Past You and Beyoncé

How to stop comparing Current You to 10-Years-Ago-You

In a recent XOMU, I talked about not comparing yourself to others—not Beyoncé, not the influencer you follow on Instagram, not your next-door neighbor—because any comparison between your lived experience (of which you are intimately familiar) and someone else’s (of which you know virtually nothing) is both unfair and meaningless.

After which a bunch of you wrote to me saying, “I’ve learned not to compare myself to others—but I still compare me to me. Younger me, pre-baby me, pre-illness me, pre-injury me, pre-pandemic me… when I compare Current Me to Past Me, I always come up short, and it makes me feel like crap about myself.”

What if I told you that Past You was no different from Beyoncé, the influencer you follow on Instagram, or your next-door neighbor, and any comparison you make to your past self is equally unfair and meaningless?

If you’re comparing Current You to Past You in some particular area (your career, athleticism, body, finances, love life, etc.) and coming up short, one of two scenarios is at play: You’re either going through something hard now (or recently have), or you had a ton of advantages in your past, which were unacknowledged or unrecognized at the time.

Or both. (It’s both.) Let’s unpack it.