Life is a race.
It’s one of the first truths I was taught — not in a classroom, but in the quiet, persistent comparisons that whispered their way into my childhood.
Sometimes direct, sometimes silent. A look, a question, a passing comment that suggested my worth was always up for measurement. Even perceived successes were diminished to relative failure when compared to another’s success.
And so, I learned to scan the lanes beside me.
Who’s ahead?
Who’s behind?
What does that say about me?
Without realizing it, I turned people into benchmarks. Their milestones became the measure of my delay or acceleration. My pace was judged, not on where I was going, but how fast someone else got there.
But as I grew — and watched people’s lives unfold in their beautifully unpredictable ways — I started to notice something:
No two people run the same race.
We may share destinations — degrees, careers, marriage, milestones — but the paths that carry us there are entirely different.
Different terrain.
Different weather.
Different shoes.
Different weights on our backs.
Some walk through stillness. Some are sprinting through storms.
And the truth is, many people, we quietly compare ourselves to, are not ahead of us. They’re just… elsewhere. On a different track. With a different rhythm. Carving a story that was never supposed to mirror ours.
When I began to see it that way, comparison started to feel less like motivation and more like distortion. A ridiculously futile card to play in this game.
I realized that constantly looking sideways was making it harder to look within.
Because the real markers — the ones that matter — are inward:
Am I growing in ways that are true to me?
Am I moving, even if slowly?
Am I being honest with where I’m going and why?
There’s something sacred about running your own race, something grounding in resisting the pressure to conform your path to someone else’s blueprint, something liberating about allowing success to look different on you than it does on someone else.
So maybe it’s not about being faster.
Maybe it’s not even about being first. First against who?
Maybe the real win is being faithful to the path that is uniquely yours. Defining what it means to succeed and not just being content, but proud of it!