Insatiable hungers of the comparison monster
the struggle to keep my eyes on my own paper
Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.
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There were a handful of times in the past week where I looked up at the clock to find that it was somehow already well past 5pm, and yet it felt like I had spent the whole entire day — literally all of my time and all of my energy — just trying desperately not to fall into the cavern of despair brought on by comparing myself to other people.
(This, I assure you, is exactly as enjoyable as it sounds.)
The ferocity of these feelings — what I’ve privately been calling my Epic Foray into The Fun House of Debilitating Comparison — caught me by surprise. Hadn’t I already come to terms with most of this comparison stuff? I’ve done what feels like endless inner work on this exact issue, to the point where these past few years have thankfully been some of the least comparison-plagued of my adult life. But just when you think you’ve mastered something, right? That’s when the Universe is like oh cute okay let’s go.
The general questions of comparison (questions like: did you know that there will always be someone who has more than you?) don’t often ensnare me, not the way they used to. Sure, other people might have more — more money, more friends, more cool stories, more critical acclaim, more style, more everything. But honestly, this is fine. I know how much money is enough for me. I know what I want (and what I have capacity for) in my friendships. I have (mostly) stopped trying to impress people with cool stories. I wear pretty much the same four outfits on repeat, and I’m not sure that any of them could be considered “stylish.”
But then I decided to publish a book, which meant digitally surrounding myself with many other people who were simultaneously publishing their own books, and it was as if, overnight, all of my former rationality around enoughness imploded into a zillion tiny pieces as the Universe smirked at me and my book and my formerly healthy relationship with comparison and was like, Muahahaha! Now we’ve got her.
Here comes that question again, but with a twist: Did you know that there will always be other authors who have more than you? More readers, more book sales, more endorsements, more media mentions, more stamina to pitch for interviews and actually do said interviews while also managing to host Instagram Lives every day and keep promoting their book in increasingly clever ways.
I thought this wouldn’t matter to me. Not when I had already taken the time to carefully choose my own metric of success, which was simply publishing the book at all. I experienced such pure and visceral joy upon first holding the finished copy in my hands. But the more I watched what other authors were doing during the same early weeks of my own book launch, the more this “success” of mine no longer felt like a success at all. It felt naive, almost. Too small. Entirely inconsequential. Why hadn’t I set the bar higher? What was wrong with me that I wasn’t pushing myself to bigger and bigger literary ambitions?
One of the best decisions I’ve made so far this year was actually a joint decision, with my friend Cait.
Back in early January Cait and I decided to talk on the phone once a week, every week. Not just as friends, but as writing partners. And not writing partners in the sense that we regularly read each other’s work, more so writing partners in the shared commitment we hold to cultivating a deeper writing practice.
Here is what I did in my writerly life last week, we tell each other. And here is what I am prioritizing for the week ahead.
We have now had eight of these such meetings, and just the knowledge that I will be speaking with my friend every Tuesday morning helps to create gentle accountability for me as a writer, nudging me to show up to the blank page when everything in my procrastinate-y mind is screaming for me to avoid it instead.
These calls are also a safe place to bring the gross feelings that can often accompany any act of making something and putting that something out into the world. (There are other people in the world, you see, and these other people will be able to see this something that you’ve made and have their own feelings about it! What joy! What hell!)
And so I recently brought my itchy feelings of comparison and not-enoughness to Cait, and we discussed it. We normalized it. We identified a few specific things I could try that might help, and then in the following days I did those things and they did, in fact, help quite a lot.
Here is what I did:
Each day, no matter what, I hiked and I wrote. This is because hiking and writing are the two practices that most solidly and reliably bring me back to myself, especially during periods where I have wandered away from my own center. I hiked and wrote, hiked and wrote.
The next thing I did: I made a list, a big list of all of the action steps that I had already taken to share my book with potential readers. This helped to dissipate the lie that “I wasn’t doing anything.” I was actually doing a lot of things!
Then I made another list, a list of all the upcoming tasks I knew I genuinely wanted to do before my April 3 publication day. With this list in hand I turned to my calendar and I diligently assigned each task to a specific day and a clear time slot, which as I’ve learned is the only way I can ever reliably see if I am overcommitting myself or not. Do I — as a real human person with real human needs, a person who has never once been able to operate at robotic peak capacity for more than a little blip of time and even then not without consequences — have the capacity to do these new things I have entered into my calendar while staying in integrity with my other work projects and personal commitments? If yes, proceed. If no, something has to go.
(Rude, I know. I frequently try to negotiate with this part of the process; accepting my own limitations is a perpetual work in progress, lemme tell you.)
So I hiked, and I wrote, and I made my lists and used my calendar and evaluated my true capacity, and it was this combination of steps that helped to ground me in the facts instead of just my icky feelings.
When I first talked to Cait I felt like I wasn’t doing nearly enough for this book launch, but when I saw it all written out and time-blocked in my planner? When I could answer those pesky feelings of not-enoughness with the clear reality of what I was actually doing? That changed everything. That allowed me to feel satisfaction for my efforts and gratitude for my future readers and, most of all, a spark of awe that I was getting to do any of this at all.
The cure for comparison is doing your work.
Those eight words are now written on a sticky note that’s affixed to the blue ceramic pen holder that sits on the corner of my desk.
I cannot think my way out of comparison. When I am really in it, trying to remind myself to keep my eyes on my own paper is as useful as telling a highly stressed and emotionally overwhelmed person to “just relax.” Just relax?! You relax, motherfucker.
And so the cure for comparison (my cure, anyway) is to do my work. The work of reading through the list of things I have already done; the work of focusing my attention and devotion on the next task and the next task only; the work of admitting to a friend how bad it feels when the Not-Enoughness Monster comes at you, snarling and hungry and impossible to satisfy.
I used to think that personal growth meant not getting eaten by the same monster again and again. But what if this is wrong?
What if growth means still being eaten by the exact same monster, only now you have the skills and tools and support to haul yourself out of there before said monster grinds you into a pulp with the acids of its body.
This is my new hypothesis. What if it’s okay that the monster comes! What if it’s okay that the monster swallows me whole! What if I know that I have what it takes to escape. What if, what if, what if!
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More soon—
Nic
