u/i-am-taylors-child

I was a JEE dropper and things did not go the way I expected at all. My performance was much worse than I hoped, my grades went downhill, and I ended up in a mediocre college in a very small town. The contrast feels huge because I was born and brought up in a Tier 1 city.

Growing up, I always loved fashion, dressing up, shopping, taking pictures, and just being a confident, outgoing person. The problem is that my current environment doesn't really allow me to express that side of myself. A lot of the clothes I buy online aren't something I can comfortably wear in my college, and my mom isn't very supportive of those styles either. So now I have clothes I genuinely love but almost nowhere to wear them.

I've become less active on social media, but whenever I open Instagram and see my school friends studying in Tier 1 colleges, celebrating birthdays in cute cafés, attending fests, dressing up, posting aesthetic pictures, and just living the kind of college life I imagined for myself, I feel jealous. I can't help feeling envious because they're doing things I wanted to do too. It feels like I missed out on an entire version of my life.

My college doesn't have much of a fest culture, and because of that I've stopped posting much myself. Then I end up scrolling through aesthetic accounts and comparing my life to theirs, which makes me feel even worse. Sometimes I get the impulse to just delete Instagram altogether.

I'm not trying to hate on other girls or put anyone down. It's more like when I see them living the life I once imagined for myself, it reminds me of everything that didn't work out the way I wanted.

Has anyone else gone through something similar? How do you stop comparing your reality to someone else's highlight reel when it feels like they're living the exact life you wanted?