The Need to Be Better Than Everyone Else

The Need to Be Better Than Everyone Else

On feeling so inadequate that being ordinary starts to feel like failure

hasif 💌

Oct 15, 2026

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I think one of the saddest things about growing up is realising how much of your personality was built around being liked by people who probably weren’t thinking about you half as much as you thought they were. I spent an embarrassing amount of time wanting to be impressive. I wanted to be the person who had something interesting to say, someone people remembered after leaving a room, someone who seemed to have figured out a few things that everyone else was still struggling with. I wanted to be good at things, preferably better than the people around me, and I wanted that difference to be obvious enough that nobody could question my worth. Looking back, it sounds exhausting. Living through it was even worse, although I was far too busy congratulating myself for having high standards to notice.

There is something strangely comforting about believing you’re better than everyone else. I hate admitting that, but it’s true. When I felt out of place, it was easier to assume I was more interesting than the people around me than to consider the possibility that I was lonely, insecure, or simply struggling to connect with them. Superiority was a convenient explanation for rejection because it allowed me to leave every uncomfortable situation with my pride intact. I could tell myself I had outgrown certain people, that I wanted more from life, that I was meant for something different. Sometimes those things were even true. The problem was how often I used them to avoid looking at myself honestly.

I wonder how many people have done this without realising it. We learn to turn our insecurities into ambitions, and suddenly every ordinary part of being alive feels like a competition we have to win. Someone gets better grades, so we work harder. Someone is prettier, so we spend another hour examining our reflection. Someone seems happier, more loved, more successful, and their existence becomes an uncomfortable reminder of everything we haven’t managed to become. Their happiness should have very little to do with ours, yet we find ourselves measuring our lives against theirs, searching for some category in which we can still come out ahead. It becomes difficult to enjoy anything when there is always somebody doing it better.

And the truly embarrassing part is that sometimes we don’t even want the things we’re competing for. We want the recognition that comes with having them. We want people to think we’re talented, attractive, intelligent, interesting, successful. We want the quiet satisfaction of knowing that someone envies us, even if we’d never admit it aloud. Somewhere along the way, being happy with our lives becomes less important than making sure our lives look impressive enough to justify the effort we’ve put into them. I think that is where a lot of unhappiness begins, in the distance between what we genuinely want and what we believe would make us worth admiring.

I recently read a submission from Brigitte Bonet Ugalde for

La Porteña

, in which she writes about growing up feeling different from other children and responding to that feeling by convincing herself she was smarter, prettier, and more capable than them. She became obsessed with excellence, worked relentlessly, and built her identity around the person she believed she needed to be. Eventually, the pressure became unbearable. After leaving her Fashion Design degree and moving from Argentina to Spain, she began studying Art History and approached her life differently, allowing herself to exist without constantly trying to prove that she was exceptional. What struck me about her story was how much energy she had spent trying to turn her difference into an advantage, when what she really needed was to stop treating it as a problem.

BRIGITTE’S ESSAY:

I’ve always had a strange relationship with awareness. Being an introvert, my inner world was quite rich, and I didn’t feel the need to involve anyone else. That being said, I wasn’t always a loner. There was a time I would seek out friends to play with, like any other child. However, I couldn’t

connect

with most other kids, and the worst part of it all is that I didn’t know

why

.

Now, the thing I want to focus on isn’t that I didn’t fit in per se, but rather the fact that I could

feel

something about me was off to them but couldn’t quite tell exactly what. That’s when my social awareness would fail me. As a defence mechanism, I would tell myself that nothing was wrong with me, that they just didn’t get it. That I was smarter, prettier, more cultured, with more potencial. I made that my whole personality, I always worked harder at school, took extra care of my appearance, read more, dreamt more. I expected great things of myself because if I didn’t, then what was the point of all that? All that work, all those missed gatherings, all those missed hobbies I could have tried, all those insecurities, all for nothing. I was obsessed with

Excellence

. And guess what? I was absolutely

miserable

. Because I knew it was all a projection. Of course I wasn’t perfect all the time, that was the lie I performed for everyone else. The real problem was I eventually believed my very own lie. So every time I fell short of my own expectations, I wanted to die.

I dropped out of a major in Fashion Design at 23 because I was so burned out I couldn’t enjoy any of the process. I was, for the first time in my life, without expectations, which was both liberating and terrifying simultaneously. I decided at that moment to leave Argentina and start over in Spain.

At 24, I started a new major in Art History, which I love and found out about in my previous major. This time, I decided to be myself unapologetically, and if people liked me, great! And if they didn’t, also great. The twist? I almost instantly made friends. I didn’t try to fit in, I simply showed up. If I felt I wasn’t the right fit for a group, I didn’t take it personally and moved on. For the first time ever, I was genuinely comfortable being alone. And that’s when people started showing up.

I think fashion was a great tool for me to learn how to express myself. Knowing what looks good on you AND how to communicate who you are through a clear visual language, actually does wonders for your self-esteem and you also get a say in the way you’re perceived. I wanted to show up as myself, so that’s exactly what I focused on.

Today, at 26, I rent an apartment with my first ever boyfriend and a friend of ours, content in myself while also embracing a journey of healing and self-

re

-discovery, as I relearn the passions I held dear as a little girl, such as fashion and writing my own newsletter. I recognise there’s still a long road ahead but I’m no longer afraid of it, I’m excited to cross it. And for whoever needs to hear it: as long as you’re alive, you still have time to start over. You’re not broken, you just need to be at peace with the fact that maybe you won’t be for everyone. And that’s alright.

I kept thinking about how exhausting it must be to live with the feeling that every part of your life has to justify your existence. Even the things that are supposed to bring you joy start carrying expectations. A hobby becomes another opportunity to prove your talent, friendships become places where you wonder how you’re being perceived, and personal growth turns into a project with deadlines you invented yourself. There is barely any room left to be a beginner, to be mediocre at something, to change your mind halfway through, or to admit that you simply don’t care enough to become excellent at everything. Life starts feeling like an audition for a role nobody actually asked you to play.

I have also noticed how difficult it becomes to appreciate other people when you’re constantly comparing yourself to them. Their achievements can feel like your failures, their confidence can make you question your appearance, and their happiness can leave you wondering what you’re doing wrong. It is an awful way to experience other people’s lives, especially when those people might have become your friends if you hadn’t spent so much time deciding where you stood in relation to them. There is a particular loneliness in entering every room with the intention of being impressive rather than with the simple hope of finding somebody you like. Everyone becomes a potential audience, an imagined judge, or an unwilling competitor, and genuine connection gets lost somewhere in the middle.

I don’t think the desire to be better comes from arrogance alone. Sometimes it comes from a childhood spent feeling overlooked, from being the person who was rarely chosen first, or from discovering early on that praise made certain uncomfortable feelings disappear for a while. Achievement gives us something measurable to hold on to when our sense of worth feels uncertain. It offers the promise that if we work hard enough, look good enough, or become interesting enough, we can finally stop worrying about whether we’re deserving of love and attention. The trouble is that the relief rarely lasts, because there will always be another person to compare ourselves with and another standard we haven’t reached.

What makes this particularly difficult to let go of is that ambition itself isn’t the problem. I still want to do things I’m proud of, make something meaningful out of my life, and become someone I respect. I don’t want to pretend that achievement means nothing or that caring about how I present myself is somehow shallow. I simply don’t want every accomplishment to become evidence in a case I’m building for my own worth. I want to be able to admire somebody without immediately searching for something I’m better at, and I want to enjoy doing something even when I know there are people who could do it more beautifully, intelligently, or successfully than I ever will.

Perhaps growing up involves accepting that there will be people who are better than us at almost everything we care about. Somebody will write better, earn more, look better in photographs, make friends more easily, or figure out their life at an age when we’re still trying to understand our own. That is an ordinary fact of being alive, although our pride makes it feel like a personal insult. Their existence doesn’t diminish ours, and their accomplishments don’t erase whatever we have managed to do. I wish this were easier to believe on the days when comparison gets the better of me, but I am trying to make room for the possibility that another person’s excellence can simply be something I admire.

I don’t know if I’ll ever completely outgrow the urge to prove myself. Some days, I still want to be the most interesting person in the room, and I still catch myself measuring my progress against people whose lives I barely know. The difference, I hope, is learning to recognise what I’m doing before I build another entire identity around it. There is so much of life I would like to experience without turning it into a test, so many people I would like to know without wondering whether they think I’m worth knowing. I want to make mistakes without feeling humiliated by them and enjoy my ordinary little life without needing to convince anybody that there is something extraordinary about it.

Because honestly, I am tired of treating my existence like something I have to earn. I am tired of imagining an audience for every decision, of feeling behind when someone else gets ahead, and of confusing being admired with being loved. I would like to believe that I can be a perfectly ordinary person on an ordinary afternoon, doing something badly, looking a little tired, having absolutely nothing impressive to report, and still feel perfectly fine about being alive. It sounds like such a small thing to want, which is probably why it hurts to realise how far away it can feel. I spent so much time trying to become someone nobody could look down on that I forgot I was allowed to be somebody who didn’t need to look down on anyone either.

Co-Author Substack:

Brigitte

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