Are we fine until we start comparing our lives with others'?

The whole world has people and we're alone . . .

A movie made me cry last night. It wasn’t so much the slightly unbelievable happy ending, but the knowledge that my life has been so different. My family never supported my dreams the way the parents do in this movie. I didn’t have adults jumping in to help every time I messed up. And now, I was old, alone, not feeling well, and still wishing for that support I didn’t get as a kid.

Comparisons.

In reality, although I didn’t get everything I wanted, my childhood was pretty good. My brother and I had everything we needed, including two parents who loved us and each other.

Sometimes I think the worst kind of loneliness is loneliness by comparison. When I’m not comparing my life to anyone else’s, I can look around and see how blessed I am. Look at this place where I live. Look at all the great things I get to do.

Then I see a couple in love or a family with kids, parents, and grandparents, or a Facebook post showing my online friends having a great time with their loved ones, and I feel bad. Birthday party pictures kill me because I’m usually alone on my birthday. These days, dog pictures get to me, too. (I have decided a new dog will be my Christmas present to myself.)

But again, it’s comparison.

In his book Together, former surgeon general Vivek Murthy writes that he feels perfectly comfortable working alone in a coffee shop where most of the other customers are also alone. But he feels bad when he goes to dinner in a restaurant where everyone else is dining in couples and groups and he’s the only one requesting a table for one.

Comparison.

It’s natural to compare, whether it’s counting how many people we have in our lives or wanting a car like the neighbor just bought. When my writer friends boast of prizes I did not win, I feel like a loser although I know I’ve done pretty well. But we see others doing or having what we don’t and feel like maybe we’re doing something wrong. If we were more sociable or more attractive or more successful, maybe we wouldn’t be alone?

That’s probably not true. We’re on our own because that’s how things turned out. As my brother likes to say, “It is what it is.”

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

I felt awful for a while last night. I had stayed home from an event I was looking forward to because I was feeling achy and tired. Two COVID tests said it wasn’t the virus, but I still might have something contagious, and I didn’t have the energy to dress up and drive an hour each way in the rain. Of course, I worried that I had everything from MS to congestive heart failure, which I probably don’t. Aside from achy joints and Graves’ Disease, long in remission, I have always been healthy.

Instead of going out, I watched a few episodes of “Royal Pains,” my current Netflix binge.

I continued reading singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile’s autobiography Broken Horses. Talk about rough childhoods.

Between couch-sits, I did my laundry, replaced burned-out light bulbs, and tightened the screws on my squeaky antique chairs. They still squeak, but I felt powerful upending those chairs and applying my strength to make them tighter.

For dinner, I traded the meatloaf I had planned for homemade clam chowder, Mom’s easy recipe.

After the movie, I worked myself out of my tears by playing songs on a Steel Tongue Drum I bought online simply because I had always wanted one. (That’s it in the photo.) You can only play this one in the key of C, with no sharps or flats, and it’s not very loud, but there’s something soothing about the hammering motion and the bell-like notes. If anyone else were around, they might find it annoying. But there was no one else here, so I could play every song I could think of, and that felt good.

I’m not going to compare my playing to the pros, but you might enjoy listening to this recording of steel tongue drum music.

When you’re alone and you’d rather not be, sometimes it’s going to hurt like hell. We need to find our own ways to comfort ourselves and to quiet the comparisons.

• Yes, we’re alone and other people are not.

• We don’t have partners or children, and others do.

• We don’t have someone to pick us up when we fall.

• We probably don’t have plans for Halloween.

But also yes:

• We’re free, and other people are not.

• We are not stuck in bad relationships while others are.

• We are strong enough to take care of ourselves.

• We can make Halloween plans if we want to, but maybe we don’t want to, and that’s fine.

We can’t help comparing our lives to other people’s lives. In the process, we might feel bad sometimes. But let’s try not to forget the positive comparisons, too.

I’m still achy, but I’m ignoring it because it’s Monday, and I love my work. On Halloween, I will wear my orange sweatshirt and my orange earrings, light a candle in a pumpkin, and call it good. How about you?

Do you get caught up in comparisons? When? Does it make you feel bad? Or do you feel good because you like your life the way it is? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

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How did I end up alone? My first marriage ended in divorce. My second husband died of Alzheimer’s after we had moved to the Oregon coast, far from family. I never had any kids, only dogs. Now I live by myself in a big house in the woods. You can read our story in my new memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s, available now at your favorite bookseller. Visit https://www.suelick.com for information on all of my books.