Comparing Apples to Oranges

Diva Gina's latest column is up over at Romance Divas, about not comparing yourself to others, and this part particularly caught my attention:

Comparing is part of life, but most of us have at one time compared ourselves to someone else. Comparing can be healthy because we then can recognize our weakness and know where we need to improve on. Yet, when we use comparisons to determine our personal worth, we’re focusing on the wrong things. Your value as a person, as a woman, as a sister, as a mother, as wife, as a girlfriend, as a writer is not dependent upon how you stack up next to someone else.

I am more than the sum of my responsibilities and relationships, more than my accomplishments and failures, more than my past. So are you.

Excellent points, but how do you deal with the stress, the pressure, when someone else is comparing you to a third party? This has happened many times in my life, as I'm sure it has everyones, but some incidents are more difficult to disect or survive. In seventh grade, when it became apparent that a gym teacher was grading my sister and I by comparing us, even though we were in different grades and classes, even though she has always been more outgoing than I am, the solution was as easy as our mother requesting we be transfered out of that teacher's classes. We could have had a similar problem in high school, when we had many of the same classes (at least one of them the same class period), but thankfully had teachers intelligent enough to recognize that all kids are different, even those who are related, and graded us on our own work, NOT by how well one of us did compared to the other.

But here's the thing: Often, you have the option of being transfered out of an unpleasant situation in school; that is not always so in Real Life. I had a job not too long ago that I loved. I was good at what I did, was in fact more knowledgeable in an area than even I imagined. It was fun, sometimes challenging, and I genuinely liked it -- to the point where I saw myself being there many years -- and all was well for at least the first year .

And then the problems started. Suddenly I was expected to be more like one of my coworkers, someone who was brassy, blunt to the point of being extremely rude, completely tactless, and whom I could never, no matter how hard I tried or anyone else might want it, be like. Moreover, I would never want to be this person, nor anything like her. Suddenly the merits I had been hired on didn't matter and the things I was previously praised for -- the reasons I was encouraged by this former boss to apply in the first place -- were glaring character flaws. I was constantly being compared to her, to what she did, and found completely lacking, eventually to the point of losing that job.

How do you deal with that? What options do you really have when it's your boss making these unfair comparisons, someone you thought of as a friend and mentor, especially when she had praised your methods and abilities only a year before? Gina's article goes on to say,

Comparison can lead to discouragement.
Comparison can brew bitterness.
Comparison can cost you your dream.

I know that discouragement and bitterness all too well, and it cost me more than dreams. It cost me a job I loved, a job I was good at, and it cost me friendships. More than that, it destroyed my self-confidence -- something I never had much of to begin with -- and filled me with self-doubts, negativity and a depression so deep it took me months to claw my way up out of. I'm still struggling to regain my equilibrium, but no matter how hard I try, the damage done is so deep sometimes it feels like I will never recover. No matter how many people praise my work and abilities, this demon's voice still haunts me, overpowers everything else to the point that all I hear is her: you're not good enough, what made you think you could ever do that, could ever succeed in anything, could ever be as good as or even better than her? You'll never be as great as she is, never come anywhere close. She's perfect and you're NOTHING.

Yes, I try to shut out her voice, try to grab on to words that others have spoken: I think you're the best writer in our class... You never let me read any of your stories!... This is the best article on this subject I've seen...

But still, always I hear the demon's voice, taunting me, overpowering me. Stealing what little ground I've gained and always comparing me to everyone else.

Some may say it's like comparing apples to oranges, and say there's no sense in it. But if the apple is constantly praised, and the orange compared to all an apple can do, while at the same time condemned not only for all it is not, but for not being the apple, eventually the comparisons lead to rot. Once started on that road, it's difficult to reverse.