You avoid anywhere you might be compared

Let us look plainly at this, because the avoidance feels like prudence while quietly costing you a great deal. The avoidance shrinks your life to protect a fragile standing — every arena you stay out of is an experience and a growth foreclosed, and a life of such avoidances narrows your world to the few corners where your standing feels safe, all to protect one fragile thing, your rank; name the trade, a shrinking world for a protected standing, and you can weigh whether to keep making it. The unbearableness is the real problem, not the comparison — comparison is everywhere and cannot be escaped without leaving life, and it only wounds because your worth rides entirely on your rank, so the thing to work on is not the comparison but what it is allowed to mean about you. And enter one arena you have avoided, and let yourself not be best — the belief that being less than best is unbearable has never been tested, so test it, step into one avoided place and be ordinary there, and discover that you survive it, which loosens the belief as no reasoning can. What have you narrowed your life to avoid?