Built to Belong

by Natalie Franke

  FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

  If you are a chronic comparer, please know that you are not alone. Time and time again, I have fallen back into the same traps of questioning my worth when insecurities crept up. Especially during those six years of marriage leading up to the birth of my firstborn, every pregnancy announcement felt like a dagger in my chest. It was an inescapable pain that was always lurking in the shadows, waiting to rip away my joy and replace it with the belief that my body was failing me.

  I was never sure when it would appear: matching pajamas during the holidays, another Mother’s Day empty-handed. However, as friends one by one announced their pregnancies, my personal struggle with comparison became a daily battle. One that I had to learn, conscious thought by conscious thought, to fight back against.

  One of the most powerful tools in the mindset-shifting toolbox that you’ve seen me use numerous times in this book (and in my doodles) is the act of cognitive reframing. As a reminder, reframing means taking an existing perception of how things are and changing the narrative in favor of a better outcome. Turning the tables. Flipping the script. Changing the game.

  In the case of comparison, I like to think of cognitive reframing as kicking jealousy out of the driver’s seat and reclaiming control of the vehicle that is your life. Replacing envy with compassion, empathy, and joy.

  So, how does it work? I’ll show you. Let’s take a look at some examples of upward comparisons that we may come across in our daily lives and examine how to shift away from negative perceptions and toward a positive view of our experience.

  Career Success

  FROM THIS: She is so much more successful than I am—her business is booming and I can’t even get mine off the ground. I am a failure.

  TO THAT: Wow! She is on fire! Seeing her achieve that level of success shows me the magnitude of what is possible. I can do it too.

  Family Life

  FROM THIS: She has three beautiful kids before thirty, and I’m nowhere near that season of life. My priority is my career. I must be falling behind and missing out.

  TO THAT: I’m grateful that we all have the freedom to pursue different callings. There is no single timeline or set of milestones that determine success. She deserves happiness and so do I.

  Physical Health

  FROM THIS: She has the perfect body, and when she parades it around on social media, it makes me feel unworthy. I will never look like her.

  TO THAT: It’s amazing to see another woman comfortable in her own skin. I deserve to feel that confident and love myself fully.

  This technique is all about shifting our mindset away from comparison and toward a celebration of others. It means accepting that other people are not our enemy. It means welcoming the accomplishments of others rather than using those achievements as proof of your unworthiness.

  We have a choice when we see others climbing higher, when they are reaching goals that none of us thought were possible. We can cheer them on or we can tear them down.

  If we choose to tear them down, if we discount their accomplishments and judge their successes, if we make it harder for others to succeed, then we all lose. That failure is shared by the collective because we all remain trapped together beneath that impenetrable ceiling.

  If we choose to cheer others on, if we make an effort to raise their voices and fan the flames of their success, then we are all the better for it. When someone else wins, we all win. When someone else wins, it affirms that it is possible for all of us.

  When someone else finds happiness, achieves greatness, it doesn’t take away from your ability to do the same. You can celebrate the accomplishments of others without feeling diminished by their prosperity.

  Moving past mindsets of comparison to truly embrace, celebrate, and empower one another requires so much more from us than mental gymnastics. It requires taking action. Once you’ve mastered this mindset and have reached a season in life when you are ready to pour back into others, do it.

  When we become the success stories that we once compared ourselves to, we have a responsibility to make it easier for the ones who come after us. We must use our power to empower others—ensuring that we are not a one-hit wonder, but rather the start of a shift in the status quo. We may have to fight our internal narratives to do it, but it is up to us to turn the tide.

  We must become the empowering and affirming voices that we wish we had when we were in the arena. The comparison of our past can become the camaraderie of our future. The choice is ours.

  WE ARE ICEBERGS

  It all began with a question. “If I don’t like the way I look in my images, you can make me skinnier, right? You can fix my arms, my waistline?”

  The bride looked at me across the table with a completely serious stare. This was 2009—long before filters or apps that made it easy to change your appearance at the drop of a hat. Instagram wouldn’t be created for another year.

  I know it might seem like a common question today. However, this wasn’t the case back then. It was jarring.

  This was the first time in my career as a professional wedding photographer that I was being asked to do this. I froze. Sitting across from this bride-to-be, I was suddenly faced with an issue much greater than I was ready to understand.

  For me, the question was not whether I could manipulate her images to make her resemble her bridal magazine covers—airbrushed, liquified, and perfected in Photoshop—but whether I should.

  So I sat there staring back at this gorgeous young woman as my own insecurities came bubbling to the surface.

  Shoot. If someone “like her” wasn’t happy with her body, how could anyone “like me” be satisfied with the way I looked? I was even further from her definition of beautiful. My waistline was curvier, and I had dozens of scars on my arms and stretch marks on my hips. I tried not to take it personally, but her question made me feel like crap.

  My stomach turned. My cheeks felt hot. Make no mistake—at nineteen years old and paying my way through college, I needed the money. I really needed to book this wedding.

  However, I just couldn’t give her the answer that she wanted. I couldn’t say yes.

  So she booked another photographer.

  I’m not going to lie to you—it sucked. To make matters worse, year after year the requests became more frequent, and the practice of editing our appearances and, along with them, our lives became more and more commonplace.

  My realization, beyond the fact that the world was desperately in need of a body positivity and inclusivity movement, was this:

  The images we consume, the content all around us, only tells half the story.

  The other half gets buried behind the painstakingly curated images and delicately crafted highlight reels that we see in our daily scroll. The other half gets airbrushed out or hidden from the algorithms that popularize what the world deems to be beautiful. The other half is too hard to write into words or express on the internet.

  The other half, the most vulnerable and honest half of our lives gets left behind.

  It’s no one single person’s fault.

  We are all human. Our insecurities are so deep, our past trauma so vast and wide, that sometimes we do whatever we can to hide it. We are imperfect beings doing the best that we can and struggling with things in our hearts that the rest of the world will never see. None of us is exempt from it.

  When we struggle, we’re told “Chin up, buttercup. Don’t let them see you cry. Put your best foot forward and keep pressing on.”

  So we do. We tidy up our hearts as if the mess within us is too much for others to bear, and we tuck away our grief in the deepest corner of our beings. We know that there is so much more beneath the surface, there is so much depth to our experiences that the world will never truly witness. We are imperfect beings doing the best we can in a broken world… and often wading through the waters of shame that threaten to swallow us whole.

  We are little icebergs—the beauty and joy glimmering just above the water, wit
h so much more that lies beneath the surface. Dynamic and wondrous, the complexity of our lives cannot be fully understood in a single image or a caption.

  None of what I just said is new to any of us. We know that there is so much more to our stories than what we share online or in community settings. However, when we turn our gaze to others, we are so quick to forget.

  With phones in hand and the internet at our fingertips, we take the half-truths and highlight reels and stitch them together into a reality that feels far superior to our own. We construct a picture of the world from the best parts of other people’s stories and wonder why our lives feel so much messier.

  In order to break through that, in order to build deep and lasting bonds with others, we must dig deeper. We must accept that things on the surface are rarely indicative of how things truly are.

  I’m an iceberg. You’re an iceberg. Everyone in the world is a freaking iceberg.

  And if we continue barreling through life without acknowledging that there is so much more to others beneath the surface, we’re going to crash. If we keep comparing and comparing and comparing, we’re going to sink like the Titanic and spend the rest of our lives wondering if there really was enough room for Jack to survive on the floating door with Rose after all.

  So how do we go deep in a shallow world? How do we get past the highlight reels and curated feeds? How do we stop comparing and start truly loving one another?

  One word: empathy.

  Empathy is mirror neurons firing on all cylinders. Our brains are equipped with emotional intelligence and wired to imagine what it would feel like to experience the world from someone else’s situation. It’s a critical component of human connection.

  Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and in the case of comparison in the digital age, to acknowledge that there is so much more than what meets the eye. It means occasionally reading between the lines and reminding ourselves daily that every person we meet is fighting a tough battle.

  Accessing empathy enables us to eradicate thoughts that put the lives of others on a pedestal and replace them with deeply held compassion, kindness, and respect for the challenges they have faced to get to where they are today.

  The mother with three beautiful kids also has two angel babies in heaven. That entrepreneur who just went full time was actually laid off by a boss who told her that she would never make anything of herself. The person you compare yourself to on social media has a painful past and a trunk full of trauma that never makes its way onto their Instagram feed.

  Human beings are not highlight reels.

  Consciously seeking empathy-centered truth means kicking any notions of perfection to the curb and training your brain to catch half-truths before they become the full picture.

  In the battle against comparison, empathy is the key.

  GROUNDED IN GRATITUDE

  Something tells me that at the end of our lives, we won’t look back and wish that we had spent more time comparing ourselves to other people on the internet. Something tells me that we won’t long for the hours we wasted counting all the reasons we didn’t measure up.

  Something tells me that we’re going to wish that we had loved ourselves and others just a little bit more… that we had put down the phone and lifted our eyes to see the beauty that surrounded us. Something tells me that we will wonder why we couldn’t see it then—all those reasons to be grateful, all those beautiful relationships we so often took for granted.

  A grateful heart that celebrates the successes of others is a weapon in the war of comparison. When we’re grateful, we’re not fearful. And when we’re not fearful, we’re able to concentrate on what is good in our lives and share that spirit of abundance with others.

  Whenever I talk about gratitude, I know that half of the room immediately thinks this bit of advice doesn’t apply to them. Perhaps they have heard it time and time again. Perhaps they think it’s too fluffy, too abstract, to truly make a meaningful difference in their lives.

  Here’s where the science comes in. Intentional gratitude changes levels of serotonin and dopamine in the brain. Like a natural dose of Prozac, practicing conscious thankfulness changes our neurochemistry.3

  When you start comparing your life to someone else’s, count the things in your day that are truly special. Take note of the people, experiences, and things that you so often take for granted.

  Another tip for chronic comparers like me—start each day with a gratitude activity. Rather than reaching for your phone, reach for a journal. Comparison isn’t going away when we put our phones down. However, we can choose to reach for the things that lead us back to ourselves. In that journal, write down three things that you are thankful for that day and spend a few moments reflecting on what you cherish most in your life.

  AN END TO THE WAITING

  Our season of waiting for fertility treatment ended when we finally evicted my benign brain tumor from its residence in my head. As you’ve read, it’s a much longer story than that—but we’ll keep going.

  At my post-op appointment, my neurosurgery and endocrine team told us that we could begin trying for a baby six months after surgery.

  So exactly six months and two days after the day that I was wheeled into the OR for brain surgery, we walked into our new fertility clinic in San Francisco.

  Can you tell that we were just the tiniest bit eager to get started?

  A new doctor with an optimistic outlook on our chances assured us that there was hope. Sitting in her office was far different from our experience years before. She was warm and empathetic. I felt seen and heard for the first time on our infertility journey.

  The following week we began treatment.

  We moved from pills to injections, appointment after appointment, prayer after prayer, until a few months later we received the news that we had been fighting for—it worked. I got a positive test after all those years of yearning.

  It was nothing short of a miracle.

  I find it difficult to describe the moment we first saw our son on an ultrasound. Simultaneous waves of joy and worry washed over me.

  The flutter of our baby’s heartbeat was the music that my ears had waited to hear for so long. Those independent notes filled the room in a resounding symphony of redemption. A beautiful new life, nestled in the womb of a woman who never thought she would get the chance to have a baby.

  However, the joy of that moment also brought about a new set of fears. There were many, as any pregnant mama can attest to, but the biggest one for me was around sharing the news with the world.

  I was terrified to publicly share that I was pregnant.

  I kept feeling as though this were all a dream—like after years of waiting, this outcome was far too good to be true. I worried that when we finally shared our happy news with the world, all of this would be ripped away. It felt like everything would come crashing down. Our happiness would just disintegrate through our fingertips, and we would spiral even deeper into a grief that we would never recover from.

  And what about all the other women still waiting for their miracle? What about them?

  My heart ached. Truly ached. A mixture of guilt and grief that I never could have anticipated. Why not them? What had we done to deserve this blessing? My anger for my friends who were still at war with infertility raged within me.

  I had never been on this side of the journey to parenthood, and in all those years, I never actually considered what it would be like to have an announcement of our own to share.

  Was this how my friends had felt all those years? Afraid to tell me their happy news? Did they worry about sending out baby shower invitations and struggle to find the right words to say? I wondered.

  Did they too struggle to celebrate the joy of this season? Did they fear for this little life every second of every day? I also wondered.

  In the complexity of that moment, I was reminded that there is so much more to our stories than what meets the eye.

  Even
in our victories against the darkest moments of our lives exists a complex layering of the trauma we’ve traversed to get there. Prosperity and pain can coexist. Grief can intertwine with joy. Worry can weave together with hope in the tapestry of our mind.

  No one’s experience can be summed up in a single snapshot. No one’s journey can be communicated in a few dozen characters. This is what it means to be human.

  We waited well into the second trimester to share the news, and when we did, something surprising happened. Yes, our friends were happy for us… but the women who cheered the loudest, the ones who celebrated my success as if it were their own, were the women in my infertility support groups.

  I’ve never experienced such a rallying cry of celebration in my entire life. The most enthusiastic voices came from friends who were still in the battle, the ones still fighting for their miracle moment, who chose to love me amid their own suffering.

  If it can happen for her, it can happen for me.

  Their outcries of support filled the silence where fear and doubt danced around in my mind. They showed me, through their solidarity and compassion, that we must choose to celebrate others not only when it is easy, but most important, when it is hard.

  It was a lesson that I failed to understand so many years before… and through their selfless solidarity, it became a learning that I carry with me to this day.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FINDING YOUR PEOPLE

  Growing up in Annapolis, you see the rowers zipping down the Severn River nearly every morning. They cut through the water like magic—racing up and back, up and back—until it’s time to return to the boathouse.

  I used to sit by the water and watch them, knowing that when the time was right, I was going to join a team.

  At fifteen, I signed myself up for the local rowing club.

  My childhood dream was finally coming true! Watch out, world…