I need to stop comparing myself to others. I tend to suffer more in my imagination than in real life, and looking back, it feels like it encapsulated my whole past life. There were so many dead ends in my world, built-up from my own mind of what I'm not capable of and what I shouldn't do. The negative association that comes from my alienation and pessimism drowns out my individuality and autonomy, and it bleeds over into the interactions I have with others.
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I can only admire people from afar if I want to remember them fondly. I wish to have stayed as friends with some, and as strangers to others. The exploits that come from my interactions with these friends, classmates, or peers; it makes me think that maybe I haven't done enough. Maybe I need to do this differently, or better. These possibilities plague me, and it becomes an ever-evolving paradigm of watching others achieve what I could've and couldn't. Job hunting, school assignments, life goals - it's an endless list of things that I feel the need to keep up with to feel level with those I look up to and work towards my own aspirations.
But wearing some rose-tinted glasses brings me the joy of living life and learning from what I did and didn't do. The days where I'm not deep in a rabbithole, it's days that aren't like they used to be. I crave for change, and the hopes and dreams I chase constantly shift because of that. I spent many years of my life living by these unhealthy comparisons, waiting for things to line up. And I noticed that once you realized a dream is just a dream, it ceases to be one. That moment hit me like a brick wall. I'm not writing this up because I've become enlightened or anything of the sort, but I'm beginning to gain back some of my individuality and autonomy.
I always tell people to live life with no regrets. And I think I finally understand the depth of that now.
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