Question 2

Who do you sometimes compare yourself to?

Try as I might to not compare myself to others, it's inevitable that I do.

I, like any other person, have their down days, their fat days and their dull days. Though sometimes I also wake up and feel fantastic, invincible, elated; it could almost be described as enigmatic.

I was bought up Catholic, and that means I have a cloud of guilt pretty much hanging over my head all-the-time. We cannot feel sorry for ourselves, yet we frequently do. We cannot dwell on our own problems, yet we bemoan our grievances. We must have trust and love for our fellow human beings, though we are amongst some of the greediest humans (past and present).

This brings me to my roundabout point of comparison. To compare means that you are thinking you'd rather be something else, somewhere else, or someplace else. It signifies desire, want, need - not attractive traits in the average person.

I used to want to be any other person when I was in my late teens. Then, several years later, I turned down a path whereby I became truer to myself. I stopped focusing on what other people thought about me, and decided my opinion of myself was the one that mattered. I began deciding how I wanted to live and began to grow steadily into myself. Into my quirks. Into my bodyshape. Into my erratic mood swings. Into my sometimes inappropriate mouth. Into my bookishness. Into my gentleness.

We're all a combination of traits, never being wholly good or wholly bad. As Judy Garland said once, 'Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.'