Someone said that to me once, on a public Facebook thread.
I’d posted something upbeat – one of those graphics with a positive message about possibility and change – and this chap, who’d been following me for a while, hit the comments with those four words…
It’s alright for you.
I challenged him, gently, and asked what he meant.
To his credit, he was honest enough to explain. He wasn’t really having a go at me, he said. He was just having a hard time, and my positivity was making him feel worse about his own situation. All that cheerfulness was highlighting everything he felt was missing in his own life.
Fair enough. I understood that.
What struck me, though, was that he’d been following me long enough to know my story – the abusive relationship I’d had to escape, the back broken in three places, the clinical depression, the suicidal ideation, the breakdown, the years of rebuilding from scratch. It was all there, publicly, because I’ve never made a secret of any of it.
He’d just, in his own words, parked the inconvenient bits.
When we’re in a dark place, other people’s light can feel like an accusation rather than an invitation. So we set aside the bits of their story that don’t fit our narrative and tell ourselves it’s alright for them.
I’m not judging him for it. I’ve done it too. I suspect we all have.
The highlight reel problem.
We see polished. We see the outcome, rarely the process. We see the confidence on stage and not the years of terror beforehand. We see the successful business and not the period of having absolutely no idea how the bills were going to get paid. We see the pink hair and the big smile and the awards and the speaking gigs, and our brains fill in the gaps with a story that goes something like: some people just have it easier than others.
Some do, of course.
For a lot of us, though, the ease we perceive in others is the result of work we simply can’t see – inner work, often the hardest kind, done in private, over years, with no audience and no applause.
By my early thirties, from the outside, I looked like someone who had it made. Good job, company car, Armani suits, holidays in the Americas, a house in the countryside. The full set.
What nobody could see was that I was crumbling inside the pinstripes. Surviving on anti-depressants. Walking on sticks. Crying in the car park before client meetings. Wondering, more often than I’d like to admit, whether I wanted to be here at all.
It was very much not alright for me.
The work I do now only exists because of everything I lived through – every bit of it.
The teaching hiding inside the comparison.
When we catch ourselves thinking it’s alright for someone else – when we feel that sting of comparison, that sense that they’ve got something we haven’t – it’s worth pausing and asking what’s really going on underneath it.
Very often, it’s not really about them at all.
It’s a signal. A pebble, if you’ve been reading along. A nudge from somewhere inside that knows you want something different and hasn’t quite worked out how to ask for it yet.
The comparison isn’t the problem. The comparison is the compass. It’s pointing at something you care about, something you want, something that matters to you – and it’s worth paying attention to that, rather than using someone else’s highlight reel as evidence that it’s not possible for you.
It IS possible. Nobody showed you the behind-the-scenes footage, that’s all.
Something to sit with this week.
Think about someone you follow, admire or occasionally feel a stab of envy towards… someone whose life, or work, makes you think it’s alright for them.
Now ask yourself: what specifically is it about their situation that I find myself wanting? Not their life, but what their life represents to you.
Is it freedom?
Recognition?
Confidence?
The ability to do work that actually means something?
That thing you just identified – that’s yours to explore. That’s the conversation worth having with yourself, and possibly with someone who can help you work out what to do with it.
Your version of it will look completely different to theirs. It should. You’re not them.
The point isn’t to copy someone else’s life. The point is to stop using their story as proof that yours can’t change.
Because it can… especially if you decide to make it happen.
Now, what’s one small step towards the life you want to live that you can take today?
#UnleashYourAwesome
Taz
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