A while back I was talking one of my friends who wanted to lose weight and at some point in the conservation, she said, ‘I don’t want to be unrealistic, I’d love to be your size’.

I was genuinely speechless. My weight has been up and down ever since I can remember, and there’s not a single part of my body I’m satisfied with, let alone happy. All I think was, ‘Be careful what you wish for’. (I later recounted this conversation to another friend and he laughed in disbelief and just said, ‘Is she crazy? You need to lose loads of weight.’ Sometimes being realistic is more important than being nice).

Anyway, the upshot of it is that I got thinking about how the grass is always greener on the other side. We’re intimately familiar with and aware of our own flaws and generally much less judgemental of others, except when we want to make ourselves feel better. Some people are direct about this, and some don’t even realise they’re doing it. It’s only when you have a conversation with someone and they add ‘like yours’ to whatever it is they’ve just done/bought/made, that you suddenly realise that they want their life to be more like yours. That’s terrifying in so many ways.

A few weeks ago two friends came over. They live quite far away so we don’t get to see each other as much as I’d like. They exclaimed over the stuff we’d bought recently (mainly computer games) and our new kitchen, and said, ‘We use you to see what our lives would be like now if we hadn’t had kids’. It was intended as a compliment (I think), but again, it was terrifying. My instinct was to panic and wonder if we were having enough fun and making enough progress and being exciting enough for four people. I felt a sudden new pressure in an area I hadn’t even considered. After I got over the initial shock, I was able to see it as a good thing (mostly), but it’s still a little scary.

I don’t think people actually want to be more like me or have the things I have. I think everyone, me included, is generally geared towards being a better version of their own self. Sometimes this crosses boundaries with things other people do or have or are, and that’s where some people get stuck. That’s when it becomes a competition (or jealousy). This can be a good thing, if you use it to do more and push yourself and make plans and identify goals. But these should be for you and you alone. Other people shouldn’t be your benchmark.

I refuse to compete wherever possible, even though there are a few people in my life who try and drag me into who earns more/who weighs the least/who has the nicest home/who has the most x types of debates at any opportunity. I’m not perfect or even necessarily comfortable with who I am, but I’ve realised that seeing myself in isolation and comparing past versions of myself to my current self and potential future selves makes me happier and more productive.

Competing with yourself is generally a good thing to do. If you’re a runner, you don’t compare your personal best to Mo Farrah’s personal best. You try to beat your own best. Yet when we look around at what other people have (or seem to have) – more money, more holidays, more Facebook likes, more fun, more whatever – we’re unhappy. Of course, the people around us are more comparable/realistic benchmarks than an Olympic athelete. But in both cases, you still don’t see the struggle. The blurry photographs that got trashed, the cakes that had to be re-iced at 1am, the blog post that’s been agonised over for weeks, the hours that were put into learning something new just to wish you’d spent those hours at the gym instead when you see a friend showing off their figure on social media. There’s only a finite amount of time, and no one can do everything as well as they’d like. But they can focus on one thing at a time and get that to where they want it to be – or at least a better version of what they could do before.

This year, ‘Beat your own best’ will be my mantra. What’s yours?