Right from a young age I believed I was different. Not in a unique, special or distinctive way even, just different. Someone who lives their life invisible, the runner up, second best. I was, still am and will probably always will be an introvert, someone who hides from the limelight, the backing singer rather than the main event but that’s me, it’s who I am. Whilst I can say that now like it’s nothing it has not always been that way, far from it. For a long time, I believed I was the problem, the thorn in the side, the freak show and being second best was just in my DNA as much as having brunette hair was.

Having a loveable, friendly older brother who people adore made life in and out of school difficult for me because people expected me to be a cardboard cut-out of him and when I wasn’t, people almost recoiled in horror as there must have been something wrong with me. How could he be so amazing and me so strange? He won awards whilst I won concerned looks. In a nutshell he was loved and I wasn’t. I couldn’t compete no matter how hard I tried.

All through school I could count on one hand the number of friends I had, even less fingers to count those that actually wanted to be. There was always someone cooler, smarter, louder and funnier than me and surplus to requirements I became. Getting older I believed I would grow in confidence and find a place in the world whereby I would be the important one, the one that people liked and wanted to be around but I was wrong. Every friendship I had was based on my ability to enjoy a night out and not about me as a person, and the second someone better came along I was rejected and thrown away like some old tat sent to the charity shop. When I made friends I took it we could do anything together, be it going to the cinema, chomping on a burger or dancing the night away. Friends are friends no matter what you did but clearly I was very much wrong because ‘so and so’ is a much better person to talk to, share things with and just be around, but you know what Sarah ‘so and so’ doesn’t like a boogie so you’ll do for that and that only.

I’d like to say relationships were different but lets face it they weren’t. I seemed to have always fallen into that zone of meeting someone straight after they have finished with someone else and not just anyone else – the love of their lives. The love of their lives that so happen to be the one who broke up with them leaving them heartbroken. The love of their lives that happen to be the person they wanted to marry, have kids with and live happily ever after with and the kind you don’t and will not ever compare with. So instead of loving me like they loved them, they would use me to feel better before moving onto someone else who turned out to be the next love of their life and worst still I would let it happen.

The world of second best hasn’t improved in this modern day world of dating of course, what when there are so many options available at the swipe or the click of a button. You claim you want x, y and z from a women, well I have all those traits but still you choose to find something better, so what is wrong with me?

What is wrong with me is a question that has plagued me for most of my life. Why am I never enough? What is missing in me that is not missing in my brother, my former friends or other girls? Of course I have never found a distinct answer because you know something there isn’t one, as there is nothing wrong with me. By challenging my thoughts I have finally realised that I am the person who has thought there is something wrong and as a result believed it. The only person’s opinion that matters is my own and it is my feelings of not being enough that have plagued my mind and not that of others peoples.

Rather than reach that default setting every time something goes wrong or when I get rejected – you know that setting that zooms in on what is wrong with me and what I must have done wrong, maybe it’s more appropriate to think it’s actually about the other person. It is their rubbish to deal with and I need to stop ingesting it as mine. I am a good person, a shy introverted person yes but still a good person all the same. I am who I am and there is nothing wrong with that. At the end of the day it’s my job to value me not the job of someone else and whilst I may spend my life being second in the eyes of others, from here on out I will always endeavour to make myself number one in my own.