the only way to come out a winner when you compare your life to an others is make sure that they don't have nothing left, and still that's not guaranteed success. just because they have nothing left still doesn't dictate the quality of life that they had in the past, nor how they are dealing with it now.
poverty can knock on any ones door in this day and age. most of us are just a couple pay checks away from total annihilation. there is nothing really wrong with the person that has lost it all. you just have to have the right attitude, and a lot of gratitude to work your way back up.
on a personal note: if you know somebody that has lost it all.............please don't get all paranoid and awkward about it. they are the same person that you have always known. continue to be their friend, and don't avoid talking with them, because your friendship is the last thing that they need to feel like the have lost at this time.
the real honest problem with compare your life to the lives of others is that you will focus on one general aspect, and come up loosing most every time. the problem with this is that it just totals your self-esteem completely out. without a good healthy self-esteem your heading straight down the road for chronic depression. then you have convinced yourself that your such a looser over someones life that you really know nothing about to begin with. all you really know is that you saw a picture of them smiling, and what they said in a caption of the picture.
can i be totally honest with you? possible with out hurting your feelings? there is a simple way to test out what I'm fixing to say to you for validity. see if it fits in your own life, and then you will know that it is true.
we all have skeletons hidden in our closet. we have all done things that we wished that we hadn't done, and wish that nobody would never know about these events in our life. the smarter of us has told one very trusted friend, or a total stranger that we will never see again about this action just to relieve the burden of guilt, and gone on to live another day. we only every tell another person as much as we really want them to know at the time. as relationships grow in time we become more honest about things. even still,........most of us have secrets that will never be revealed.
what I'm saying is simply that you don't really know a person, unless you have spent every waking moment with them since they were born. it's really hard to compare ourselves to another person if we don't have all the facts. who knows how hard a person has struggled to have what they have got today? who knows if what they have today really shines like the diamond that it appears to be? how is their health? what kind of attitude do they possess? who have they developed into from the person that they were 30 years ago?
now some folks have delusions of grander, and will never come out on the bottom. they are looking at the world through rose colored glasses, and think of themselves more highly that they should be. this type of people should be pitied more than the rest!! they have lived their entire life through a self-centered, selfish lifestyle where they are the sun in their whole existence.
what make us want to compare ourselves with others? life is not a competition. life is a journey, and not a destination. we should be spending the time that we use for comparing to loving each other. if we loved more then we would not have need for comparisons. here is a direct quote from one of my friends on facebook. her name is Kim Oliver Cofield, and she makes a great point..............and she's also one of my kin folks.
Damn James, that sounds exactly what me, you and elona and senka did today. Friends are more valuable than I ever thought, I am glad I made the journey to this point, it is worth living for.
ReplyDeleteFor me, comparing myself to others sets a trap. True growth happened when I stopped.
ReplyDeleteRecovery from anorexia meant stopping comparing myself to my former self, too, and respecting and accepting where I am now.
Your words ring true.