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The Disease of Comparison

The Disease of Comparison

This week, as I was casually scrolling through my Facebook feed—which let’s be real, is a scary place 99 percent of the time—I came across a post from a magazine I follow.

The post was essentially summarizing the mission and purpose of the magazine: Empowering women, redefining the standard of beauty by not using Photoshop and publishing intentional articles about what it means to be a woman of virtue in today’s degrading society.

And below that was the comment section, where a woman was criticizing the magazine.

My heart broke. And not just because one woman was bashing the magazine for associating a woman’s value with her beauty, but because multiple women were ridiculing the mission of the magazine.

In all honesty, I had to face the truth that almost all of my insecurities are at their highest when I see other people thriving.

Let’s be real, from as early as many of us can remember, we have been compared to our peers.

For most of us, competition was all we knew in in high school—and I’m not just talking about sports.

From an extremely young age, girls around the world are thrown into this hierarchal scale system based on  (if we are being honest here) what boys and men deem as valuable in a woman—looks, money, confidence, all that fun stuff.

When someone walks into a room, confident, outgoing and unapologetically themselves—many of us feel like curling up into a little ball, looking for the closest corner and feeling like we no longer have anything to offer.

But why?

I believe it is because we have always been compared to our peers in our school, work, families and social media.

I believe it is because we fear we will not be successful if they are.

I believe it is because we assume there is not enough success to go around.

From a young age, we have been taught conformity is right and individuality is wrong. Yet somehow we are only valuable to the world if we work harder, look better and are more confident than the person sitting next to us.

The truth of the matter is if the Creator of the universe wanted us all to be the same, then we would be. Simple as that.

While so many of us are hurting because we struggle with comparing our worst to another person’s best, we are constantly finding ourselves feeling like we will never be good enough.

In reality we should be striving to find our identity, security and worth in the One who created us.

Not in the appearance, confidence or success of the person on our newsfeed.

Because we are more than enough. We are beautiful and valued and loved. We are strong and created to live boldly. We were given a purpose and a mission for this life. We are worthy children of the King.

 

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