What is "not a race"?

Since it seems like I'm making an effort to make this blog a regularly-updated thing, how about we try for a little introduction?
"Not A Race" - this title - comes from a tale of my childhood. Apparently, when we (myself and my sister, or my dad and I, or something) would be running about from one place to another, and I would begin to fall behind, I would yell "it's not a wace!" in my adorable southern lisp. This is a thing that my family still does. Adorable.
But, like many good book introductions have taught us, this seemingly both simple and uninteresting anecdote has a more complicated and even less interesting translation into the rest of my life.
"Not A Race."
I'm a very competitive person: not in the way where I will try super hard to beat someone else out, but more in the way where I am constantly comparing myself to others (usually women around my age, but also everyone else) to measure my success. When I find myself lacking, I get sad.
This has led me to split myself in a lot of different directions: some people are good at music - I should try music - but then I'm not very good at that, so I should make sure I'm still good at math or something - but I'm not very good at that - so I'll be mediocre at languages as well... and so on.
Not a race.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that I'm happy and satisfied and doing things that make me happy - but what is an easier thing to do is to try to find people of my age or my alma mater and try to figure out how I'm more successful than they are. I think this comparison, or "competitiveness," as I generously like to call it, is probably the thing that makes me the least happy.
This post has taken a somewhat negative turn.

I promise this is a good thing, though. The more I learn about myself, my default ways of examining things and what makes me happy and sad, the better I get.
This "competitiveness" idea was a pretty big breakthrough when it happened. Similar to when I discovered that my parents were fallible, when I figured out my least moral peers were the ones in my sunday school class, and when I learned that the more someone tries to convince you to make the decision they made, the more they're really trying to convince themselves they've made the right choice.

So yes, this blog. Maybe if I slow down and think and track my own life and progress I can be happier in myself, instead of poking around looking at other people's blogs and Facebooks to see how I track. Because it's not a race, you see.

*thunderous applause*