E22 | You Are Not Behind | Why Comparing Your Life to Others Is Keeping You Stuck

Before you compare your life to someone else’s, remember this:

You joined their story in the middle.

In this episode of The Living Story, we’re talking about comparison, social media, waiting seasons, and the quiet belief so many women carry that they are somehow “behind” in life.

Maybe you thought you’d be married by now.
Maybe you thought you’d have children, clarity, healing, purpose, or peace by now.
Maybe you scroll through someone else’s life and wonder why their story seems to be moving while yours feels stuck.

But what if you’re not behind at all?

What if you’ve simply been comparing your page one to someone else’s page three hundred?

In this episode, Tennille Martinez explores:

•  why comparison is emotionally destructive 
•  how social media distorts our timelines 
•  the hidden middle chapters people never show 
•  what the stories of Joseph and Hannah reveal about waiting 
•  why God’s timing is not punishment 
•  and how your “middle chapter” may actually be the place where transformation is happening most deeply 

This episode is for the woman who feels overlooked, delayed, discouraged, or exhausted from measuring her life against everyone else’s.

You are not behind.
You are being formed.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

You were never supposed to compare your page one to someone else's page 300. You're scrolling, and there she is, the life that looked like what you asked God for, the marriage, the home, the thing that you've been waiting for longer than you want to say out loud. And you know it's not the whole picture. You know there are hard days behind that photo and struggles that never make it to the grid. You know, and it still sits with you for the rest of the day. You close the app, but somehow the feeling follows you into your real life. The ache is not jealousy, it's comparison. And comparison has been lying to you about where you are in your story for a very long time. Today, we are talking about why that comparison is not a fair fight and what changes when you understand that you have never actually been behind. Stay with me We need to talk about something that is making this worse than it has ever been in human history, and you probably know the answer to it already. It's, uh, what I would say is the bane of existence, but we can't stop from looking at it every single day, and it's social media. Now, I'm not here to tell you social media is evil. I'm literally using it to tell you that this episode exists. I use it to connect with other people that think the same way that I do. It's a tool. Like any tool, it can build things or damage things depending on how you use it. But here's what it does to us that we don't talk about enough. It gives us a front row seat to everyone else's page 300 while hiding pages one through 299 completely. You scroll past a woman with a marriage that looks solid and loving and easy, and even though you know, you know that no marriage is as easy as it looks on a grid, it still sits with you. The longing, the quiet grief of wanting something You don't yet have, and not knowing when or if it's coming for you. You see the woman with the home, the nursery photos, the babies, the family that looks like the one you've been hoping for. And even when you can see the filter on it, even when you know full well that behind that beautiful photo, there are hard days and sleepless nights and struggles that never make it to the grid, it still sits with you. The ache. You see the woman who seems to have her faith figured out, the peace she carries, the way she talks about God like he is someone she actually knows, and you compare that to where you are. Still asking questions, still figuring it out, still unsure some days. And the story you tell yourself is, "She has something I don't have. I'm behind. I'm missing something fundamental." But what you don't see is her page one. You don't see the years she has spent circling faith from a distance before she walked through the door. The marriage before the good one that taught her what she actually needed. The pregnancy losses before the nursery photos. The decade of quiet faithfulness before anyone was paying attention. You joined her story at page three hundred. You missed the first two hundred and ninety-nine, and some of you have been punishing yourselves for years over a comparison that was never even accurate. You've been comparing your page one to her three hundred and calling yourself behind. That's not a fair fight. That's not even an accurate comparison. It's a story. And it is one of the most damaging stories we tell ourselves because it uses real information to draw a completely false conclusion. If that comparison has been running quietly in the background of your life, there is something in the show notes built specifically for this moment. It's called I Thought I'd Be Further by Now: Five Signs You Are Trying to Finish a Story God Is Writing. It's free, and it will meet you exactly where the scroll left off or where the scroll left you feeling small and tiny and unseen. Grab it and come back. We are just getting started So every year at the beginning of the school year, I say something to my students that I've been saying for over twenty years, and honestly, I think I've needed the reminder just as much as they have. I tell them, "You're a brand-new sixth grader or seventh grader or eighth grader," all depends the class I'm teaching at that particular moment. "This is your first time being this age, your first time being at this level, your first time navigating this version of yourself, and you cannot compare your first week to your ninetieth day. You're on day one. You're supposed to be on day one." And then I always say, "Please don't compare your experience with your older siblings, or your cousins, or what your parents tell you it was like when they were your age." And every single year, there's always one student who looks at me and says something to the effect, "Yeah, but that was like so 1900s or the early 2000s." And I give them the teacher look. You know the one. The one that says, "I heard that," "and we are going to discuss your choices later." But the point stands. Their experience is theirs. Their timeline is theirs. Their story is unfolding in a completely different moment with completely different circumstances than anyone who came before them, and measuring their chapter one against someone else's chapter ten is just, it's not fair. It is categorically incorrect. It is comparing two things that were never meant to be compared. Your life is not a remake of someone else's story. It is an original, and originals don't come with a comparison point. There have been seasons where I quietly looked around and believed everyone else had figured something out before I did, like somehow everyone else got handed the instructions, and I missed a meeting. Maybe you know that feeling too. but comparison only works when you forget that every story has pages you never got to read. Here is something I have noticed as a reader and as someone who has spent her entire professional life thinking about story, and I would say my younger years too. We always join stories in the middle. Always. When you open up a novel, you don't start at the character's birth. You enter somewhere in the middle of her life. She already has a history you're catching up on, relationships formed before you arrived, wounds sustained in chapters you've never read. The author drops you into the action and trusts you to piece together what came before from the clues left in the narrative. And here is what you never do as a reader. You never compare yourself to the character and say, "She's further along than I am," because that would be absurd. That would be absolutely ridiculous. She is in the story. You are reading it. You are not on the same timeline. but we do this with each other every single day. We look at another woman's life as if we are characters in the same story with the same starting point, and we compare where she is to where we are and call ourselves behind. You are not in her story. You are in yours. And your story has a different author, a different timeline, a different set of pages written specifically for who you are and what you are being prepared for. The woman you are comparing yourself to did not start where you think she started. She started somewhere you never saw, and she has been walking longer than you know. You joined her story in the middle, which means you have never actually been behind. You've just been reading from the wrong page And maybe for the first time, you are realizing the comparison was never telling you the truth Selah. So if you've been here before, you already know what this means. If this is your first time listening, pause, breathe, write down one word, write down one thought. You're right on time. Whose story have you been measuring yours against? If you are driving or walking right now, hold the name or image in your mind. Come back to it later. Write it down when you can because that comparison has been shaping the way you see yourself for longer than you realize, and it deserves to be examined. You have been measuring your chapter one against someone else's chapter thirty-three and calling yourself behind. That is not an accurate read of where you are. That is a story, and it is not a fair fight because you joined her story in the middle. You missed the first two hundred and ninety-nine pages. You have been drawing conclusions from incomplete information your entire life, and that ends today. And if you want something to walk through slowly after this episode, I thought I'd be further by now. My freebie, my gift to you is in the show notes. Take it slowly because what we're about to talk about with Joseph and Hannah is going to land differently once you name the comparison you've been living inside. There are two people in scripture whose stories feel like the clearest examples of middle chapters to me. The first is Joseph. If you have never read the Bible, here is a short version. Joseph was seventeen years old when he received a dream about his future, a promise, a glimpse of where his life was heading. And then for the next thirteen years, everything moved in the opposite direction. His brothers betrayed him. He was sold into slavery, falsely accused, thrown into prison, forgotten. And if someone had looked at Joseph's life in the middle of those years, they would not have seen a success story. They would have seen a man sitting in a prison cell wondering, what happened to the promise? They would have joined his story at the worst possible page and called it the whole story. But it's not the whole story. It was a middle chapter, and the middle chapter was forming the man who would eventually need everything it built in him. He was not forgotten, and neither are you. But Hannah. Hannah feels different to me And Hannah is another person in the Bible because her story is the story of every woman who has ever carried a longing so specific she barely says it out loud anymore. the woman who has watched someone else receive the thing she wanted most. The woman trying to figure out what to do with that ache quietly in rooms full of people who would never fully understand it. You know that ache. The one that is not loud or dramatic. The one you carry quietly because you don't want to seem ungrateful, because you know you have things to be thankful for. Because maybe you explained it once or twice, and the response wasn't what you needed, so now you just carry it. This is Hannah. Hannah wanted children, and in her culture, infertility carried shame. Year after year, she watched other women receive what she was praying for. And on the outside, nobody would have known the full weight she was carrying, but it was heavy. Some of you know exactly how heavy. And then one day, she brought it to God with everything she had. Not politely, Not with a tidy prayer, something wrapped up and, and simple. It was with full, unfiltered weight of her grief and longing and hope, and she wept. She poured herself out and was so undone that someone watching thought something was wrong with her. They actually thought she was drunk. eventually, God answered her. not because she had finally detached from wanting it, not because she performed faithfully waiting correctly, but because the middle chapter had finished forming something in her. The thing she longed for became the very thing she now had the wisdom to steward because of everything the waiting had built inside her. What you're waiting for in the middle chapter is not being withheld. It is being prepared, and so are you Here is what I wanna say to the woman in the middle right now. Not the beginning, not the end, but in that very delicate middle, the messy middle, The middle that just takes every ounce of courage to walk through. The chapter that feels like it's taking too long. The chapter where you cannot fully see what God is doing, but cannot fully shake the feeling that He is doing something. That chapter is not punishment. It's not. It is not evidence that you missed your moment. It's not proof that you're behind. The middle chapter is where formation happens. Not the beginning. The beginning is about starting. Not the end. The end is about arriving, completion. The middle? The middle is where you become the person capable of carrying what comes next. Joseph needed the middle. Hannah needed the middle. And maybe you do too. Because you're not behind. You're being formed. And the God writing your story knows exactly how many pages are needed before the next chapter becomes possible. So what do you do with this? You stay in your own story. And I know that sounds simple, but it's not. Because comparison constantly invites us out of our own page and into someone else's. But healing starts when you return to your own story honestly. You celebrate your page one without apologizing for it because page one is not less valuable than page three hundred. Without page one, there is no page three hundred. The woman you admire had a beginning too. You just never saw it. You ask different questions. Instead of, "Why is she further along than I am?" You ask, "What is this chapter teaching me that the next one will require?" Instead of, "What am I missing?" You ask, "What is being built in me right now that I cannot yet see?" And then you return to the author because the only one who can see your whole story from page one to the final page is the one who wrote it, and he has never once looked at your middle chapter and said, "She's behind." He looks at your middle chapter and says, "She is exactly where she needs to be for what comes next." That is the story he's writing, and it has never been behind schedule. If you're sitting with the weight of the middle right now, I thought I'd be further by now, The freebie in the show notes will help you see the five signs you are trying to finish a story God is still writing. It's free. And honestly, don't carry this comparison story into another month unchanged. Take it slowly. Work through it honestly. You're not behind. You've never been behind. you never were behind. You joined someone else's story in the middle and compared it to your page one and drew a conclusion that was never accurate. And today, that story loses a little more of its grip. Joseph started in a pit. Hannah started in grief. And God wrote both of them stories that were worth every page of the middle. He is writing yours too, and he has not lost your page And if you have ever asked God why something happened and never felt like you got a satisfying answer, stay close because the next series we're stepping into is called I Never Got My Why, and it is for the woman who is still carrying unanswered questions, the woman who thought healing would come faster, the woman who understood things in her mind long before her heart caught up The woman trying to figure out what faith looks like when the story did not unfold the way she had prayed it would. We're going there honestly, not with cliches, not with easy answers, not with everything happens for a reason energy. We are talking about grief, disappointment, identity, heartbreak, healing, and the gap between what we know and what we still ache for. And what happens when God does not hand us the explanation we thought we needed? So if that sounds like your story, make sure that you hit follow. Subscribe now so you don't miss the first episode, and share this episode with a friend who keeps quietly wondering if she's behind or if she's comparing herself or anything remotely close to that, because she's not. And as always, before you leave, I want you to know that you are seen, you are loved, and the story is still being written in God's hands. Until next time, grace and peace