When I was in school studying creative writing, the director of my MFA program started
off each of the residencies with a mini speech about the dangers of comparing
yourself to other writers. The main danger is that you can render yourself not
only artistically paralyzed, but also emotionally frozen by focusing on how
much better you think everyone else is compared to you. Envy and comparing were
dangerous emotional paths to take during workshops with other writers because
it took away from both your own experience as well as the experience of
enjoying another student’s writing. Not to mention, as our director would often
say, there is room for all successes, and one person’s success doesn’t detract
from your own. In the nurturing
environment of the MFA program, coupled with the
inspirational speech from our director at the twice-a-year residencies, I can
honestly say, I never experienced more than small flickers of envy and
comparing during those two and a half years.
Then, I graduated, thrust out of the cocoon of warm and fuzzies
that was The Solstice MFA Program and into
the Real World where I encountered a serious problem with envy and comparing,
encounters that got increasingly more emotionally upsetting over the subsequent
four years post graduation.
Looking back, thanks to my newest pursuit of becoming a
psychotherapist, I know from my studies of psychology that comparing yourself
to others is a normal and even healthy way to measure your own successes and
failures and that envy also is a normal response to such comparisons. However,
there is an insidious cognitive experience that occurs when we start comparing
ourselves to others, and it’s called Social Comparison Bias.
Social Comparison Bias, which
stems from Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory that
states humans have an internal drive for “accurate self evaluations” (basically
we want to know how well or poorly we are doing), and the way that we humans
get those self evaluations is by comparing ourselves to others, across the many
domains of our lives (looks, economic status, education, etc). Festinger’s
theory was expanded upon by a guy named Willis, who talked about upward and
downward comparisons. This is where it all can get tricky and exceptionally bad
for us artist-types because we are pretty sensitive and emotional creatures.
Willis’ idea is that in order to measure our own success, we look up (for
motivation to be better) and we look down (to feel better). This is all well
and good if you can, in fact, compare yourself to an Olympian, or the Olympian
of YA fiction, Judy Blume, and become inspired. Or, if you can compare yourself
to an out-of-shape slob and feel good about the three miles you jogged. And, in
my case, if you can compare yourself to someone who isn’t as far along in the
world of publishing as I am—someone who hasn’t had anything published yet—and
feel like you are progressing towards the goal of published author.
The problem lies in this: as we are looking up or down, if our
self-esteem isn’t in a healthy place—instead of being inspired by Judy Blume, I
actually started to resent her (as if I even knew her personally!)—this
psychological shit hits the fan.
And, friends, my shit (emotional, spiritual, psychological) hit
that fan, hard, splatteringly hard upon graduation of that MFA program.
On the surface, I was a model post-MFA student—within a year I was
launching a YA anthology, landed in Publisher’s Weekly,
and was receiving an offer from an agent. Deep inside, something terrible was
happening.
These successes were trumped by the failures that came along with
them. The YA anthology, while widely recognized and submitted to, didn’t “take
off” as I hoped. Signing with an agent I loved and who believed in me didn’t
guarantee we’d sell my work. Within a few short years post MFA, I was sobbing
in a therapist’s office, declaring myself a complete and utter failure and sham
of a writer. I took this even further, by the way, attaching guilt to the fact
that I’d spent over a decade of my time and money to this to turn up with
nothing and sacrificing time away from my family. I took my failure to launch
as an author to be a failure as a mother, wife, friend, daughter, teacher, etc.
How did this happen?
As soon as I graduated from Solstice and began my YA anthology, I
spent a lot of time on social media, building up interest and excitement over
my new endeavor. Unfortunately, I also started to compare myself to other
writers/authors, who I perceived as being better than me, and neither comparing
up nor down served me well. Not to mention, my comparisons were 24-7, thanks to
Twitter and Facebook.
All of us are continually bombarded with Facebook posts and Tweets
that espouse successes, triumphs, and achievements, as if life is truly always
endless bowls of cherries and constant dancing unicorns. This is such a problem
that in recent psychology studies, researchers have
been able to link Facebook with depression, making this social comparison bias
phenomenon a possible cause to mental illness! This makes perfect sense! When
we continually see statuses about job promotions, new relationships, and
expensive purchases or, in my case, new book deals, we start to compare ourselves
to those statuses in unrealistic ways. The bias (tendencies
to think in certain ways that stray from what is rational) part is the worst
because this is the part where now we actually start seeking out information
that supports this cognitive distortion that I suck and everyone
else doesn’t. Thus, when I see the status that so-and-so got a “nice” book
deal, I start to seek out more information about the book deal to either
confirm that, in fact, I suck or, the opposite, that they suck. Everyone who
has a Facebook or Twitter has committed the social media “crime” of stalking
that ex-boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/friend’s page to find out more about
his or life…in search of some information to reassure yourself that somewhere
in his or her life things are not perfect. Aha, Suzie may have
just married a hot guy in Fiji but scroll down a few years we find out that she
got divorced from an overweight, former, high school sweetheart. Or,
in my case, aha! Suzie may have signed
a book deal, but it was with XYZ publisher and “nice” means that she could have
gotten no advance. Woo-hoo! Boy do I feel good now because she isn’t such hot
shit.
There were times, for a few of those post-MFA years, Suzie’s new
book deal simply drove me to work harder on my craft and on my research of
publishers to send my work out to. Unfortunately, more times than not, it made
me feel like total shit. My “illness” took over for a period of time and
rendered me depressed. By comparing myself to others, it didn’t inspire me as it
could have had I been in a better mental state.
And, as I discovered in therapy, this constant
comparing, over time, changed the way I thought about myself not just as a
writer but as a mother, wife, friend, teacher, etc…What rendered me so
depressed was the major change in my thinking and my perception of myself. The
comparing myself to others I perceived as more successful, reinforced the
thought, I am
a failure…at
everything and that thought became the lens through which I looked at
myself and my world.
Eventually, the healing came in the form a
serious commitment to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. By both
challenging these thoughts about failure and gathering up concrete factual
evidence to both support and refute that statement, I was able to start seeing
myself more clearly. I started to examine failure and discovered that I was
equating my failures as crimes rather than what they were, simply failures and
that failure doesn’t make me a bad a person. A bad person is many things but
not someone who simply fails to get a book deal.
I also discovered that I was putting my worth into something that is kind of equivalent to winning the lottery: saying “I suck because I don’t have a book deal” is like playing the lottery and saying “I suck each time I don’t win.” Not only is equating suckage with whether or not you achieve a certain goal or dream ridiculously illogical, but also you can’t control winning the lottery any more than you can control if someone wants to publish your book. All you can do is play the game.
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