The Search for Realistic Role Models/ “Comparables”
My father works as a realtor and often talks about finding a “comparable” for a house that’s on the market. It’s a way to make an educated guess about how to price a unique house: find another recently-sold house that has similar qualities – similar age, similar neighborhood, similar features – and use that to assign value to the house you want to sell. And we are tying to sell ourselves, aren’t we? At least, we’re trying to stage and photograph and market and maintain our lives (just as you would a house) to entice others to invest in it; invest in us. I’ve had some great female role models in my life – but not a lot of comparables. No older women in my family have lived a life anything close to mine. So it’s hard to feel that I’m doing anything “right;” it’s tricky to assign value to different aspects of my life. Of course, a person will always feel this way, trying to compare their life -- their values, their choices, their circumstances – to someone else’s. People of