I was noticing that I was comparing myself to others: How close was I to this friend? Who had shared more about their lives with me? How much did I know about this person compared to how much someone else knew about them? I thought it was interesting that I had some sort of ranking system in my relationships with others and I wondered about it. Was I trying to judge myself to be a better friend? It didn't feel like that. It didn't feel like I was doing this to be better at it. It felt more like I was afraid of being left. It felt like I was checking to see who was going to be chosen as "the one." Like if I didn't get my stuff together, and figure out how to be the best, the other person would be chosen, and I would be left all alone, completely out of the competition.
I thought this was kind of weird, because friendships aren't like that. People have varying degrees of closeness and intimacy but you usually don't get left behind because of it. But then I thought about competition and our society. I thought about how often there is just one winner, and that no one hears anything about anyone else after that. Number two is just...gone. I thought about my classroom and our tests. I thought about applying to college and I thought about how so much of our society is about weeding people out- that we are constantly striving to be the best, not necessarily to be the best but just so that we aren't thrown out or demoted or left behind.
It made me understand the desire and fear I have around comparing myself to others. I feel like I need to know what to do to stay at the top. It's not so much that I want to be better than that other person, it's more that I don't want to be the one who's rejected, the number two that's never heard or seen from again.
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