Let me tell you exactly how long I’ve been preaching this message: Five years and 12 days. I posted this quote on my Instagram June 20, 2015. It got approximately 28 likes and let me tell you, that was a lot for me and my little "babygram" back then.
Here’s what I wrote:
“The more time we spend on social media, the easier it is to feel inadequate about our own lives. The friends and celebrities we follow on Instagram always look like they’re having a great adventure while we’re on the couch feeling like we must not be good enough to live such an exciting life. Especially among us women, we constantly compare other women’s victories to our shortcomings. This only convinces us of the lie that we are failures. We need to stop believing the lie and start focusing on the truth (Philippians 4:8)! Romans 12:15 reminds us to, ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice; and weep with those who weep.’
“Social media is a platform for us to share our accomplishments, but we cannot ascertain that one photo defines who we are. We all have ups and we all have downs, but the low points in our lives are not what we want to immortalize on the internet. Instead of being women who get jealous of other women, I challenge my girlfriends to be women who love and support each other in a manner reflecting Romans 12:15. I love you all!”
How crazy is that nothing much has changed in five years? (Except for the fact that I never use the word ascertain anymore!) We still deal with the pressure to create perfectly edited, glamorous photos of our lives. Only things have gotten so much worse because the Gram is even more prominent in society and one of the fastest growing for marketing weapons.
What used to be a platform for us to post blurry selfies with the Valencia filter has now become a $100 billion industry that has created multi-millionaires out of every day people.
And yet, we’re not one of them.
Do you scroll through your profile and like what you see. Do you think, ‘that’s a fun-loving girl’ and ‘this is a pretty photo,’ and wonder why you’re not getting paid to post a picture with Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses.
This is not a blog post about how to become a career Influencer. There’s plenty of other blogs about that as well as this really good book, literally called, Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media by: Brittany Hennsessy. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in learning more about breaking in to that career field.
And I will side bar for a moment and say it really is a career field. I believe there are people who claim to be an influencer because a no-name brand said, “Anyone who wants to be a brand ambassador let us know and we’ll send you free stuff.” These “finfluencers,” aka fake influencers, give the real deals a bad rap. However, don’t be deceived. Many legit influencers are hard-working women who’ve been through a lot of rejection and trial and error to get to the position they are in. It is a real, cut-throat business and only the best "make it."
So that brings me to one of my favorite quotes about comparison, whether you're comparing Instagram accounts, careers or family portraits.
Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.
It is vital that if you are on a journey toward something and you’re comparing where you’re at right now to someone else who’s doing the same thing or something similar but is further along than you, you need to quit that comparison game right now. You are only going to hurt yourself and be discouraged by your progress because you are setting unrealistic expectations for yourself!
I'm picking on Instagram for the time being, because that's where so much of our FOMO stems from, right? It's where the heart of our comparison lives. We wouldn't care if our friend got to take a trip to Jamaica if she never posted about it. We wouldn't think that woman from moms-night-out had perfect children if every post she shared wasn't oozing with love and smiles.
No one is immune to comparison. Anyone who says they don’t compare themselves to other people, whether on social media or in real life, is lying through their teeth! We always have that one friend whose Instagram Stories always seem to include a birds-eye view out an airplane window as they fly to their next adventure. Or maybe you're most jealous of the girl whose daily #OOTD post gets 2,000 likes. If you are breathing on this planet, you've compared yourself to someone else’s success and you've felt like a failure.
But girl, her success is not your failure!
There is no differential success between you getting 100 likes and your friend getting 1000. Your friend who’s flying to Chicago is not better than you because you’re at your desk and she’s on a plane. And guess what? That mom whose kids always look perfect online? They throw up too! That mom just didn’t post about it on social media for the same reason you didn’t post about your kids throwing up on social media.
So here’s the deal, everyone and your mom could tell you all the reasons why you shouldn’t be jealous of someone else. But sometimes, despite knowing that you shouldn’t be jealous, you still are.
And you know what? I think that being jealous is okay.
For a finite amount of time.
Being jealous is a natural human emotion because we want to live happy, meaningful lives. When we see someone else who appears to accomplishing that in a moment when we don’t feel that way about ourselves, we can become jealous.
While it’s okay to feel that pang of envy when your friend gets engaged and you’re still a single pringle, there are two monumental things that aren’t okay.
Tearing down your own life.
Tearing down her life.
When our jealousy starts to create a constant cycle of negative self-talk, or maybe even outright verbal complaining about our lives, then we need to put ourselves in check, do some inner soul searching and make a change.
When our jealousy starts to make us say hurtful, rude and untruthful things about the other person than we definitely need to take a time-out and evaluate where this thought-process is rooted. Chances are it’s not rooted in love and gratitude.
I’ve been jealous of one of my best friends more times than I can count. We were trying to accomplish the same things in college. We had similar career aspirations. We wanted to achieve the same awards. Time and time again, I watched her get to the goal before me, instead of me and oftentimes even better than me. She’s incredibly talented, kind, caring, fun, hard-working, dedicated and so much more. That’s why she was in my wedding! I know how to pick good friends!
However, that didn’t mean that I never felt jealous when she got picked for a job instead of me or when she was awarded a well-deserved trophy for a category I wasn’t even qualified to enter.
But here’s the God’s honest truth, I never stopped rooting for her, encouraging her and telling her how proud I was of her. Actions speak louder than emotions. Feeling jealous is okay until it affects the way you think about, talk to and act toward someone.
I’ve even had really tough, honest conversations with my friend when the jealousy was bad enough I needed to confess. She always met me with grace and understanding, and sometimes even the shocking revelation that she’d been jealous of me at certain times of our friendship! I thought that was so ridiculous because I didn’t think I had anything to be jealous of.
Our jealousy of other people blinds us to the accomplishments of our own lives.
We need to look inward and realize that while we’re so busy being jealous of someone, there might be someone else who is jealous of us. When we’re looking enviously at someone who seems to have the perfect job or the perfect marriage, there might be someone else who feels the exact same way about us.
I’m not saying to be proud of the fact that your life is making someone else jealous, but just look around you and be grateful with where you’re at right now. You are probably living someone else’s beginning right now and they're wishing they were as far along in their journey as you.
There’s another reason why I think jealousy can be a useful tool. When used correctly, it can help us identify what we want out of life.
Are you jealous of the woman who quit her job to open a bakery? Is that because you’re in a job you hate and really want to open a coffee shop? That kind of jealousy can actually be a really powerful trigger to get you to pursue your dream.
Are you jealous of your friend’s relationship with her boyfriend? Is that because you look how in-sync they are as a couple, but you can’t remember the last time you spent the whole day with your boyfriend without fighting? That could be a sign that you want more out of a relationship and it’s time to break up.
I know that not every jealousy is a sign you need to make a change and that sometimes changes aren’t as easy as others. But it could be that that thing or person you’re jealous of is an arrow pointing you in the direction you need to go.
And as you begin this journey towards a new you, a new life or a new career, don’t compare where you’re starting with where someone is five years ahead of you.
Everyone started single. Everyone started poor. Everyone started with zero followers. And no one got to where they are now alone or in a day. Life's a marathon not a sprint.
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