybe true intellectual honesty isn't rigorous self-criticism but recognizing that the entire comparison game is rigged. There's no cosmic scoreboard, no universal metric for human worth, no celestial accountant tallying our failures.
The standards we measure ourselves against are as made-up as everything else humans have invented - imaginary buildings constructed from anxiety that we can choose to demolish whenever we want.
Last Monday, I swam fifteen laps at our community pool, stopping whenever I needed to catch my breath like the out-of-shape former giraffe that I am. In the lane beside me, an older man moved through the water with careful, deliberate strokes, taking twice as long as me but looking twice as peaceful. In the other lane, a woman executed perfect butterfly strokes that reminded me of Talisha.
I no longer know who Better Me is supposed to be. Maybe there never was such a person. Maybe Better Me was just a story I told myself to avoid dealing with Actual Me, who is perfectly fine as she is, even when she occasionally resembles a drowning giraffe.
The water holds us all differently, and the miracle isn't how fast we move through it but that we're brave enough to get in at all. There's room in the pool for everyone, the graceful butterfliers, the determined breaststrokers, and yes, even those of us who look like we're conducting an emergency evacuation of a sinking ship.
And honestly, that's more than enough.
Thank you for taking the time.
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Somebody helped me when I was in my 20s by telling me that we compare our insides to others' outsides. What we see of others is different from what we know of our interior life. That helped me. I appreciate your article for the wry way you speak truth with your story. From what I can tell, you have been learning well who you are now, with the multitude of people you have been helping see more clearly. Thanks for this.
Love this, sis. Although I do see the irony in one of the best writers on this platform discussing the idea of not measuring up. You measure up just fine, rat :)
I also think this idea of our need to compare is interesting. Why do we even want to compare? Why can’t we discover what happiness or success looks like for ourselves? When we start comparing, that’s when we mess everything up. That’s when we get frustrated that our Alaska garden isn’t producing tropical fruits, as your grandfather so wisely said.