I COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER

I knew a man who used the phrase, "psychic contender." He meant those people we carry inside ourselves, the ones we are always in competition with. Am I doing better or worse than him? Is she getting more than me? It's often a painful connection and usually with people we actually know - maybe I stopped talking to her, maybe we drifted apart and went our separate ways. But whatever the reason, there's some kind of anger and resentment at the heart of it.
     I have one or two of my own long term psychic contenders but sometimes others pop up for a day or two. It happened the other day. I saw something about a woman I didn't know though our paths had crossed with one degree of separation more than once. Someone once said that I was a smart version of her and I've carried that comment ever since; it's a flag I plant in the soil of well-being to comfort me.. 
     She's had a wonderful life, just what I wish I had. She's immensely confident, ambitious and worked hard. There was no doubt to stifle her ambition and eat away her confidence; she wasn't ambivalent; she knew what she wanted and went after it. She had everything she needed for success.
     I thought, well, I could have done that if I had had more confidence. I could have had her life. I let that thought float around my mind for a while, a delicious fantasy of the life I could have had. Then what I was doing came to me: if I wasn't who I am, I would be someone else, another me. How silly is that? I can't be me and not-me at the same time. And that the point.  My obstacles are mine, my voyage is mine, what I need to work out in this lifetime is mine. While it might be fun for me to imagine alternate lives, like a writer inventing and inhabiting characters, it ultimately only serves to make me feel bad about myself. Because those alternate lives are always better than mine - what would be the point of fantasizing one worse? 
     I see what that comparing does. It moves focus to a distant object, an imaginary construct, and takes it away from me. I used to be afraid to come back to my own life which I believed was full of problems, doubts and fear. But something has changed in me. Changing focus and coming back to me now feels like a blossoming, an expansion, a space in which I can work out my own stuff. We all have stuff, even the ones who seem to lead a charmed life. I don't want to be asking, why don't I have more, all those whys and if-onlys and should haves. I want to be in my own body, doing the things I need to, learning what more I can about how to be better, do better, not to shine in the world, but to have the deep satisfaction of knowing myself and getting more free.