When It Feels Like the World Is Leaving You Behind

I've seen you in a thousand different faces; a thousand places; and a thousand situations, in a thousand ways. I have seen you; you are not invisible, and I somehow feel like I know you. You're twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-four or forty-two. The age doesn't matter. I've seen you.

Disappointment doesn't ask to see your birth certificate before it moves in. It doesn't care what colour your skin is, where you grew up, how much money your parents had or how many letters come after your name. It has no favourites. It simply lets itself in, makes itself comfortable, and quietly begins rearranging the furniture of your mind.

When life takes a different direction

You are disappointed. Not because life has been difficult, but because life has been different from what you imagined. Like you, we were led to believe when growing up that if you studied hard, worked honestly, treated people well, and kept your nose clean, life would eventually reward your efforts. It sounded fair. It sounded reasonable. It even sounded just, and just it is. Then life introduced itself.

You watched people with fewer qualifications climb the same ladder you’d tried to climb and somehow felt an opposing force pushing you off. You watched doors open for people who seemed no more capable than you. You watched opportunity knock on someone else's door while you sat beside your own, wondering if it had somehow got the wrong address. You weren't angry with their success. You were confused by your own delay. There is a difference.

When questions become judgements

Confusion is often far more painful than failure because failure usually has a reason. Confusion rarely does. It leaves you searching for answers to questions nobody seems able to answer. "What am I doing wrong?" "Why not me?" "When will it be my turn?" They're innocent questions at first. But questions are curious little things. Leave them unanswered for long enough, and they quietly stop asking. They begin telling.

"Why can't I find a job?" becomes, "Nobody wants me." "Why hasn't my business worked?" becomes, "Perhaps I don't have what it takes." "Why did they leave?" becomes, "Perhaps I wasn't worth staying for." That's the danger. The greatest damage disappointment ever does is rarely to your circumstances. It does its finest work in your thinking. Without you noticing, it persuades you to mistake where you are for who you are. That's the dangerous thing it does.

Your circumstances are not your identity

A season of unemployment is not an identity. A failed business is not a character reference. A broken relationship is not proof that you're broken, and a delayed opportunity is not evidence of a wasted life. Yet pain has the remarkable ability to convince us temporary circumstances are permanent truths. It whispers so often, and so convincingly, that one day you stop arguing with it. You simply accept what it says as fact… even though it isn't. That is how people slowly surrender long before life has defeated them.

The story you believe about yourself

Failure rarely damages your future. It usually damages your opinion of your future. Those are not the same thing. One changes your circumstances. The other changes your decisions. If I can convince you that you're incapable, you will eventually stop attempting things you might have achieved. If I can persuade you that you're unworthy, you'll begin walking away from opportunities before they have the chance to reject you.

If I can make you believe that your best years are behind you, you'll never discover that some of life's greatest chapters are written much later than expected. That is why your opinion of yourself matters so much. Not because positive thinking is magical. It isn't. But because every decision you make is filtered through the story you believe about yourself. Change the story, and over time you begin changing your decisions. Change your decisions and, over time, you begin changing your direction. Direction, not speed, is what changes a life.

The cost of comparison

Then there is comparison. What an accomplished thief it is. It doesn't steal your intelligence. It doesn't steal your ability. It doesn't even steal your opportunities. It steals something far more precious. It steals your ability to see yourself clearly. You can possess extraordinary gifts and still feel ordinary because you've spent years measuring your beginning against somebody else's middle.

You compare your struggles with their celebrations, your rehearsals with their performances and your behind-the-scenes with their highlight reel. It is one of the few competitions in life where the rules are so unfair that nobody should agree to play, yet millions of us enter every single day. I may be repeating myself here, but it needs to be repeated, and here's the irony.

There is a practical reason to step back from the highlight reel. In a randomised study of 143 university students, those asked to limit Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to ten minutes each per day for three weeks showed greater reductions in loneliness and depression than those who used social media as usual (Hunt et al., 2018). The study focused on students and didn't test whether comparison caused those feelings, but it offers a reason to be more deliberate about how much time we spend looking into other people’s lives.

Begin before confidence arrives

The people you admire have often stood exactly where you're standing now. They simply didn't stay there. The world is full of people who wait until they feel confident before they begin, not realising confidence never applied for the job. Experience gets hired first; then confidence usually turns up a few months later, pretending it was there all along.

Final word

Perhaps that's the greatest misunderstanding of all. You think confidence creates action. More often than not, action creates confidence. The first step has always been awkward. The first interview. The first speech. The first business. The first book. The first day. The first attempt. Nobody begins looking like they know what they're doing. They begin by doing. And somewhere between trying, failing, learning and trying again, confidence quietly introduces itself, extends its hand and says, "I've been looking for you."

Recommended books

• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Further reading on time, personal limits and deciding what matters in your own life.

• Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff. Further reading on responding to disappointment and self-criticism with greater understanding.

Reference list

• Hunt, M. G., Marx, R., Lipson, C., & Young, J. (2018). No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751