Pie-Stealing Comparison Goblins

⭐️ This letter is a ~5 minute read ⭐️

In the weeks between newsletter number two’s dispatch and the congealing of this little baby newsletter number three,  I considered unsubscribing from every personal newsletter I currently read.

A grave and familiar wave of melancholy swept across my heartstrings and keyboard last week, getting my panties all up in a bunch, and eclipsing my voice as I know it with a lot of loud noise and preoccupation with what everybody else is up to. 

Here I was stepping out on the limb of myself with this new found public-facing writing practice, slaying demon after demon of who am I to do x y and z with my samurai sword to just publish the damn thing and LO who cometh my way but darkness my old friend– The Comparison Goblin.

Suddenly, every newsletter I had previously loved and appreciated now became a measuring stick, a metric by which I could use to assess myself, and of course, to do what always follows in this heinous comparison act, to use other people’s magic as a weapon against myself.

Nooooooo!

Someone else being sensational MUST mean there is now one less slice of sensational pie for me to be. Or eat.  As if one person’s brilliance extracts from a limited supply of awesome, leaving less available for the rest of us. Sorry, all slices of sensational pie have been dished out today, try again tomorrow.

Cut to scene with small inner child kicking rocks on the playground in deflated shame when some other kid can make it all the way to the end of the monkey bars without falling before your tattered little mitts have learned to sustain such Herculean prowess. 

Call it the delusions of growing up an only child in which everything not so secretly needs to be about said only child.

Call it the psychologically punishing training of growing up in ballet culture, where young people are thrust into the unsubtle hierarchical pecking order in which they must sniff out their competition constantly. There's only a few great parts, you know, and you’re quite replaceable by every other girl that looks like you in tights and a leotard.

Call it completely freaking natural. Competition, I’m aware, is a big thing in the animal kingdom. But aggressive male elephant seals flapping their flubs and lobbing their lumps at one another to compete for dominion over the local seal harem doesn’t account for our preoccupation with compare and despair–as Kimberly Drew called it on the internet last week.

We all know too well that a decade of social media interference with our self-esteem has been an acid trip from hell that’s sometimes a third-eye-opening mind-expander and also still very much a hell trap. Particularly when it comes to maintaining a STURDY SENSE OF SELF that is unencumbered by what other people are doing with their lives.

I still need this reminder often, no matter how much it gets said. 

I need it to support and defend against  the learned, underlying belief that maybe I'm not okay,  that all is not well. We’re all out here swimming in the zeitgeist of perpetual uneasiness, which is then internalized as a kind of forever waiting for the other shoe to drop-–inside of us and outside of us.

For me, the comparison game is an unconscious self assessment, measuring myself against anyone I encounter to determine where I'm at on the scale of fine to not fine. 

It's a way of locating oneself in time and space by using other people as the bumper rails. To know oneself by what you are not. An echo location Marco Polo game, sending out little harpy cries of AM I OKAY AM I BAD AM I GOOD and seeing what shit thy tender call out into the void bounces up against and brings back. Am I good like they’re good? Am I bad like they’re bad? Am I clever like, whip smart like, irreverent like, corny like, heaux-ish like, destined for entrepreneurial greatness like, a hot punk gardener like, a mess like, like, like, like…

It’s a goldilocks style understanding of the self via the watermark of others–am I above or am I below, or am I just right?

Which all smacks so hard of white supremacy training I can hardly see straight to typey type this dispatch to you.

It’s the perennial pecking order psychosis. The ranking of everyone along a vertical axis based on perceived value.  Are they on a pedestal above me, or down in the gutter below me? 

In the real thick throes of comparison hangover, my GAHWUD, any thing can become one kitten heel slip towards the gutter luge of infamy in which, finally, at long last, the jig is up, and now everybody knows what everybody always knew the whole time which is 

WASSUP GUTTER BABY. 

This comparison business is how we learn to see the world and relate to each other. Judging and assessing ourselves and everyone else to ascertain where and how we belong. Where and how we are worthy enough to stand where we’ve been planted. 

It reminds me of being in grade school and being instructed to line up in height order. Buzzing around, awkwardly trying to find your place in the great order of things by literally sizing up your classmates, and perhaps being pushed and moved around by the bossier kids who are quite certain they are taller than you.

This is the dang DEAL out here. Look around, sniff sniff, compare, despair. The training of this culture, and social media in particular, has us leaning so far forward away from our center, our eyes laser-focused on every lil ole body that scoots through our vision, observing what they’ve got going on, and what trophies are up in their glass cabinet. 

Not to say observing others is inherently wrong or bad, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to be fascinated by each other. It’s more about what we do with that information. What conclusions we draw and stories we weave with our observations. 

And if we use them as a blade against ourselves or not.

When I  started writing this newsletter, the working subject line was KILL YOUR IDOLS, because that’s what I thought I meant by addressing our cultural propensity to compare ourselves to people we admire. But in writing what wanted to be written, I'm reminded that the real pain-relieving medicine has very little to do with other people, and how to relate to them–quelle surprise!—and has everything to do with how we relate to ourselves.

We are so discouraged from just standing where we’re at and being jazzed about THAT.

Standing with such certainty in the ‘this is what it is’ of our lives, and celebrating it so that comparison becomes obsolete. An absurd distraction from absorbing and soaking up the astonishing miracle of THIS PLACE RIGHT HERE. Knowing what I know, and seeing what only I can see from my unique vantage point of right smack here, baby.

And for me, that means becoming really interested in the sturdiness of my body, my own physical architecture. My SPINE! That magical highway of information and intelligence that keeps us upright inside ourselves. That stellar bridge between our head and our ass. That golden rope of sinew and structure that prevents one from becoming a willowy watery jello body, puddling in the face of comparison.

In putting my attention on the spine, locating it, sensing how it feels, how it cascades and curves, I give it life and juice and power. I anoint it with my attention. I anoint myself.  And I restore my capacity to witness other people’s greatness, nay REVEL in it, without blowing away in the wind. Without it meaning any kind of deficiency about me.

I, for one, wanna go back and get all the versions of myself I’ve allowed to languish in the loser gutter for one single second. I wanna be like YO SISTER I HAVE YOUR BACK, let’s go home! I wanna pull myself up to my own dinner table and remember that I know how to cook up my own sauce. And be my own slice of sensational pie every damn day.

And I really and truly wish this for you, beloved reader. Because, ya’ll, sensational pie is an infinite resource. There’s really enough for all of us. 

We need each other’s permutations and wacky-ass versions of it. All of them. 

Sturdy thy spine, be kind to your idols, feed them your pie. 

First, a lot of THANKS to folks who have been supporting my work and explorations lately. Thank you for the kind words, the quilt commissions and jacket inquiries and all the love. It's soul food for real. 

I've been spending this mid-winter hibernation time, finishing up long-sitting projects and initiating new commissions. 

In February, I plan to release a couple quilt jackets every newsletter to my hot and loyal subscribers. Ay-oooo

I'm also cooking up a quilting workshop (!!!) through the lens of grief, using fabric and clothing from a departed loved one or from another time in your life, that you'd like to process and repurpose into a quilt with other people doing that very same thing.

So stay tuned for allla that. 

BIG FROST-MELTING LOVE from me to you til next time,

❤️ Melissa