COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY

I looked up Peterson’s original list of rules for life, posted years ago on an online forum. It includes 41 “valuable things everyone should know,” and I was struck by a few that didn’t make it into his top 12. “Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.” “Make at least one thing better every single place you go.” “Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.” “Maintain your connections with people.”

I don’t know what happened to these, since most of what I’ve been offered so far are meditations on how wretched and flawed we are.

But then I got to Rule 4: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” On the brink of turning 30, the age of reflection on milestones missed and goals unmet, Rule 4 felt like the advice I needed to hear.

I have this high-school friend, Meghan Turnbull, who recently turned 30 herself. Most of Meghan’s 20s were consumed by her struggle with anorexia. She was diagnosed just after she’d turned 20, and she’s still dealing with it a decade later. She wrote a recent blog post about her birthday, saying she was embarrassed to tell people she was turning 30. “Shouldn’t I be married? Shouldn’t I have kids?” she wrote.

I decided to call her. It was the first time we’d spoken since before she got sick.

I remember how much of a perfectionist Meghan was in high school. She told me she’s had to learn to set new goals for herself that aren’t based on what everyone around her is doing. It took her seven years to graduate from university, but she did it. She has her own apartment now, and a job she loves.

“It’s constantly just reminding myself of that, right? And just recognizing what I’ve accomplished,” she said.

I am not good at this, either, preferring regular doses of self-flagellation to self-acceptance. But in an attempt to compare myself to who I was yesterday, I spent several hours trawling through my Facebook data, a collection of every message I’ve ever sent and every photo I’ve posted in the 11 years since I joined the platform.

From my younger days, there were the predictably overwrought messages about minor conflicts, lengthy treatises on the state of my life that used words like “trepidation” and “schadenfreude,” and my personal favourite, delivered to the first boyfriend I really liked when I was 19: “No guy has ever known about my maple-sugar addiction until you. So there you go. That’s the best proof I can give you. I want to be with you.”

It was kind of nice to have a record of how much I’ve grown in the last decade. Since starting this experiment, this was the first thing that actually made me feel good about myself — despite all my flaws and wretchedness, etc.