Compare and Despair: How to Release Judgement
Do you ever hear about a friend’s achievements and your heart sinks? You’re totally happy for them, but something within you starts wondering why you didn’t get that job, that engagement proposal, why you didn’t reach that goal or milestone in the same timeframe that they did. This is called compare and despair. Your brain starts to compare your insides to your friend’s outsides. To put you down and call you a failure in a bad way, to begin to ask dead-end questions in a mean way. Does this mean I need more school? To gain or lose some lbs? To do my whole life differently if I want what this friend, family member, stranger on the internet has?
Does your brain start to get all “poor me” about it and to question all your life’s work and success, your worth? Yeah, I’ve been there too, my darling, and it’s a dead-end street for sure. One I often traversed alone in the dark.
This thought habit known as compare and despair does nothing to move your perfect life forward.
And so often, we look at social media pictures, we look at these stories, and we think, “Ugh, why isn’t my life like that? Why aren’t I doing all these amazing, magnificent, productive things in quarantine? Why am I not hitting all these goals?”
That, my love, comparing your perfect insides to someone else’s outsides, is called compare and despair.
And it’s a time, energy, and vital life force suck for sure, and it’s one I’d love to help you begin to shift through starting now.
One of the things I hear so much from my clients who are actively working to shift their codependent and perfectionist thought habits is this same habit of comparing themselves to others and despairing about the ways they see others living, judging themselves against a friend who communicates directly, who doesn’t seem to take things personally, who sets healthy boundaries, who doesn’t procrastinate, who lives into their weirdness, their authenticity, who is unapologetically themselves.
These comparisons come with this story that you are supposed to be somewhere other than where you are in your growth.
A whole bunch of “shoulds.” I should be more healed, I should be less reactive, I should know what my life’s driving purpose is, I should be able to set up goals and keep them, I should be able to take care of myself first, I should be able to say no when I mean it, and yes when I do. I should be able to not answer my mom’s phone call without endless guilt.
My love, you can do and live into all of these things, and doing them from that “should” place is a recipe for breaking your own heart and will keep you spinning in the old compare and despair.
And as I love to say, the way you do anything is the way you do everything. And if you’re judging yourself against other people in one area of your life, you’re likely doing it in every area of your life.
Though perhaps in more subtle, or less conscious ways. And my beauty, I get it. I’ve been there too. Comparing my journey to other people’s journey. My healing to theirs. My success or perceived lack thereof to theirs and beating myself up for it.
What this habit does is it reinforces a narrative that most of us learned in childhood that we are alone in life, that we have to be everyone to everyone else, everything to everyone else, and everyone to ourselves.
That we are uniquely messed up and have to prove our lovability, value, and worth. That deep loneliness within that codependency and perfectionism can lead to.
Whether you completely feel this or not, get curious about it. Are there undertones of this thought habit in your life? I know there were in mine for sure, and it kept me comparing and despairing. And it feels so amazing to not have that be my knee-jerk reaction anymore.
The term compare and despair means to compare yourself to someone else, to see how you measure up, and to feel bad about yourself in the process.
As with thought habits like perfectionism and codependency, your comparison is not based in any kind of objective reality, but rather, it’s a projection of your own inner worry, fear, and insecurity. Your thoughts.
And as always, it’s a form of protection. It’s a beautiful self-loving reflex to attempt to keep yourself safe from well, yourself, from the ways you’ve learned to beat yourself up for being you, on your own path, developing, learning, growing. And sure, not measuring up to where you think someone else is on their path, or where you think you should be on your path.
And therein lies the problem. Not accepting your perfect self where you are, and thinking you should be at some other place on a trajectory of healing and growth that you’ve decided you’re not measuring up on. Ouch.
Something I hear a lot on this topic is talk like, “Other people are just showing the best parts. Everyone is suffering underneath. You never know what’s going on for other people.”
And while yeah, that’s totally true for sure, you never know someone else’s truth, what’s really going on for them under the shiny Instagram pictures, what doesn’t matter is whether what other people share online or tell you about is real. Whether it’s real or not, whether there’s more to the story or not is immaterial.
Because if your thought habit is to compare yourself to what they’re presenting, you’re going to do it all the same, whether you know about the underlying depression, anxiety, loss, fear, et cetera.
In fact, your brain may still say, “Yeah, she may be depressed or have eczema, whatever, but look at all she’s doing under quarantine or while depressed or whatever.”
That’s because when your mindset is still based on externalizing your self-worth, people-pleasing and seeking outside approval, no matter what the outside truths are, you’ll keep holding yourself up as less than, if that’s your thought habit.
This goes back to a core story in codependency and perfectionism, which goes they have to like me for me to be worthy of love. I don’t think most of us are conscious that that’s our story. But when we do what we do in this family and we pull back with love and gentleness, we start to see the patterns.
The places this ingrained and insidious thought habit shows up in our day to day. So this habit may have to do with the earliest stories put in your head about what makes you worthy of love and celebrating.
For many of us, it starts at home. If your parents or other family members compared you and siblings, cousins, whatever, which is a thing I hear a lot, that parents said things like, “Well, Claudia got straight As,” or, “Well, Maria keeps her room clean.”
I’m not saying there’s anything malicious there, that your parents were trying to set up compare and despair in your brain. It’s just what happened. But it does set your brain up to value you and your worth and accomplishments against someone else.
So too, it teaches us to compete against ourselves, as though that were even a thing, right?
Why be in competition with yourself versus gently, lovingly holding yourself up and encouraging yourself to do your best every day? School is also set up to teach us to compare ourselves to others. Workplaces do this too. Evaluating people in relation to each other, grades, deadlines met, work produced, et cetera.
The patriarchy and capitalism also teach us to compare ourselves to others and what we view them as having.
We’re taught that to get ahead, we need to compete, versus being cooperative and celebrating other people’s success. That to get ahead, we need to take things personally, which is also a hallmark of codependent and perfectionist thinking, to take things personally.
And that we need to make someone else’s success or failure mean something about yourself, which it never does. It’s like there’s a system wide scarcity mentality. Like there’s only so much success to go around and it’s just not true. It’s just marketing.
And humans socialized as women are taught especially to compare our weight, figures, fashion, hair, et cetera, to others in these constant and ubiquitous ways, and it seeps in so deeply that we may not even know we’re doing it. And yet, we suck in our tummies when we walk by any reflective surface.
Capitalism wants you to feel bad about yourself, to feel scarcity. That’s how it thrives. And you thinking that you’re not perfect and amazing, and thus, you spend money on the latest serum or waxing trend or fashion item or whatever. And don’t get me wrong, this femme loves having a well-moistured visage. Not because I think it’ll make me more lovable. Just because it feels good to not have tight, dry skin.
Next my angel, we will declare a nerd alert. So as humans, we generally prefer being told what to do rather than doing what we want because it can feel less scary, because then you are not to blame if you fail. You were just doing what you were told, what is expected of you. Toeing the line. Doing what everyone else is doing. Comparing yourself to others and holding tight to the story that you’re always a failure if you don’t measure up.
Evolutionarily speaking, we privilege fitting in with a crowd, whatever that crowd is, because it feels safer in the moment.
Fitting in feels good in this deep biological way. It feels like belonging. So of course, we compare and despair because it’s a measurement of that belonging.
Comparing ourselves to anything feeds that, keeps us trying to fit in, versus creating space to be our authentic selves, to own our weirdness.
For those of us with codependent and perfectionist thought habits, with that internal barometer of our own worthiness set squarely on other people and what they think of you, then comparing yourself to others is what your brain will be focused on doing.
Telling those same old stories about you not being smart enough, not getting paid enough, not being thin enough, not being fashionable enough. And so your brain will continue to collect more evidence. And my nerd, we love evidence. But here, we use it against ourselves as evidence of how you’re not worthy, how you’re obviously less than.
The problem is if you base how you feel about yourself by external rewards, you have no choice. No choice but to compare and despair because it’s the thought habit you know.
And the problem is that as long as you do this, you will always, always find someone who is doing better than you, who is succeeding more than you, who is effectively of greater worth, value, and lovability than you on some kind of measure.
And meanwhile, your brain will do what it’s supposed to. Fixate on comparing yourself to them and despairing at what a failure you are. I’ll also say that celebrating ourselves, especially as women, is seen as selfish or arrogant, or somehow just not okay. Not the right thing to do.
Our labor has been ignored, made less than, made unimportant for so long. And all of that is just BS. My brain just went to the phrase “working mother.” Like as though there were any other kind, right? My love, you get to celebrate you exactly where you’re at, and that has nothing to do with anyone else. Just you being you. Doing you. Celebrating you.
Finally, comparing and despairing is a side effect of consumption. What we consume in terms of social media, magazines, et cetera, strengthens the story in your head that you need to compare your life, your success to others.
And sort of zooming out and recognizing just how wonderful and perfect it is that you are exactly where you are, who you are, and that everything is exactly as it should be.
And whether someone else is married, has kids, is at peace with not having kids, is a size x or y, is “successful,” none of that has anything to do with you, my love. But the more you consume media that tells you that it does matter, that it has so much to do with you, you’ll stay stuck in that thought narrative.
So my darling nerdlet, let’s dive into the remedy. So as always, we start with awareness, acceptance, action.
The first step to release compare and despair thought habits is awareness.
And it’s to just begin with asking yourself, am I scanning the world for folks to judge and to judge myself around or against?
Most of us are until we begin to recognize, shift into acceptance around the fact that we do that, and then start to reframe that habit. Bring new thoughts in to create new feelings.
The second remedy to compare and despair thought habits is self-love.
But that’s no surprise, my darling. Self-love is the key to it all. And part of self-love is valuing yourself. When your opinion of you is the most important one, what you imagine other people think of you, how other people are doing in the world, it all starts to fade into the background and your brain can start to relax when it feels you doing something that may not get you the sort of social accolades it used to want.
The only way to feel better about yourself is to lovingly challenge your thought habits, to get really curious about your belief system about your own worthiness, remembering as we do, that a belief is just a thought that you’ve thought over and over and over again, and to ask yourself where that worthiness statement comes from.
And we do this gently. We don’t jump to changing our thoughts to try to feel better.
The next step, to heal compare and despair thought habits is celebrating yourself.
I literally schedule time into my day every single day to celebrate me. Not just my accomplishments and what I did, but who I am, how I showed up in the world each day. I celebrate being loving, honoring people, being kind, being generous, being of service.
You are a human being, not a human doing. Along with celebrating yourself is also learning to be okay with feeling inadequate, unworthy, less than. With letting that feeling just exist. And instead of attempting to push it away, which you know I never recommend, instead, I’d really encourage you to get into conversation with it, to be curious about it.
What if someone else’s success isn’t a problem?
What if it has nothing to do with me? It’s all about them and where they are energetically, where they are on their own timeline. And it has nothing to do with mine. Get curious about that. See if you can take someone else’s success as inspiration. Not something to despair about. Get out the pen and paper and write about it.
Next, is to begin to practice celebrating the success of other people.
Being happy for other people’s happiness. Not from a fake place. Not from like, a BS positivity place. We don’t do that. But from a real place in your core, in your gut.
There’s a teaching in Buddhism I’ll offer you called mudita, which means joy. Especially sympathetic or vicarious joy or the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s wellbeing. And this was first taught to me as being in the mind state of a most loving, generous parent, observing a growing child’s accomplishments, successes. Not having any interest or direct income from the accomplishments of that other.
Meaning, you don’t stand to gain from their success and you find joy in it. Mudita is a pure joy unadulterated by self-interest. That inner well spring of infinite joy that is available to everyone at all times, regardless of circumstances.
The more deeply one drinks of this spring, the more secure one becomes in one’s own abundant happiness.
My love, let these messages soak in. Let them move your heart. Pay attention to how you show up in this coming week for yourself and the people in your world, the people on your Instagram, your family members who may be marking these wild successes during quarantine.
But just mark it. Be curious about it. Give yourself wild love about it.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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