Compare and Despair

The pointless misery of comparing yourself to others

“My daughter is in nursing school,” the patient told me.

“You must be very proud of her,” I said, not looking up from his chart.

Mr. Smith, who had been chatty a moment earlier, didn’t answer.

“Mr. Smith?”

I looked up. His breathing had slowed and become shallow. The monitor showed his oxygen saturation dropping.

The two other nursing students and I moved at once. I sat him upright. Allison* started oxygen. Lara* ran for Narcan. We knew he’d received a high dose of morphine not long before, though he’d seemed fine when we walked in.

A woman rushed into the room and froze. “Oh my god! What’s happening to my dad? Is he dying?”

Ten minutes later, Mr. Smith had revived. In the hallway, we debriefed with our professor and the patient’s “daughter” (a teaching assistant).

“You guys did great,” the professor said. “This is the first group I’m giving a ‘competent’ score to.”

We grinned at each other, relieved.

Then he added, “There’s one person I want to give a special shout-out to. Lara, you were fantastic. You really took charge.”

My mood dropped instantly. I’m not as good as her. I’m the weak link.

That’s how fast it happens. A neutral fact—my classmate did well—becomes evidence that I didn’t.

After years in journalism, trained to stick to facts and avoid leaps in logic, my internal dialogue still runs on exaggeration and spin. The headline: Not good enough!!

This isn’t new, but I got much better at shutting it off in recent years. I remember the moment I first caught it in the act. I was reading about Tom Brady’s anti-inflammatory diet and suddenly felt anxious about my own very normal eating habits. Compared to his, mine seemed borderline reckless.

Then a clear voice interrupted the spiral. Call it inner wisdom, a god shot, whatever. It said: This is stupid. Tom Brady’s diet has nothing to do with your life. Potatoes will not kill you.

The moment stuck. I started noticing how often I compared myself to people whose circumstances had nothing to do with mine, and how quickly those comparisons turned into quiet panic.

Getting older helped. So did becoming a mother, and building competence in my previous career. I had, for the most part, outgrown the habit.

Then I went to nursing school.

Starting over is humbling in a very specific way. You’re surrounded by people who are faster, more confident, or simply further along. The comparisons come easily, plus it’s stressful, and old habits tend to resurface when your defenses are down. Thankfully, I know better now than to act on the comparative thoughts, even if I can’t stop them.

After that simulation, I congratulated Lara and told her she deserved the recognition, because she did. I felt better immediately. Sometimes you have to act your way into right thinking, instead of letting thoughts guide your behavior. That said, when another classmate told me his group had accidentally killed their patient in simulation, I felt a flicker of satisfaction.

Nursing, and medicine more broadly, offers endless opportunities to measure yourself against someone who knows more, has done more, or trained longer. You can use that to shrink yourself, or to learn from it. Tony Robbins has a great quote related to this (typing that made me cringe, but hey, take wisdom where you find it): You don’t live life. You live what you focus on.

One of my favorite parts of nursing school is something called interprofessional collaboration. A few times each semester, we run simulations with medical and pharmacy students. In one session, we had to disclose a medication error to a patient’s son; we’d given his mother ten times the intended dose of heparin, and she’d landed in the ICU.

The scenario was uncomfortable, but the teamwork wasn’t. Working alongside people with different training and perspectives made the task easier, not harder. It reminded me that in medicine, you don’t want to be the most knowledgeable person in the room. You want people around you who know things you don’t.

One afternoon during a med-surg clinical, I found myself alone at the nurse’s station for a few minutes. A doctor came out of a patient’s room, glanced at me, and asked if I could grab the supplies to remove the patient’s surgical drains.

I hesitated, then said, “Sure,” and walked straight to the other nurse’s station.

“I have no idea what I need,” I told the first RN I saw.

She took me into the supply room and gathered everything, explaining each item as she handed it to me. I carried the stack back to the doctor.

As I handed it over, he asked how the patient had been progressing. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m a student nurse. I’ve only seen him today. But I can ask the nurse I’m working with.” He looked surpised.

A few minutes later, he came back out and said to the now-busy nurse’s station, “She’s going to be a very good nurse. She knew exactly what to get. Most students don’t.”

I felt a flash of embarrassment, then pride.

I hadn’t known what to get at all. But I had known who to ask. Someone more experienced, more knowledgeable, and generous with that knowledge.

I smiled, nodded, and took the win.

*Not their real names