The identity comparison trap I've nearly escaped

There's a market I go to most Saturdays when the weather allows it — a small one, covered stalls, the kind that sells cut flowers and vegetables that still have soil on them and handmade things wrapped in tissue. I was there last weekend in the pale spring sunshine, straw bag over one shoulder, moving slowly between the stalls, and I caught my reflection in the glass front of a shop.

Just for a second. Just the flat, unhurried image of a person walking past. And the thought that arrived was: oh, that's me. Not a comparison. Not an audit. Just recognition. It lasted maybe three seconds and then I moved on, and I didn't think about it again until later in the day when I was making tea and it came back to me — that three seconds felt like something. Like evidence that something had genuinely shifted in how I walk around in my own life.

Because it hasn't always been like that.

What the comparison spiral actually felt like

I'm going to be honest about this because I think it's more common than people admit, especially among people who make things publicly and then have access to the infinite archive of other people making similar things publicly. There was a period — and I'd put it somewhere around the middle of last year, maybe six or seven months into doing this — where I would look at someone else's feed, someone doing something adjacent to what I do, and I would begin an involuntary audit.

The audit would go like this: they had better editing. They had a more coherent aesthetic. Their captions landed differently, more confident, more assured. They seemed to know exactly who they were talking to. They had more responses, more engagement, more of whatever the external markers of doing it right looked like. And I would catalogue all of it, systematically, and hold it against a mental image of my own work. My own work, predictably, would lose.

The thing I didn't understand at the time was what I was actually comparing. I was comparing a fantasy version of them — the version constructed from their best posts, their most polished moments, their highlights — against a real version of me. The real version who'd just had a week of interrupted sleep and half-finished drafts and the particular exhaustion of trying to make something while also trying to figure out who you're making it for. The comparison was structurally impossible to win.

What the comparison was measuring

I spent a lot of time trying to work out what the comparison was really about. Because on the surface it looked like aesthetic envy — they had the visual style I wished I had, the editing language I was still developing — but underneath that, I think it was something more uncomfortable. It was the question of whether I was enough. Whether the quieter, less polished, more tentative version of what I was making had a right to exist alongside the more assured versions I could see everywhere I looked.

And the further underneath that — the really uncomfortable layer — was a question about identity. Not just "is my work good enough" but "am I distinctive enough." Do I have something that is genuinely mine, or am I just a slightly dimmer version of the people I was admiring? The my look alike anxiety, essentially — looking at someone doing something similar and wondering which of you is the original and which the echo.

The answer, I've come to understand, is that this framing is wrong from the ground up. There isn't a hierarchy of original and echo. There are just different voices, shaped by different lives, returning to similar themes because those themes are the ones humans have always returned to. The question isn't originality in some pure vacuum. The question is authenticity — how closely does the thing you're making match what's actually true for you?

The goal was never to be better than anyone else's version of this. The goal was to be more fully my own version — and those are entirely different projects.

The practice that actually helped

I tried various things when the comparison got bad. I muted accounts. I took screen breaks. I told myself sternly not to look at metrics. Some of this helped in the short term. None of it was really the solution, because the solution wasn't about what I was looking at — it was about what I thought I was seeing.

The thing that actually moved the needle for me was something almost embarrassingly simple. I went back through the content I'd made and I identified the pieces that felt most like me. Not the most popular. Not the most polished. The ones where, reading them back, I thought: yes, this is the most direct line between whatever I was thinking or feeling and the thing that landed on the page or in the video. The ones where there was no performance of what a post should be — just me, talking about something real, in my actual voice.

And then I looked at those pieces and I asked: could anyone else have made exactly this? And the answer was genuinely no. Not because they were brilliant, but because they were specific. They had my specific observations, my specific sensory detail, my specific rhythm, the particular things I find funny or moving or worth noting. The specificity was the thing that made them mine.

Once I could see that, the comparison lost some of its grip. Because the comparison was trying to measure me against a standard that was actually irrelevant. They weren't trying to make what I make. I wasn't trying to make what they make. We were making different things, even if they looked similar from the outside.

Walking through the market with a straw bag

Back to the market. Back to the reflection in the glass.

I had the straw bag over one shoulder and lavender in my hand — just a small bunch, from a stall near the entrance, still fragrant in the cool morning air — and I was moving slowly because I wasn't filming anything and I didn't have to be anywhere for hours and March on a Saturday in that particular market is one of my favourite states of being in the world. And I saw myself. Just briefly. Just normally.

A few months ago that flash of reflection might have prompted an involuntary audit. How do I look? Does this feel coherent? If someone filmed this, would it seem intentional? The comparison spiral doesn't always require another person — it sometimes runs entirely internally, the fantasy standard and the real self both internal.

But that morning it didn't go there. I just saw a person walking past a shop with lavender and a straw bag, and I recognised her, and I moved on. That's the unfamiliar thing — not the seeing, but the quiet of the seeing. The absence of the audit. And unfamiliar doesn't mean wrong. In this case, unfamiliar means it's actually getting better.

What makes a voice yours

I've been thinking about this a lot because I think it's the actual question underneath the comparison — not "are you good enough" but "are you you enough." And I've come to think that a voice becomes yours not through some originary act of being different but through the accumulation of honest choices. Every time you tell the truth in a post instead of performing what you think the post should sound like. Every time you put the specific detail instead of the general observation. Every time you stay with an uncomfortable idea long enough to say something true about it instead of reaching for the comfortable resolution.

That accumulation, over time, creates something genuinely yours. Not yours because no one else in the world has these ideas, but yours because no one else has lived them in exactly this body, in exactly this life, in exactly this slightly chaotic flat with exactly this paper journal and this specific tendency to notice light and the way it moves across a room.

The comparison trap is real. I think most people making things publicly fall into it at some point. But I also think it has a trapdoor at the bottom, and when you fall through it you find yourself asking the right question finally: not how do I measure up, but what am I actually building? What does it actually sound like when I tell the truth without performing it? What makes this specific and real and mine?

Those questions are so much more interesting. I'm glad I found the trapdoor. It only took most of a year.

I want to add one thing for anyone who is in the thick of the comparison spiral right now, because I was there not very long ago and I remember how consuming it is. The spiral doesn't feel like comparison while you're in it. It feels like assessment. It feels like legitimate quality control — like you're doing something responsible by measuring yourself against the work of others. It takes a while to realise that the measurement is rigged, that the standards keep moving, that no amount of catching up to a fantasy version of someone else will produce the feeling of being enough. Because that feeling doesn't come from the gap closing. It comes from stopping the measurement entirely.

You don't have to be better than them. You don't have to be the original and they the echo, or the other way around. You just have to be more you. That's the whole project. It turns out it's quite a good one to be working on. 🤍