My parents have been comparing me to my older sister my whole life and I don't know how to make them see me as my own person.

My sister graduated two years ago with an incredible GPA, got into her first choice school, and is now pre-med. Everyone in my family thinks she's perfect. And maybe she is. I don't have a problem with her. This isn't about her. It's about the fact that I can't get through a single week without being compared to her. My report card came home last week. I worked really hard for what I got. I'm taking harder classes than she took junior year and doing it while working a part time job on weekends. I was actually kind of proud of it. My dad looked at it for about ten seconds and said my sister was doing better than this by junior year. That was it. He put it down and walked away. I started thinking about how long I'd been measuring myself against someone else's timeline and someone else's strengths. I also thought about how much energy I'd spent trying to earn a comparison that would never come out in my favor because we're just different people with different things we're good at. I'd been trying to win a game I never agreed to play. TURNING POINT I realized I'd been trying to have the wrong conversation. Every time I brought it up I was talking about my sister, defending myself against the comparison, trying to prove I was just as good. That conversation was never going to land. What I actually needed was for them to see me, not a version of me measured against someone else. Talking it through helped me figure out what I actually wanted from my parents. Not for them to stop being proud of my sister. Just to be seen as my own person. We agreed the best next step was to stop trying to argue against the comparison and instead put something in front of my dad that was just about me. Tell him specifically what I'd been working on, what I was proud of, and ask him to respond to that directly. Not as a debate. Just as a conversation about me for once. I wasn't going in expecting everything to change. I just wanted one moment where the conversation was about who I actually am instead of who I'm not yet.