In the last years of my PhD, my nights ran like this. Past midnight, grading a stack of student papers with one hand, steadying a crib with the other, looking at my phone.
A friend from graduate school had posted a job announcement. Another had tagged a conference. A third was somewhere I could not place, smiling, moving forward. And the thought arrived the way it always did in those years, fully formed and certain: I am so far behind.
Not slower. Behind. As though there were a single destination and I had missed the train everyone else had caught.
I left home at fourteen. Every degree after that took me further from my family, further from the people who would have seen me through the hard days simply by being in the same room, further from the place where I needed no translation. By the time I was deep in my dissertation, I had two children under two, a full teaching load at Trinity College, and a committee waiting. The comparison ran underneath all of it like a current.
The strange thing about that feeling is how total it is. When you are inside it, you do not notice what it costs you. You are spending real energy, real hours of mental life, running a race that exists only in your own head. The comparison did not make me work harder. It made me feel smaller. Those are not the same thing.
What changed it was not a breakthrough or a conversation or a book. It was quieter than that.
I started to see what other people were carrying.
There was a colleague holding a career together with one hand and a sick parent with the other, saying nothing about it, showing up anyway. Once I noticed her, I could not stop noticing the rest. The person two years ahead of me whose visa would not let him travel home to see his family. The woman who had finished faster than I did and was raising her children alone.
I had been so fixed on the gap between where I was and where I thought I should be that I had never once asked what anyone else was actually holding up.
This is not a comfortable realization, and it does not rewrite the hard years. My circumstances were genuinely difficult. Two small children, a dissertation, full-time teaching, an ocean between me and my parents. All of that was real, and naming it is not self-pity.
But here is what the comparison got wrong. There is no version of this where you set two lives beside each other and declare one of them harder. Load is not transferable. What depleted me might not have touched you. What you carried with ease might have flattened me. The only honest position is that it is hard for most people, in ways that rarely show from the outside, and the scoreboard you keep consulting is one you built yourself.
I was not behind. I was inside my own story, which was never going to match anyone else’s, and was never supposed to.
I finished the PhD. I applied to more than sixty-five jobs. I got one offer, and I took it.
None of that came faster because I tracked how I measured up. It came because, eventually, I stopped measuring.
Comparison is not analysis. It is noise dressed up as information.
— Irena