Why am I afraid to show you who I am?

Four strategies for when comparison rears its ugly head.

I do not want the things in this letter to be known.

Why am I afraid to show you who I am?

How can I keep up appearances if I put it all out there?

I often preach authenticity and yet I currently find myself deeply reminded that authenticity takes work: a lot of work. We’re bombarded by a plethora of micro choices every single day and a lot of those include choices that pose the question: Am I honoring myself in this situation, interaction, etc? It isn’t always easy.

This past year, I found myself to be taking the easier route more and more. Why am I afraid to show you I am? Well, if I don’t like who I am right now, why should you? Authenticity is challenging but it’s made significantly more so if I’m not even being authentic to myself.

So, this letter is obviously about authenticity, right? Nah; maybe some other time. This letter, however, DOES require I be as authentic as possible if I want to do it justice.

This one’s about authenticity’s greatest assailant; The guy who beats it dead and continues smashing away until any hope of it has been snuffed out. Yup, you guessed it (damn, y’all are wicked smahht), it’s EVERYBODY’S good friend, the Comparison Monster!

Last year, I was a 33-year-old with an awesome apartment in the Upper East Side of New York City. I had a high paying career, a very active dating life, the best puppy on the block - basically, I had the things that, at the time, made me feel like I was crushing it (notice how I didn’t mention ‘friends’). And then, life happened.

My mentor of twelve years, who was like a father figure to me, passed away. It was devastating and grief is an ugly bastard, but life went on. About two months later, my closest friend since childhood, who I had recently cut off due to what I saw as exceedingly toxic behavior, also passed away. Fast forward a couple of weeks and my job was cut due to layoffs. To put it bluntly: I WAS LIVING THE DREAM, if that dream was a crippling nightmare.

With the weight of the grief for my mentor and friend, as well as the weight of the grief for the life I was supposed have, I moved back home to the suburbs of Boston.

A quick jaunt to woodlands I call home and I’d be right back at it, right? My mom was having surgery as well, so I was able to be there to help her through her recovery. I’d be able to reclaim everything I lost and claim the title of world’s best son along the way. Bear and I could be ‘the goodest boys’ together.

Well, that shit didn’t happen. I already felt so low from events beyond my control, and with the added weight of the realization that this wasn’t going to be this short excursion, I transformed into a shell of who I once was. I was just bitter, lifleless, angry, irritable and didn’t feel like I could see the way out.

To add insult to injury, it felt like I couldn’t look in any direction without seeing everyone my age getting married, having kids, buying houses. Everyone seemed very well-put together and were achieving the things I wanted, and it just made me feel worse and worse. We know we’re only seeing other people’s highlight reels. We know we’ll get all of that eventually (although it’s easy to start questioning that). We know everything will get better, but none of that helps in the moment.

It’s just this raw, visceral feeling that grabs hold of us and holds on for dear life.

I could NOT stop comparing myself to anything the moved. I was so hypercritical and negative and felt extremely alone in all of this.

Thankfully, I eventually reached a melting point where I was just ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’.

I knew how to drag myself out of this hole I’d created for myself, so I decided to retake my own sanity. Months of intensive healing soon followed, which funnily enough led me to starting Humbling the Narcissist, and I was feeling like a new version of myself that I was quickly learning to cherish.

Regardless of how much better I was feeling, I still had unanswered questions and lingering feelings. I didn’t really place value judgements on these feelings. They weren’t GOOD or BAD by any means, but they begged a bit of investigation.

Questions such as:

• ‘Is it something specifically about this age that made me lean so hard into comparison?’ I was genuinely wondering if it was something about the 30s that did this to us.

• ‘How do I stop myself from comparing myself to others in the future’. Aside from seeing the obvious futility of comparison, I also felt like the added layer of comparison bastardized the grieving process I was experiencing.

As I looked further into these questions, I also began to document not only the answers, but also the strategies I was finding to help the most with fighting off or maybe even accepting comparison.

1. Realize that we’re FAR from alone in feeling this way.

---

Just last week, I ‘restacked’ this image that had really resonated with me. It always seemed easy for me to forget at times that regardless of how much I have accomplished, if there were certain things I hadn’t accomplished by a specific age, then I had failed.

I woke up the next morning and this thing had taken on a life of its own. Take a look:

Clearly, this resonated with way more people than I expected. The comments were from people as young as twenty years old giving sentiments among which were that they are afraid to move forward in life due to not feeling up to par. There were also a number of fifty, sixty, seventy-year-olds all saying the same thing: ‘Something you remind yourself of in your 30s? Hah! Try 70s!’.

There’s something light and healing about the idea that this seems more a part of the human experience rather than a cause for ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!’.

2. Visit a support group

---

I’m piggy backing off of the previous point here, but this one is a bit more specific.

In 2016, I had a reached a point where I just didn’t want to deal with alcohol any longer, so I decided to check out some AA meetings. I went in thinking a lot of my thoughts, experiences and concerns would be unique. I quickly found out, however, that that could not be further from the truth.

Listening to individuals in a group of people all brought together to treat a common ailment was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. Here I was, comparing myself to everybody I could and catastrophizing in my loneliness, when all of a sudden, a different person’s mouth would echo my exact fears, thoughts, and worries.

I was further able to meet so many people from the group and the more I attended meetings and spoke with my peers, the more I realized that the whole ‘lonely in my comparison fueled nightmare’ dramatization was some of the biggest bullshit I’d ever convinced myself of.

It is monumentally more challenging to take comparisons seriously when it becomes so clear that everybody is going through their own individual shit. It also seemed like everyone was comparing themselves and everyone else to EVERYONE ELSE. Me comparing myself to you comparing yourself to him comparing himself to her comparing themselves to them, ad infinitum.

Yes, I did have to listen to a man complain about how his quality of life plummeted because he could no longer drink on his yacht, but to each their own or something.

3. Use Mindfulness

---

“Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance.” - Tara Brach

One of the most important things I found was the ability to catch myself when I found myself comparing myself to others, and then sitting there with those thoughts and feelings.

What was spurring me to get lost in comparison right now? Was there anything I wasn’t doing? Was there anything I was doing too much of? What was is it that I needed in the moment to honor myself.

It’s funny - in the past, I had tried to put my work out there. I’ve published before and I was always really proud of the fact that I did so, but I would ALWAYS fall into the trap of comparing my writing to the plethora of other people publishing their works online. It was really, genuinely, paralyzing.

I worked on this and worked on this, and it was monumentally challenging because of all the negative feelings I would feel each time, but it’s now to the point where I’m part of a massive writing platform (Substack) and I haven’t once found myself comparing my work to anyone else’s.

It became obvious to me that if I was reading someone else’s work and constantly comparing and worrying, I was very obviously NOT ACTUALLY READING THEIR WORK AT ALL. I can’t emphasize that part enough. By not employing mindfulness to really home in on what we’re reading, and consequently not filtering out any negative thoughts that may be present, we miss out on:

• Learning from other writers in our community. If I’m only worried about who’s better, am I really going to be open to learning from you?

• Getting inspiration. If I have to push away your work so I won’t spiral into judgement and comparison, then I’m going to miss out on so much inspiration.

• Ideas. How can I steal from your ideas if I don’t consider them good enough?!

4. Use Gratitude and Self-Compassion.

---

“Remember that if you really want to motivate yourself, love is more powerful than fear.”

- Kristen Neff

It’s so easy to forget all the great things we have in our lives when we’re visited by the comparison monster. Training ourselves to practice gratitude and self-compassion are natural remedies to comparison but it’s hard to remember to equip them unless we make a habit out of it.

Cultivating gratitude really just requires us to take a few pauses during the day and look around for a few things to be grateful for in the moment. Alternatively, this can be a more structured practice where we write out five things we’re grateful for every night or morning. That can look like:

• I am grateful for my continued health

• I am grateful for my car and how it allows me to get where I need to go

• I am grateful for waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

• I am grateful for the pauses I take every day to admire the sights, sounds and smells all around me.

It really doesn’t have to be anything too complicated.

Another practice we can employ is to write down our wins in a place we can revisit often. When we’re stuck in a comparison rut, it’s hard to remember all the good we’ve done in life and all of our accomplishments. If we pick out a journal that we slowly fill in with all the accomplishments, big and small, that we can remember and add to it as we go, then we’ll have that list to reflect on whenever we feel like we’re just not up to snuff.

As far as self-compassion goes, it’s an act of self-love to only compete against the person I was yesterday. To only compare myself to the person I was yesterday. I love myself, therefore I want my future self to be better. I love myself, therefore I want my future self to be able to look back to yesterday and be grateful for my present efforts.

It will also NEVER hurt to pause and tell ourselves: ‘it’s okay’. It’s never going to hurt anyone for us to pause and put our right hand on our left forearm and remind ourselves that we’re doing our best and we’ll get what we set out for when the time is right for us.

Comparison may very well be a natural part of the human experience but I’m all the way over letting it decay my joy and bastardize my journey.

---

What do you do when you find yourself visited by the comparison monster? What sort of things do you find them telling you and what strategies do you employ to kick it in its ugly-ass face?

I would LOVE to hear your experiences so please comment below, dear readers!

---

Quote I’m currently pondering:

Fear is not who you are at your core.

Fear is not the real you that you must somehow fix or improve or overcome.

Fear is a very useful signal along the path to freedom. The stronger the fear, the closer you are to what you are seeking. If you want to stay “safe” (stuck where you are), fear tells you to stop what you are doing. But if you want to be free, fear lets you know you are on the right track; it is a signal to push ahead in the same direction, to pick up the pace.

Cheri Huber

Books I’m working my way through right now: