Mary Schiller explains comparisonitis, the habit of measuring your life against others on social media. She proposes a mental shift: view each person as living their own separate story with its own purpose. At a Q&A with author Mick Herron, she caught herself comparing as an aspiring novelist, then reframed by recognizing his story was his alone.
Hello, bonjour, it's Mary in Paris, but I'm not in Paris. I am in beautiful Oxford, and I have a message for you today if you suffer from what I call comparisonitis. Comparisonitis. What is comparisonitis? Well, basically, it seems to me that we live in a culture that fosters comparison, and social media has made this even more intense, hasn't it? You know, every day we are on our phones, we're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is, and we're looking at other people's lives, and we're often asking ourselves, oh my gosh, is my life as good as theirs? Why do they have a nicer house than mine? Why is her hair less gray than mine? Or whatever it is. It can be anything. And this is a really, really difficult place to be living in, isn't it? This whole state of comparison and thinking that we are somehow less than someone else. Well, I figured out a solution. Cure, if you will, for comparisonitis, and that is this: everyone is in their own story. I'm in my story, you're in your story, and everyone's story has a purpose that for me personally is beyond my understanding. I don't really know what purpose my particular story of Mary is serving, except that I know that your story and my story have a reason for being in this thing called life. And everything that has happened in your story and everything that is happening currently in your story and everything that will happen in your story is yours. It's meant to be yours. Whichever direction it goes in is yours. And so once we realize that everyone is in their own story and everyone's life is telling a story on behalf of life itself, then what is the point of comparison? It makes no sense. I'll tell you why this topic came to my attention. A few days ago, my daughter surprised my husband and me with a wonderful event at Daunt Books here in Oxford, in Summertown. And it was a Q&A with Mick Herron, the author of the Slow Horses series. You may have seen the show, and he's written several other novels as well. But I was sitting there thinking, gosh, here's someone who is just a few years younger than me. And as an aspiring novelist myself, I was like, gosh, he's had so much more success. You know, I've basically written one novel that needs to be completely reworked, and I'm so far behind and all this stuff. And then I stopped myself. I was like, hey, wait a second, Mary. His story is his story. You're not going to write the Slow Horses books. You're not going to have the Slow Horses TV show. 'You're gonna write another series of novels,' which I am hoping they will be. I have the one idea that could definitely be more, and I'm working on it. And that's my story. Whether it will be published, whether it will turn into something else, I have no idea. But my story right now is Mary is reworking her novel, and that's where I am. I don't need to compare myself to anyone else. I can certainly be inspired be inspired by his success. I could certainly be inspired by the answers to the wonderful questions the audience asked of him about writing process and all kinds of things. That to me is different from comparing myself. So if you're finding yourself in a place where you are stuck in this comparison mode and feeling like what you are or who you are or what you're doing or whatever it is, is less than someone else, I really want you to set that over there and don't look at it again. If you do, it's okay. No judgment around that. But remember that your story is yours and theirs is theirs. You are not meant to be them. They are not meant to be you. You are meant to be you. You are meant to carry this particular story for life itself, with a capital L. That is how it looks to me, that we are each living out a story that life wants to tell through us. And I don't want it to sound like we have no agency here. We do. As far as I can tell, we do. But I also want to emphasize the fact that we can't be someone we aren't. It's not possible. We can be inspired by— we can emulate other people in certain ways. For example, I was very inspired by McCarran's attention to detail in his drafts that he talked about, and his writing schedule, and how he prepares his first draft before he shows it to someone. I was very inspired by that, and those are things that I would like to emulate. But I'm not going to become Nick Herron, and he is not going to become Mary Schiller. We are two different people with two different stories, and life is being lived through us in that unique way. And the same is true for you. You are living out life's unique story through you. So no more need to compare yourself to anyone else. You can let that go forever.
