#selfcomparison — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

From FB, and so relatable. ⁨The Self⁩ There is a particular kind of shame that comes from looking around one day and feeling like everybody else got a head start on being a person.

They built careers while you were learning how not to panic. They formed healthy relationships while you were still mistaking familiar pain for love. They saved money, took risks, travelled, studied, made plans and developed confidence while enormous parts of your energy were being spent simply trying to feel safe inside your own life.

But nobody sees time that way.

They see the age.

By thirty you should have this. By forty you should know that. By fifty surely you should be further along. There are invisible milestones everywhere, and when your life doesn’t match them it can feel like evidence that you’ve somehow failed at adulthood.

So you compare your chapter to somebody else’s without accounting for what it cost you just to reach the page you’re on.

You forget the years spent recovering from things you didn’t cause. The relationships you had to unlearn. The beliefs about yourself you had to dismantle. The energy lost to anxiety, hypervigilance, grief, dissociation, people-pleasing or simply getting through days that looked completely ordinary to everybody else.

That time wasn’t empty.

You were doing work.

It just wasn’t the kind of work society knows how to put on a résumé.

You were learning that love shouldn’t frighten you. You were learning that saying no doesn’t make you cruel. You were discovering which parts of your personality were actually yours and which were adaptations. You were learning how to make decisions without asking what would upset everyone else first.

Some people got to spend their early years building a life.

Others had to spend part of adulthood rebuilding the person who was supposed to live it.

Of course those timelines look different.

This doesn’t mean trauma should become the explanation for everything that hasn’t happened yet, or that we have no agency over where we go from here. But shame is a terrible starting line.

Maybe you aren’t lazy. Maybe you aren’t immature. Maybe you haven’t “wasted your potential.”

Maybe you’ve been measuring yourself against people whose energy wasn’t being spent fighting battles you couldn’t see.

There is no prize for arriving at somebody else’s version of life on time.

And perhaps I’m not behind at all.

Perhaps this is simply what my life looks like after taking the long way back to myself.

#theself #knowthyself #feelingbehind #complextrauma #cptsd #childhoodtrauma #traumarecovery #healingjourney #selfworth #selfcomparison #selfawareness #psychology #mentalhealth #survivalmode #latebloomer