Hello, friends. I’ve been struggling lately. I’ve been struggling with emotions, with my depression, with the usual familiar demons Comparison and Not Feeling Like I’m Enough. The best part about these two is that they feed off of each other perfectly like some sort of shitty ouroboros. “Wow, I’m terrible. I bet no one else grapples with these feelings, or if they do, they don’t obsess over them like I do. I wish I could be like this person and not think about it.”

I enable so many strategies just to get me through my day on the mental level, everything that’s been offered to me to combat these feelings, I run through it all consciously on loop. The “this person has their own struggles and they’re just as pressing to them as yours are to you” strategy. The “the only person you have to compare yourself to is the you from yesterday”. The “There will always be someone better than you, there will always be someone worse than you”. Tried and true “comparison is the thief of joy, just be grateful for five frickin seconds for what you have, could you? COULD YOU?” Those things are all on a rotating playlist in my brain, like I’m some kind of cult leader trying to break my followers or something by holding my brain hostage and wearing it down.

Does it ever get easier? Less exhausting? Is anyone ever just content the way they are without having to constantly, consciously remind themselves that they’re not solid garbage? If I were in a Shakespearean tragedy, I’m sure this compulsion of mine to compare myself to other people would get me poisoned or get my eyes gouged out or some other equally pleasant death. The exact circumstances that would bring that about are something I don’t know, but it would happen somehow. Hopefully I’d get a bitchin’ monologue before it did.

Sometimes I wish like crazy that I could wake up as someone else who seems to have a “perfect” life and go on some zany adventure that made me somehow appreciate who I am or something. But I feel like if I woke up as someone else, someone pretty and talented, I’d be more likely to be like “hot damn, now THIS is more like it”. Though the kicker is, I know it wouldn’t solve the issue at heart. I’d get used to looking hot and having the world at my feet and I’d have the same issues I used to have with myself because you can’t exactly run away from your brain no matter how you might want to. Ooh! Maybe I could just get a new brain! Hell yeah…

It’s the most frustrating feeling knowing that outside validation is empty if you don’t validate yourself, but being unable to validate yourself because you feel like, you know, there’s nothing about you outside or in that’s worth anything. So that’s where I’m at. Fighting these feelings 24/7 is exhausting and it’s a miracle I’m walking around and using words at all. Putting myself to positive thinking challenges or banishing negative self talk for X amount of time are things I’ve tried in the past, and should be trying but I’m just so mentally exhausted right now. I feel kind of backed into a corner at the moment by these feelings and between my rather spirit-crushing-at-the-moment job which does nothing positive for my emotional wellbeing and my general depression and anxiety, I feel like something’s gotta give. What, I don’t know. All I know is all the suggestions I’m giving myself are making me irrationally angry, as is the behavioral health department’s appointment system when I try to utilize it.  I don’t know, I know I’m not the only one who has these thoughts. I just wish they’d leave me alone for like, four seconds and just let me LIVE.

The most effective way for the “compare you to you” strategy for me would involve me living in a cave and seeing and talking to no one. I could learn skills like spear fishing and become a skilled cave painter. And I’d be happy because I wouldn’t be able to go on the internet and see how much better and more evocative Gughha’s cave painting turned out or how Dorg was able to spear three fish in half the time it took me to spear one even though he’s been spear fishing only two weeks and I’ve been doing it for four years. I wouldn’t go out into the sunlight and see how much better looking Eggu is than I am, even though I put on my nicest skins and put all those hyena bones in my hair and she just ate an antelope heart raw and is just covered in dirt.

I feel like even that would backfire though, because I’d be sitting around just staring at the uppity bitch in the still pool of the cave thinking what’s she so smug about. Okay, maybe that’s taking the metaphor too far but the point is that it just never stops, really. If I compare myself to myself and try to be “better” every day, doesn’t that mean I’m still not good enough and never will be? I’m not asking that to be a smartass, I genuinely don’t know. Does that contribute to the dissatisfaction I feel, is it exerting some weird subconscious pressure on me?

I just long for a day, maybe even a minute, where I can look at myself and be…well, not happy but like, okay. Where I don’t pick everything apart visually or mentally. Where I can just, without forcing it, without “faking it til I make it”, without having that shitty undercurrent of doubt beneath it, say “you’re fine, you’re okay. You’re enough,” and mean it.