A little over a decade ago, a few weeks after the birth of their daughter, my friend Jason and his wife Krista learned that Krista had a brain tumor. For the seven years that followed until she passed, Jason lived with the knowledge that he and his daughter were likely to lose Krista far too early. A minor side effect of this ordeal was that friends like me were loathe to discuss our personal difficulties, which felt petty in comparison. Jason, whose defining trait is his earnestness, developed a go-to line to combat this instinct in us. “Everyone’s hardest thing is their hardest thing,” he would say. It was a tactic for avoiding other peoples’ pity. But it was also a thesis on the futility of comparison.

Jason’s mantra stuck with me. I placed it on a mental list of “the lessons I’ve learned.” And yet, as the reality of the pandemic set in, it didn’t take long for me to hone my own go-to line, in unintentional contradiction to his: “We’re just lucky that Alexis is the perfect age for lockdown,” I would tell friends and colleagues over endless Zoom calls, speaking of my then-seven-month-old daughter. “She’s old enough to sleep through the night but young enough that we don’t have to worry about remote schooling!” I thought