Everybody wants to be better than everyone else. Often our entire lives are spent comparing ourselves to the people around us and asking ourselves, “why can’t I be like them?” I felt constantly compared while growing up. During my childhood, I lived in an area where there were not many minority groups, so I found myself being compared with a close family friend’s daughter (who I will refer to as Anne) who was also Korean and my age. Being compared wouldn’t have been as bad if I had been the one that was excelling. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. It also didn’t help that we were involved in almost all of the same extracurricular activities: swim, gymnastics, and violin. Over everything else, violin was a big part of my life. My parents greatly emphasized learning an instrument so a lot of my time was spent playing. Anne and I had the same violin teacher, so we performed at the same recitals which was an open invitation for comparison. She was an exceptional violinist even at a young age and I remember always feeling like I was never enough.
After I moved to Southern California, I began my 6-year middle school and high school journey at a college preparatory magnet school. I found myself constantly comparing myself with my peers, as most of them were very high achieving. The atmosphere at my high school was full of toxicity. There was continuous unspoken competition lingering in the air and it was hard to tell which relationships were real and which were superficial. Because so many people were performing well in school and aiming for Ivy League universities, I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t doing as much as everyone else around me. I never had enough board positions, wasn’t taking enough AP classes, and amidst all the academic pressures, I also had to face social pressures.
The sad reality is that almost everyone has probably experienced similar situations as I did. Even though the things I talked about are unique to me, there is probably some aspect that you can relate to me with. As a society, I believe it’s important that we begin to denormalize comparison in our lives. It is a huge issue as it extremely affects peoples’ mental health and discourages people from performing at their highest potential. Personally, the moment that I stopped comparing myself with my friends and classmates, was when I was able to do my best and be the most mentally stable. Just because the person next to you is good at something, doesn’t mean you aren’t, and it doesn’t mean that you are behind, just because someone looks like they are ahead. We have so much opportunity and potential to gain even more knowledge from our education if we begin to focus more on ourselves rather than other people. Imagine everything that you could accomplish if you stopped letting other people’s successes intimidate you. The fact of the matter is that most likely, the people who scare you are also intimidated by your potential.
