Sadness Isn’t a Competition

A lot of our lives have been about competition… who can get into the best schools, who can get more scholarship money, who works more hours, and who has more likes on Instagram or views on TikTok. We have constructed this bubble around our generation that we should always be wanting what someone else has. It is a social minefield to avoid being trapped into ideas of comparison. One thing that should not be up for discussion is finding a winner within our own emotions. Too many times I have heard my friends or fellow students trying to compare who feels worse, who got less sleep, or whose anxiety is worse right now. There can be solidarity in knowing that you are not alone in how you feel but when we make it a game to see who has it worse, it strips that sense away. Joy, sadness, grief, anxiety, pride, anger, jealousy, and excitement are all very real feelings that mean new things to every person. We each feel them on different levels. We cannot compare our crappy situations and expect to be deemed a winner because our own emotions are relative and subjective to us. That does not mean the people around us cannot feel sympathy or try to understand, but we are all valid in the way we feel. The student population of Berry is made up of friends, classmates, co-workers, leaders, family members, students, supervisors, athletes, partners, artists, roommates, and scholarship recipients. We have students who are getting engaged and other students who are living away from home for the first time. Students who have lost their friends and students who have lost their family members. Those are all big events that will not have the same emotional reaction, but one is not less important than the other. Representing the ages of 18-22 means that we cannot expect every single student to be feeling the same thing. We need to respect how the people around us feel, even if we think that what we have going on is more important. We all deserve to have a space to share how we feel if we choose. If we want to go back to our friends and tell them what a great class we had, but they just want to talk about the crush they cannot get over then you both deserve a space to do so. Your excitement does not outweigh their heartbreak and vice versa. You can communicate to your friend that you had a great day, but you are also there to listen. They can ask you to share in hopes of making them feel better. There is no black and white to explaining our feelings. When it comes to our relationships with roommates, friends, co-workers, bosses, faculty, and romantic partners, we cannot give up this communication. Not everyone chooses to share how they feel at every moment of the day, but we all need to make the choice to never undermine how someone is feeling. We also need to take into consideration what they might not be saying. We all deserve to have a space but it is okay to not always use it. This competition doesn’t work because we never know the whole story. Just because we may not be able to say how we feel does not take that feeling away. When we are all facing large events at the same time like Covid-19 or this new political climate, we each have expectations on how we should feel. We think that we should look around to see our own ideas and emotions reflected in our peers. That isn’t the case. Communication is not only about telling people how we feel but listening to those around us. We may feel more upset by something, or as if we are taking something more seriously, but we do not have the right to judge how others feel. Written by Katie Bevers