I am concerned with the fact that I always seem to be an outsider in any group I’m in. I know this isn’t a bad thing, and they say the best people are weird and don’t fit in, but it’s lonely sometimes. Sometimes I just want to be normal.

The grass is always greener on the other side, right?

I can’t help comparing myself to other people – I’m a creation of the people around me, so I suppose it’s normal to make these comparisons, but it just gets me down when my life isn’t the same as other people’s.

Though I enjoy watching them, almost every TV show or film I watch features characters with ideal relationships and this makes me feel insecure about my own relationships with people. I just want to be loved, but not by my family, because I know they will always love me, I want to be appreciated by a random stranger for something that I do. For some reason it’s the people I shouldn’t care about, the people I don’t know, whose opinion about me matters. I am aware this makes no sense.

Positive thought: instead of envying the lives of others, why not register the fact that I am unhappy with an element of my life and that I want to change? As long as I’m not trying to change one of my natural, physical features (by natural, I mean a feature which I was born with and therefore is hard to alter), then I think it is healthy to acknowledge my desire to change, and so, as best I can, I should attempt to make that change.

For example, after listening to a director talk about the inspirational actors with whom she worked, I felt a pang of regret that I was not as free or spontaneous as those actors. Instead of ignoring that feeling, as I normally would, I shall try to use this regret to encourage myself to be more impulsive and confident in the future. Whether this causes success or embarrassment, happiness, or regret, I will know, at the very least, that I have given it a go, and that I have lived a little.