[ Read ] "Why Do Other People’s Interests Make Me So Insecure?"

“…but the reason you don’t have the drive is that, at some basic level, you aren’t the ruler of your own drives. At your core, you don’t believe you deserve to feel good and follow your whims, because your priorities were always (subtly or not so subtly) dictated by external cues”

It’s almost as if I wrote this letter to Polly myself! As someone who is heavily on social media (most of it has to do with my work), I have found myself down a rabbit hole of comparison, feelings of unworthiness and not doing enough, then envy for others turns into self-hatred for my own limitations. While we all know the general detriments of social media and the ways these digital spaces have robbed much of our self-confidence and self-respect, it still runs very deep and very real for our daily realities. I, for one, go through bouts of these self-deprecative moments where I feel like I’m not doing enough, when I feel like others are achieving much more than I am, and that I’ve lost all my opportunities to achieve the successes I thought I would have in my near future. I do so much self-questioning and self-doubt that it becomes this never-ending cycle of “analytical riffing” (as the writer so accurately puts it). Because we feel safer when we can control and reason things, but when it comes to confronting our own feelings and the emotions that drive them, it scares us. It leaves us with facing the mirror that we’ve been too afraid of holding up to our faces.

This piece really resonated with me and I find some of Polly’s words linger heavily in my mind, which will be helpful for those moments of down-spiraling and self-deprecation. I highly recommend reading this piece, and I hope it provides you with some answers as well.

Read the full article here.