Being constantly compared to someone else is exhausting. When that someone else is an older sibling, parent, or someone else close to us, we can feel pressured to make choices that don’t align with what we really want in order to follow in that person’s footsteps—or to distance ourselves from them as much as possible. It can easily seem like we are never seen as our own selves, but only through the lens of someone else’s achievements or failures. And even if we love them and don’t receive explicit pressure to imitate their accomplishments, the unequal attention can cause resentment and friction in even the healthiest of relationships. It takes a lot of work to unlearn years of denial about our own self-worth, and many begin with a practice of self-acceptance.
