It is often said that college is the place where you find yourself through meeting new people, having new experiences and doing things you’d never thought of doing before. You join new clubs, find new friends and discover your purpose in life – or at least try to. While all of these are true, something no one ever mentions is that while you’re doing all of these amazing things, there are other people who seem to be doing everything you wanted to do and more. How do you deal with the envy? How do you make yourself feel like you’re “living your best life” when these people are already living theirs? Whether it’s classmates, acquaintances or even your best friends; comparing yourself to others will never help you become the person you want to be. Trust me: I learned that the hard way. Here are a few things I wish I knew about comparing myself to others.
1. Comparing yourself to others will actually INHIBIT your growth.
Freshman year of college, I was just about as nervous as anyone else. I had been accepted into my top choice theatre program without very much previous experience, which gave me an ounce of confidence where there otherwise would be none. However, as soon as I watched my classmates perform, the little confidence I had was lost. Mistake #1. I immediately compared myself to people I did not need to compare myself to; we were all different people, different kinds of performers with different strengths and weaknesses. Nonetheless, I could not get past the fact that they were more seasoned performers and I had a lot of work to do in order to catch up. This is the part where I’m supposed to say I started working extremely hard and came out on top like in Fame, right? Unfortunately, that’s only what I wish would have happened. Don’t get me wrong: I did work hard. I wasn’t lazy or unmotivated; instead, it was my comparison to others that inhibited me from doing my best work. While I rehearsed, I couldn’t help but think “oh, this person could do this better” or “this wasn’t meant for me to perform” and I would become discouraged from practicing. My rehearsal sessions usually ended in emotional breakdowns to the point that I couldn’t work anymore. (Good thing the practice rooms were pretty soundproof).
As the year went on, I thought I was the only one who noticed that I was just skating by. It wasn’t until one day, just days before my birthday, I received an email saying that my professors wanted to have a meeting with me. My heart began racing and everything that could possibly be wrong ran through my head until the day of the meeting. It turned out that I wasn’t the only who saw that I was not growing. In fact, my professors called me in to ask me if there was anything going on because they saw a lack of confidence in my performances all through the semester. That was the moment I realized I really was not doing as well as I could have been. Getting by simply wasn’t enough, and it was time to forget about everyone else and focus on myself. This brings us to my second realization:
2. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and we are all on our own paths to learn and grow.
While this may seem fairly obvious, to someone who was constantly feeling inferior to others, it was hard to see my strengths versus others weaknesses until my second semester in my Acting Process class. After the disaster that was my first semester, I decided that I was only going to focus on myself and not anyone else. I was not about to get called into another meeting to discuss my lack of progress. The professor put a lot of emphasis on the word “process” when it came to our acting class; it was not about the finished product, but about the process of getting there. Through this class, I began to see my classmates as equals. We were all on our own paths to growing to who we wanted to be. We all had strengths and weaknesses. While I may have been more of an actor, another person may have been a fantastic dancer. That didn’t mean one of us was better than the other; it meant that we both had different skills we needed to work on. I saw this more and more as I watched my classmates go through their acting processes, honing in on the aspects that they needed to work on. It was actually enlightening to see some classmates grow throughout the entire course of the semester. It felt like my eyes had been opened up to a new world when I stopped measuring my progress according to others’; a world where I wasn’t always in crisis mode, where I could enjoy life as it came to me. Don’t get me wrong, I still had my moments where it felt like I would never get better, but without those moments, you never learn to overcome obstacles and improve.
My progress did not show itself to me until the very end of the semester. Sure, I had been changing in ways that I was happy about, but it wasn’t an insane amount of growth in my eyes. It wasn’t until our last day of Acting Process when it was brought to my attention just how much I was progressing. We were discussing as a class how we felt our final monologues had gone, and a classmate directly told me that she had seen me grow more in that class than in the entire year combined. At that moment, I realized how much my mindset affected what I showed in my work. I had spent all semester blocking out any inferiority and focusing on how well I did, and it was showing. While it may have been just one comment from one classmate, in that moment, it felt like I had reached the end goal of my year. She may not have known how much it meant to me, but after that, I knew what allowed for that change to happen. I stopped focusing on other people and seeing them as ahead of me; instead, I focused on what I needed to work on and what would benefit my growth.
So the next time everyone around you seems to be getting what you want, re-examine the situation. Notice what you spend your time doing, notice how often you compare yourself to others, notice how much work you put into your own growth. What strengths do you have that may be someone else’s weakness? What do you need to work on to get better? I guarantee you that focusing on yourself will yield the best results, and will in turn, help you become the best version of you.