As some of you know my eldest daughter, Aidan, has just completed her first semester at Colorado School of Mines. Over Christmas break I asked her to read Richella Parham’s book Mythical Me: Finding Freedom from Constant Comparison. I remember my own days as an undergrad and my hope was that Richella could speak words of light and life. Below is Aidan’s review of the book. If you’d like to increase the voices for good in the life of your teenage/young adult children, this book is a great gift for the new year. Here’s the Amazon link.
“As a freshman in college, I found Mythical Me to be a very pertinent book. Richella Parham starts her book out by describing this idea of the “composite woman”, a perfect woman made up of all of the best parts of everyone she saw around her, the parts she felt she should be able to live up to. As a perfectionist and comparison junkie, this hit home.
Even within my first semester at college, I realized I had already mentally created this composite student by thinking that I should be as smart as my study partner, as well dressed as my roommate, have my planner as organized as one friend’s or my room as tidy as another’s. It was only through reading Parham’s book that I realized that most of the things I viewed as having fallen short of being a good student had only been an inability to reach an impossible standard.
Now, there are many self-help books out there that deal with comparison. However, most consist of advice such as “believe in yourself”, “focus on your strengths”, and the ever-helpful, “just do it.” But as anyone who has ever tried to follow one of those books knows, the advice may look nice and shiny on paper, but once you attempt to put it into practice, you inevitably lose motivation and are left feeling like even more of a failure.
Parham comes at the problem from a different direction. Instead of giving worn-out advice on how to will ourselves out of the comparison trap, she guides readers to God and his constant reminder that we are enough. One of my favorite sections of the book is her chapter on confession and how it means to speak the truth. Parham writes that in confession we should not only admit that we have sinned but also who we are, “One in whom Christ dwells and delights”, and that we should listen for God’s response. For confession is not only speaking the truth but hearing it as well.
Mythical Me is a valuable book that I think people of all ages should read, but especially young adults. As we are going out into the world and trying to find our footing, it is all too easy to find our self-worth from comparison.
This book is an important reminder that when we remember that we are secure in God’s love, there is no need for comparison, and we can begin to realize that the mythical composite woman is no more than a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster.”
Thank you, dear Richella, from one mama to another, for writing these words of wisdom.