I Put The Phone Down And Think Less Of Myself

The screen goes dark and for about half a second you can see your own face in it.

That is the moment. Not the hour before it. The half second where the light drops out and the glass turns into a mirror and there you are, in the worst possible light, at the end of an hour of looking at people photographed in the best.

And something in you goes down. Not dramatically. A small settling, a slight dimming, the feeling of having been quietly outclassed by nobody in particular.

Then you put the phone on the arm of the chair and get up and carry on with the evening.

I am not going to tell you to delete anything.

That is the first thing anybody says, and you have heard it, and you have tried some version of it, and it lasted eleven days. And underneath the advice there is always a small accusation, which is that a stronger woman would not be affected by this, and that you are being a bit weak.

So let me put that down straight away.

Comparison is not a character flaw. It is what a mind does automatically when two similar things are placed side by side, and you are being handed several hundred similar things every evening, arranged deliberately for that purpose by people who are extremely good at their jobs. Your mind is doing precisely what a mind does. Nothing is wrong with you.

But something is wrong with the measurement, and that is what I want to look at, because I think if you see it properly it loses some of its grip.

Prove your own work

There is a line in Galatians about comparison that is oddly practical, and it is not the gentle one people expect.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6:4, King James Version)

Prove his own work. And then rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.

Notice that it does not say comparison is unkind, and it does not say it is ungrateful. It goes at it from a completely different direction. It says the measurement is being taken against the wrong object, and that a person who takes it against the right one has something the other person never gets.

Rejoicing in himself alone. Alone means without reference to anybody. Not better than, not worse than. Just the thing itself, assessed on its own.

And then it says something quite sharp: not in another. Because rejoicing that comes from a comparison is not actually yours. It is on loan from whoever you measured against, and it can be repossessed the moment somebody else walks into the room.

That is why the hour costs you something every single time.

You are not just losing a comparison. You are running your sense of yourself through an exchange rate you do not control, set by people you will never meet, revised every time you open it.

You are able to hold your own life without running it through anybody else's, and a comparison has never once produced something that stayed yours. Galatians 6:4 puts the rejoicing in the thing itself rather than in the ranking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman off an exchange rate she does not control.

There was never a scale that held both

Here is the part I actually want you to have, and it is not moral. It is technical.

There is no scale.

You have been performing a measurement that does not exist, and that is why it never resolves and why it comes back tomorrow.

Think about what you would actually need for that comparison to be valid. You would need a single quantity that both faces possess in different amounts, measurable, agreed on, so that one reading is genuinely higher than the other. There is no such quantity. There is not even a shared unit.

What there is instead is a photograph of a woman you do not know, chosen out of many, taken in prepared light, at a chosen angle, in a chosen year of her life, and adjusted afterward, set beside the whole of your actual face in your actual bathroom at the end of a Tuesday.

Those are not two things on a scale. They are two entirely different classes of object, and the measurement you are taking is not hard, it is impossible, and impossible is a much better description than unfair.

Because unfair means you might lose. Impossible means there was never a result to get.

It is a measurement that does not exist, and it has never once been possible to lose a comparison that could not be taken. The written word refuses the ranking and sends a person back to their own work, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops a woman waiting on a result that was never coming.

One hour, face down

So here is the assignment, and notice how small it is, because that is deliberate.

Put the phone face down for one hour this evening. Once.

Not delete. Not a week. Not a rule about evenings for the rest of your life, because you have tried that and the trying became one more thing you failed at, and failing at it made everything slightly worse.

One hour. Tonight. Face down on a surface in another room if you can manage it, on the arm of the chair if you cannot.

And here is the part that does the work: do not do anything virtuous with the hour. Do not read something improving. Do not take up an interest. That turns it into a self improvement project, and self improvement is the same machinery running under a nicer name.

Just have the hour. Sit in it. Be a bit bored. Talk to whoever is there.

What you are testing is one thing only: whether the dimming happens tonight without the hour of looking. It probably will not, and noticing that connection for yourself is worth more than my saying it, because you will believe yourself and you will not fully believe me.

You are able to have one ordinary hour without the exchange rate running, and one hour has never once needed to be a rule to be worth having. Galatians 6:4 sends a person back to their own work rather than to a ranking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman sitting in a room with a phone face down.