Sometimes being an ostomy awareness advocate gives me a whole host of emotions. It’s easy to compare myself to all the other outgoing, beautiful, confident ostomates that I see posting on social media. To see how many followers a new ostomate has amassed on Instagram after a few short months of posts and to notice how their numbers quickly surpassed mine. Or to read what another advocate writes, realizing that I’d thought the same thing a hundred times but not thought to write it down and share it. Mark Twain sure was right when he said “Comparison is the death of joy”. My comparisons got so bad that I decided to delete Instagram from my phone and take a break from working on my website for a while. I was living in a world of “he/she’s doing it so much better than me, so why should I even keep trying”.

I knew this was not the attitude I wanted to have toward anything in life so I decided to focus my time and energy on shifting it. It took a few months of hard work to begin peeling away the story I’d been telling myself, that everyone else was sharing their messages better than I was. I often felt torn in my emotions as I wrestled with my thoughts. On the one hand, I’m human and I yearn to feel valued and be shown that I’m appreciated just as much as the next person does. On the other hand, I believe life is not a competition against anyone but yourself, and every person who is willing to talk publicly about living life with an ostomy is contributing to the end goal of removing the stigma.

I started tackling my feelings by acknowledging them. When that negative self talk started chiming in, I (tried to) notice it and then did my best to stop the thought and replace it with a positive thought about myself. Did it work every time? No. Did it work sometimes? Yes. Did I notice a difference in myself after working on this for a few months? Absolutely. Do I still practice this? Every day for the rest of my life.

Stopping my negative self talk and replacing it with positive self talk was a great first step, but it wasn’t the only thing I did as I worked to shift my thought patterns away from comparison. I challenged myself to think about what specifically it was about someone that was making me feel envious or jealous and then asked myself how I could embody those traits as well.

I have a couple friends who travel quite a bit on their own and who are often invited to travel with their friends. For years I’ve noticed myself feeling envious and jealous of them, even resenting them a little bit for having friends who invite them on adventures or for having the guts to make their own adventures.

A friend of mine invited me to travel with her recently. The timing was not ideal, money is tight, yada yada… I have all the excuses. But, as I was getting ready to say no, I found myself saying “let me see if I can find a way to make this happen.”

I realized that if I really wanted to go on adventures, like the friends I was so envious of, I’d actually have to say yes to an invite. I realized that if I said no every time the opportunity to travel somewhere outside of my comfort zone came up, the opportunities would dry up. And I realized that it would be hard to keep convincing myself that my friends were so much luckier than me for getting to travel if I was getting the opportunities, but saying no.

Long story short, I found a way to make it work and we went to Paris. When I made the decision to go on that trip, my mindset shifted. My attitude toward the friends I’d been resentful of suddenly felt different. The comparison, envy and jealousy was gone because I had turned it into inspiration and action.

My mission is to spread positive ostomy education and awareness. There is no better feeling than to know that by sharing my story, I am inspiring someone else to embrace theirs. I’ve taken a couple short breaks from working on Newbie Ostomy, but I keep coming back because there’s a voice in my head that keeps pushing me to continue. I get ideas about things I could share about all the time, but they’re useless if they live only in my thoughts. The verdict I’ve come to is that I cannot let my comparison of others, and my perception of other people’s successes hold me back from pursuing the things in life that I want to pursue, including Newbie Ostomy and the positive ostomy education and awareness that it spreads. Instead of constantly sitting in comparison, I remind myself that my experiences are unique, my voice matters too, and what I share might just be exactly what you need when you find it.

Do you find yourself in the woes of comparison? How do you go about not letting it stop you from living your best life?

PS. I’ve made enough progress that I’ve re-downloaded instagram. Check out what I’ve been up to @ostomyadventure