You never chose that script
The comparison wasn't showing me what I wanted. It was showing me what I'd been trained to want. Those are completely different things.
The entire comparison series began with a photograph on Facebook that triggered an entire series for Substack. If you missed the first one of this three part series, begin here:
Not a tragic photograph. Not even an upsetting one. Actually, quite the opposite.
It was a beautiful Memorial Day backyard gathering. The grandmother, roughly my age, stood smiling among perfectly decorated picnic tables while grandchildren ran through the yard. Balloons. Matching tablecloths. Plates of food. Family everywhere. The kind of photograph that gets posted with captions about gratitude and blessings and family being everything.
I stared at it longer than I expected to.
My first thought was: I will never have that.
But the feeling underneath wasn’t simple sadness. It was something quieter and stranger than sadness.
It was recognition.
Not recognition that I had failed. Recognition that my soul had never actually chosen that script.
That single distinction cracked this whole series open.
Because here’s what comparison does that we rarely talk about: it doesn’t just measure us against other people. It measures us against images — cultural photographs of what a life well-lived is supposed to look like. The tireless grandmother. The productive retiree. The socially active couple. The fit woman. The still-thriving, still-contributing, still-visible person who is aging correctly according to modern standards.
And slowly, almost without noticing, we stop perceiving ourselves directly.
Instead of asking what feels meaningful, what gives us energy, what kind of life actually fits who we are now — we ask: how do I measure up?
That is where self-recognition ends. Not because the world stops seeing us. Because we stop seeing ourselves except through the lens of comparison.
I looked longer at that photograph.
The woman was lovely. Put together. Clearly loved. But I could also see something in her eyes that I recognized from the inside out. Not devastation. Not unhappiness. Just fatigue. The particular fatigue of decades spent making everything happen for everyone else. The fatigue of maintenance, of orchestration, of inherited expectation cheerfully carried for so long it stopped feeling like a choice.
And I realized: the comparison wasn’t revealing what I wanted.
It was revealing what I had been trained to believe I should want.
Those are completely different things. And at 60, 65, 70 — learning to tell them apart may be one of the most important things we can do.
A few days ago I asked this community a direct question: does comparison show up in your life, and if so, where? Seventy-five of you wrote back.
I want you to know I sat with every single response.
What came back covered almost every corner of a woman’s life — energy, appearance, creativity, purpose, productivity, body changes, retirement readiness, social life, accomplishment, motivation. The list was long and honest and, in places, a little heartbreaking.
But underneath almost every response was the same deeper ache: I no longer fully know what I actually want.
Which, when you think about it, makes complete sense. Many of us spent decades responding to everyone else’s needs, schedules, expectations, emergencies, and emotional weather. We became so skilled at adaptation that direct self-recognition got blurry. We lost the thread back to our own preferences, our own rhythms, our own definition of a life that feels alive.
You told me that. And I believed you.
THE OPPOSITE GAME — A POSSIBLE ANTIDOTE
So I’ve been sitting with something I’m calling the opposite game. Not positive thinking. Not manifestation. Not pretending anything is fine when it isn’t. Just a question worth asking:
What is the opposite of the thing that is draining life from me right now? When I compare myself to others, what is the opposit of that refelction?
The opposite of invisibility might not be public attention. It might be finally becoming visible to yourself.
The opposite of exhaustion might not be rest. It might be doing less of what was never yours to carry.
The opposite of comparison might not be confidence. It might be self-recognition — the quiet, radical act of seeing yourself directly, without measuring at all.
Here’s what I want you to sit with, because I don’t think I’m the only one who has stood in front of someone else’s photograph and felt that particular sting:
Whose script have you been measuring yourself against? And when did you last ask whether you ever actually chose it?
You don’t have to have the answer today. But the question itself is a place to start.
Seventy-five of you showed up in that comment thread and told me the truth about your lives.
That’s exactly what happens every Tuesday inside The BREAKTHROUGH GATHERING
A small group of paid subscribers gather on Zoom — not as a class, not as a workshop, but as women who are done measuring themselves against scripts they never actually chose. We talk. We recognize each other. We ask the questions that don’t have tidy answers yet.
The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But honestly — so is the room.
And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her. Or share it directly with her.
Coming Wednesday night:
RE-wire
Because retirement changes more than your schedule.
Mike and I are starting a new live conversation series on Substack about the things nobody talks honestly about after sixty.
Not financial planning.
Not “aging gracefully.”
Not motivational fluff.
Real conversations about identity, grief, reinvention, freedom, relationships, purpose, and what actually happens when the life you built changes shape.
First live show: Wednesday, June 3rd at 8 p.m. Eastern
Thursday at 10 a.m. in Australia ( Mike lives in Australia )
Pull up a chair. We’re finally saying the quiet part out loud.
