As I stared blankly at the Google Doc that would become my final editorial, I tried to think up some great lesson that would be particularly insightful or clever. The other Editor in Chief, Liesl Graber, wrote something profound last week, so I should be able to write something just as meaningful, right?
That is something that I have struggled with throughout my life. I always compare myself to those around me and judge myself by the things that others are able to do. Sometimes, this forces me to work harder and push myself, but more often than not, it ends with self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy.
For the EMU Academic and Creative Excellence Festival, I found myself scheduled right between the other fiction thesis majors and immediately was frustrated because the part of me that judges myself based on others flared up and told me that I would look like a fool reading my terrible thesis in between two that were obviously going to be better.
This is clearly unhealthy, and one would think that after ten or so years of judging myself by the standards of other people, I would have figured out how to stop. I have not, but I have gotten better at ignoring my self-loathing tendencies.
The trick is to remember that everybody is different. People do things differently and learn at different speeds and in different styles. Divine creation or evolutionary diversity, whichever one made the humans on this planet, used a diverse set of tools and concepts that resulted in no two humans being exactly the same.
I know I am teetering on the brink of cliche right now, but this simple, albeit worn-out, maxim is how I have pushed myself through the periods of self-loathing that otherwise would have doomed me to a life of misery. I am not a bad writer compared to others in my class; I am just different. I write differently because my education was different and I come from a different place.
I suppose the lesson here is this: Do not define yourself by definitions of other people. It only pushes you to self-loathing when you do not measure up to these arbitrary standards.
As for those whom this judgement motivates, I will just say this: Should the motivation to be better come from within yourself, not from other people? Find confidence to know the things that you are good at. Find the awareness to know the things that you need to learn more about. Ignore the judgemental side of yourself.
