It really messes me up psychologically when I experience a surge of anxiety while complaining to peers that I feel tired and distracted and overwhelmed by X or Y going on in my life, when those peers are parents of pre-adolescents, a situation I'm like 100% sure creates more tiredness/distraction almost every single day of this period of their lives than my situation X or Y (and we're not even getting into 30/40-something parents whose kid or whose own aging parent has a major health problem they're dealing with). The anxiety is both over how inadequate it makes me feel when I consider the perspective of how their life is more distracting and exhausting almost every day, and over how unqualified it makes me feel to have children of my own even though I've always hoped for that to happen eventually.
Although one or two such peers have kind of called me out in a way that validates this insecurity, the vast majority of the time they show sympathy with my struggles, but every single time I'm in a conversation where I bring up that I'm tired and overwhelmed by such-and-such to someone who is raising a kid, I can't stop myself from imagining what they "must" be thinking but not saying.
