Somebody always has it worse. That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have it hard.

Comparison gets used as a disqualifier. Someone, somewhere, is carrying more, and that fact gets turned into an argument that your own difficulty does not count. It does not work that way. Hardship is not a fixed quantity being handed out, and someone else’s heavier load does not make yours fictional.

If you catch yourself ranking your trouble against someone else’s before you let yourself feel it, skip the ranking. Say the plain version: this is hard right now. Then tell one person who will not ask you to justify it.