Coming home to yourself and letting go of the magnifying glass

I sat nervously in a plastic chair, wearing too tight pants and one of the only nice shirts in my suitcase. The rest of our belongings and my nicer clothes hadn’t arrived at our new house in Virginia yet, and an air mattress was our bed.

This last-minute interview was the job I’d been looking for nearly a year. We talked and answered questions for 45 minutes before they said they’d be in touch, and have a good day. I felt confident, albeit sweaty in the armpits, and sure the interview had gone well.

Weeks before moving to Roanoke, I scrolled across a college friend’s LinkedIn post about her new job. I suddenly felt like an ant under her magnifying glass, the heat growing stronger as flames erupted around me.

Clearly, no one examined me so closely, but when I saw her post and compared my journey to hers, I pulled the magnifying glass out and held it up over myself. The accomplishments of milestones of others seems to magnify my lack of these things.

We’re all under pressure of some sort.

When are you going to have kids?
When are you going to get married, you’re not getting any younger?
You should work at this place because you’ll have a lot of time off for family.
You shouldn’t dress like that. It conveys the wrong impression.
Don’t you want to be a stay-at-home mom?
You’re choosing work over a family?

As women, we don’t have to look very hard or far to find someone putting pressure on us for one thing or another. And as you might have noticed above, many of the pressures we face are related to marriage, family, children, work, and friendships. Someone might have even popped into your mind who you’ve felt pressure from in the past. Maybe you’re feeling pressure right now.

Before we go any further forward, let me give you this wise advice from a writing colleague, Emily P. Freeman, that I think will apply to your life too: Your pace is your pace. There’s no such thing as behind.

I fully believe those words. There is no rush. You are doing great right now.

But sometimes it’s hard not to compare my story, my journey, my path in this life with someone else’s. It’s hard not to notice how put together her life is, how she always knows the right thing to say, how her marriage seems never to struggle, how she eats healthy ad works out all the time effortlessly, and let’s just say it, she’s skinny as a rail.

You probably don’t like to admit it, but there are times you look at her posts on Instagram and feel like they’ve all been curated and designed to make you feel guilty and bad about your life choices. Worse, to make you envious of hers. It’s not a pretty picture is it?

Don’t feel too bad about it because you aren’t alone in this. I can’t tell you how often I have to make a choice not to see that woman for a certain period of time to get my head out of her space.

I’m going to say something here and I want you to hear it because it’s taken a very long time for me to learn this lesson: That girl. She is not your competition. She is not trying to steal your joy and plant seeds of guilt in you. She is a companion on your journey, and she needs support too.

I’ll say it again for those in the back: She is not your competition, she’s your companion.

I know you’ve heard it before in one form or another. Don’t judge me until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, or The grass is always greener on the other side. But remember this too, not all that glitters is gold.

Her life might seem perfectly put together. The perfect house décor, perfect marriage, perfect health, perfect appearance, etc. But not everything is as it appears to be.

This is what happens when I pull out my magnifying glass and hold it up to my life. I feel uncomfortable, pressured in a million different directions, and as if my failures are the nightly feature on the evening news.

When the heat creeps up, burning away at the soles of my shoes, I desperately look out at the people around me, cool and carefree. Why can’t they feel this blistering heat too? They’ve got it so much better than me. I wish I had their life instead.

Jesus steps up beside me from His place in the corner, where He’s observed it all. He loos me in the eye and says, “You don’t have to live like this. I created you just as special and unique as that girl you’re comparing yourself to.”

I look back, bewildered, and say, “No, I can’t. She doesn’t deal with this heat the way I do.”

Silently, Jesus reaches up over my head, takes the magnifying glass out of my hand, and the unbearable heat finally relents, dissipating like a cool spring morning. I look back over at the girl who’s consumed my thought life for so long. She looks different than I remember, still just as attractive, but with a weight to her shoulders that I didn’t see before.

My eyes are drawn to something she’s holding up overhead, a magnifying glass.

No, I didn’t end up on top by getting that job. I simply added it to the list of places I’d applied and interviewed with that I’d never hear from again.

Coming home to yourself is a long, slow process I’m not sure we’re ever finished with. Thankfully, it’s not something we do alone, but with our friend, Jesus, matching our pace, waiting calmly for our glance to travel His way.