The Anointing Grace

Comparison Is Identity Suicide

By Sherita Jones | The Anointing Grace

This blog is not just about comparing ourselves to other women. It’s much deeper than that.

Comparison is a symptom, not the problem.

There is a serious problem in our culture today. Young girls and grown women alike are constantly comparing themselves and most don’t realize it’s not actually about the other woman. It goes deeper than that. Beneath the comparison is an identity crisis, a quiet fracture in how we see ourselves. We don’t truly know who we are. And even when someone affirms us, tells us we’re beautiful, capable, anointed, gifted, we don’t believe it. So we go looking for it. We crave validation from people we’ve elevated, people we’ve placed on pedestals, hoping that their approval will finally make something feel true about us. But borrowed validation never sticks. It can’t anchor what was never rooted.

And beneath comparison is something far more uncomfortable. Many don’t actually like who they are. Whether it be internally or externally.

So you measure, mimic, adjust, or perform. But the real issue is not that you’re not like someone else. It’s that you don’t know you.

Comparison kills. But not in the way we think. It doesn’t just kill confidence, comparison is identity suicide. Every time you measure yourself against someone else and wish you were more like them, you subtly reject your own God created design. Comparison is another form of self-abandonment, and most women don’t even see it.

Comparison is an identity problem.

When identity is unclear, we create one. Or worse, we accept one that trauma, rejection, or people assigned to us. Maybe you were the less popular sibling, always slightly in someone else’s shadow. Maybe you felt overlooked so consistently that invisible became your identity. Maybe you never received unconditional love from your father, and that absence left a wound that quietly turned into striving, performing for approval you were always meant to simply have. Those experiences don’t just disappear. They imprint. They shape perception. They quietly form identity. And instead of being taught that your uniqueness was a superpower, many of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that we needed to adjust.

When you’re trying to be like someone else, it’s not always inspiration, sometimes it’s insecurity feeding itself.

I tell my daughters often, when you use your energy trying to be like someone else, you’ve left your post. There are people who need you, need the gifts God placed inside of you. When you abandon your design to imitate someone else’s, the world loses access to what only you carry.

Don’t plant yourself in someone else’s garden.

God didn’t make a mistake when He made you.

You were not born wrong. You were not born lacking. You were not born needing to be edited into someone else. To abandon the perfect design God intentionally formed is also burying the gifts attached to that design. You will never reach your highest point adopting someone else’s identity.

You are dying in soil that wasn’t meant for you.

Think about plants. Roses, sunflowers, orchids, oak trees, all beautiful. All unique. None competing. But put a rose in desert soil meant for a cactus and watch it wither. Not because the rose is defective, but because the environment is misaligned.

The wrong soil will kill what God designed to flourish.

And it makes sense when you think about what we’re feeding ourselves daily. Your brain is always listening. What you watch, scroll through, consume repeatedly, it doesn’t just pass through. It settles. It forms a framework. When one body type is constantly praised, one lifestyle elevated, one personality type celebrated, your mind begins to quietly categorize that as the standard. And when your type is consistently overlooked, something in you starts registering that as a deficit, even if no one ever said it directly. Your nervous system responds to repetition. Feed it filtered perfection and edited lives long enough, and your perception of yourself will begin to distort. Just like a plant growing under artificial light grows uneven and weak, you will grow distorted under artificial standards.

Now, that’s input, and input is shaping your identity. Input Truth. Input the Word of God. Know what God says about you. Let His validation matter. We must know who we are more than any other time in history and steward our identity well.

If you don’t guard what you consume, you will unconsciously adopt identities that were never assigned to you by God.

You cannot walk in confidence and authority while constantly feeding yourself comparison. You cannot believe what God says about you while drowning in voices that contradict it. You cannot flourish planted in soil that starves your design.

At the end of the day, this isn’t about just believing who you are. It’s about knowing who you are. When you know who you are, deeply, spiritually, internally, comparison loses its grip. You’ll begin to love yourself, and I mean truly love yourself.

Until you do the deep internal work, the healing, the reflection, the surrender, you will keep abandoning yourself in subtle ways, operating beneath your authority, unaware that you’ve left your post.

Comparison is not the problem. Identity is.

And the moment you stop performing for the version of you that never existed, is the moment you finally meet the you God designed.

I Didn’t Lose Myself. I Abandoned Myself

By Sherita Jones | The Anointing Grace

For years, I said I “lost myself.” That sounds softer. It sounds accidental. Like something slipped through my fingers. But that isn’t the truth. I didn’t lose myself. I abandoned myself. And if I’m honest, I was abandoning myself long before my first relationship.

Self abandonment didn’t begin in love. It began in survival. My life was unstable long before I entered foster care. I attended five elementary schools, four middle schools, three high schools. Nothing stayed consistent. Not homes. Not environments. Not relationships. When your world constantly shifts, you learn to shift with it. You become adaptable. You become guarded. You don’t trust easily. You don’t attach quickly. You learn how to read rooms. You learn how to survive.

Self abandonment is a learned survival strategy. You had to perform, over-give, or behave a certain way to survive. Your nervous system learns before your heart does. You silence your needs because instability teaches you that your needs are secondary to survival. And when you do that long enough, abandoning yourself stops feeling like loss. It feels like strength.

By the time I met him at 15, I was guarded. He had to prove himself. And in the beginning, he did. He was patient. He was attentive. He wrote me love letters. He took me out. He bought my first diamond ring and made me a promise. He made me feel safe. His parents, sister, cousins welcomed me.

And for a girl who grew up unstable, safety is powerful.

A child who isn’t properly nurtured will attach to whoever feels like safety. Safety does not have to be perfect. It just has to feel steady. And he felt steady.

When we separated, he chose not to be tied down. That was the fracture. During that time, he encountered someone else. And when he eventually came back into my life, he didn’t just reappear casually, he pursued me for a year and a half before I agreed to let him back in. A year and a half of consistency. A year and a half of effort. I didn’t rush. I watched. I weighed. I guarded my heart.

But when I finally said yes, the man I received was not the man I remembered.

He was different. Guarded. Selfish. Almost cold at times, yet still charming. Still magnetic. Still fun to be around, conversations were deep, his ambition was very present. But it was like loving someone who refused to allow himself to love fully. Whatever he experienced in that other relationship, he brought back with him, and I paid the cost of wounds I did not create. I learned very expensive lessons to say the least.

But here’s where self abandonment deepened.

The hardest part wasn’t that he changed. The hardest part was that I kept loving the version of him that no longer existed. I was holding on to a man from memory, not the man standing in front of me. I was feeding a delusion built from who he used to be, not the evidence he was showing me in real time. I allowed myself to be blinded by the good parts, the undeniable chemistry, the memories.

And memory is powerful.

The brain attaches to the first version of safety it experiences. It stores it. It protects it. It fights to restore it. So when reality shifts, your nervous system says, “Just get him back to who he was.” You start negotiating with truth. You minimize what you see. You reinterpret behavior. You spiritualize red flags.

Not because you’re foolish. Because of survival attachment and trauma bonding. This is not covenant love.

Covenant love grows from wholeness. Survival attachment or trauma bond clings to what once felt safe. And when your identity was formed around instability, losing safety feels like losing oxygen.

We attract what matches our perceived internal identity. You will tolerate people who confirm that belief. If somewhere deep inside you believe you must fight to keep love, you will overextend. If you believe love can leave at any moment, you will shrink to prevent it.

Discernment whispered. But attachment was louder.

I wasn’t blind. I was bonded to history. And that’s when I realized something painful. I wasn’t just loving him. I was trying to resurrect a version of him that no longer existed. Every time I chose memory over evidence, I abandoned myself.

You cannot build a stable identity on human approval. It will collapse every time. When he was affectionate, which was often, I was hypnotized. I felt secure. This fed my self abandonment and illusion. That wasn’t love stabilizing. That was identity shaking.

The enemy’s strategy has always been identity distortion. If he convinces you early that you are unstable, unwanted, unworthy, you will spend your life trying to secure externally what was fractured internally.

I didn’t lose myself in love. I gave myself away trying to preserve attachment, trying to preserve a trauma bond. That wasn’t love. That was survival. Here is the shift, the one that changed everything:

You cannot heal what you’re still blaming on loss.

If you say you “lost yourself,” you stay powerless. But when you admit you abandoned yourself you reclaim authority. Because abandonment is a choice. If you choose to abandon yourself for someone else, you can also choose to return. That’s the prophetic truth.

I didn’t lose myself.

I abandoned myself.

But I’m not abandoning her anymore.

I was never too much. I was just too willing to leave myself for less. And this time, I am choosing me, not from pride, but from wholeness.

If you see yourself in this, hear me clearly, it is okay to choose you. It is okay to set boundaries. It is okay to say, “This no longer aligns with who I am, and who I’m becoming.” You are not losing when someone walks away, you are loving yourself the way you should. Sometimes what leaves is not punishment, it’s protection. Give yourself grace to grieve, don’t suppress it. For me, breaking this pattern was impossible without God. I could not unsee what only Jesus revealed. He exposed the identity distortion. He showed me where I was abandoning myself, and when it came down to it, I had a choice to make, God or my relationship. I chose God, although the truth is, He chose me first. And once you see yourself through His eyes, you can never go back to negotiating your worth again.

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