“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

The waiter disapperared. We watched the confetti fall from the sky, skip acros the ground in the breeze, and tumble into the canal.

“Kind of hard to believe anyone could ever find that annoying,” Augustus said after a while.

“People always get used to beauty, though.”

“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling.

— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Barf.

— Me

i

When I was a kid I was the best writer in my class. This may sound pretentious, but it was actually an easy conclusion because I was 12 and pretty much the only student excited about any creative assignment. Writing became my “thing,” the one bit that separated me from others. The idea of anyone interceding on the ground that I had already deservedly stomped left me feeling despoiled. Thus began my totalitarian regime over the subject. So I wrote, and I wrote some more. But it wasn’t enough to be better, I had to give them a reason to set their pens down and never lift them again.

It was easier to identify in high school and college. People’s lots in life start to get carved out, destinies take root and the illusion of talent equality dies off. It became my goal in every class to be the best writer in the room. This wasn’t difficult. There was only a handful of actual writers with the majority of students identifying as people who “liked” writing. I outpaced my classmates. Like, destroyed them in my wake. It wasn’t until I reached higher-tiered classes where I was the one getting my ass kicked.

Eventually, you start to see peers, not competition. Or maybe I saw them as peers because they didn’t see me as competition. Were they better than me? A few of them were, yes. But it wasn’t so much as being better as it was being different. Their sights were set on different goals than mine. My success and strengths only took me so far, so I rose to the level of my incompetence. The engine I tuned to swallow up other people’s dreams burnt out. With no more worlds to conquer, I lost my motivation.

Teddy Roosevelt warned of the dangers of drawing comparisons. I guess the idea was nothing smashes your self-esteem quite like a stick-measuring contest (unless of course, you’re carrying a big stick). Coveting another’s accomplishment isn’t particularly healthy, especially when it diverts your focus from real work. But it does open the door to channel those traits into something more productive.

Comparisons didn’t rob me of joy, it robbed me of work ethic. The entirety of my writing career had been dictated by two things: grades or pretension. The lack of competition stifled my need to be the best, and in turn halted any smug, internal need to better myself. I was frustrated, majorly pissed off at myself for backing into a wall for which every brick I placed. My old mantra of “be better than everyone in the room,” wasn’t good enough anymore. I had to reformat myself or settle for mediocrity. So I set my aim for higher targets.

ii

I dislike John Green. Not as a person. He seems like a pretty cool guy and we would probably get along. But if we were in the same writing group, there are good chances I’d make him cry. I was strongly urged to read The Fault in Our Stars by a former coworker, and everyone was gushing over it, so I had no reason to not read it. Now I have plenty.

His prose is stilted and prosaic. His characters are robotic. They do not speak like children trying to understand adulthood, they speak as an adult trying to understand children. Any attempt edging towards something beautiful or profound is obstructed by his own ego. He has an inability to murder his darlings. The text is dripping with over sentimentality and pseudo-intellectualism. My immediate response for each of these scenes is to roll my eyes. I never thought I could read a chapter about Anne Frank and feel nothing. But at least he’s kind of funny.

As I’m bubbling with all this negativity, I ask myself why then is John Green so beloved? What am I missing? The answer could be simply for no reason at all; that I have overlooked nothing, and his continued status as media darling is either a blip in the matrix or a sentence set unto me by hellish circumstances. His success makes sense to me, but the continual idea that it’s undeserved is what bugs me.

In my final year of college, I developed a new mantra: “Be better than your mentors.” And for a while that ignited some fire in my belly, and I was able to persist at a pace that was reminiscent of my Genghis Khanian campaign to leave no survivors. In the last year or two, I developed a new mantra: “Be better than John Green.”

I’m not going to be as successful as him. But the thought of his work being lauded, that he’s able to get away with something so subpar, and that I can do so much better has returned my fire. Every time I get wary or lose the desire to write, I think about one of the many terrible things written in The Fault in Our Stars, and that smug look Green must have had while writing.

“I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “Think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.”

He smiled. Gallows humor. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up,” he said.

“And it’s my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you,” I said.

“Would it be absolutely ludicrous to try and make out?”

“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”

The lesson here is when you lose yourself, and you can’t find your way, you can always turn to that special someone in your life. That one person in all the world that you positively loathe, and use them as a marker for your own ineptitude, and exceed them. Because sometimes comparing yourself to others isn’t the thief of joy, sometimes it’s the best giver of encouragement available.