On Comparison

& the mind's trickery

Andrea Dworkin

I have a tendency to compare myself to others, and only in the last few months have I started to interrogate why—knowing that, inevitably, it was causing me harm to always feel like I was so weak and small against others. I had never actually looked at this wound directly and I had never actually asked myself: why do I always feel that my life is a complete misery in my own memory with nothing worthy of note or goodness? I always, always feel deficient and recently I’ve really been trying to understand why.