Self esteem had never been an issue for you before. In fact, you though yourself to be pretty cool. Well… Cool compared to most of the other dorks you had to compare yourself to. Bu now, now here she was. She's your ancestor- practically you! And she's so much cooler than you are. She's like Terezi 2.0, better than you are in almost every way you could imagine. She's sassy, she fun, she's adventurous, and everyone just seems to like her! Maybe you shouldn't compare yourself to her, but you can't help it. Next to her you just feel so… inferior. You hate this feeling. You hate feeling like no matter what you do you just can't measure up to her.
You feel stupid crying over something like this but there's a lump in your throat that just won't go away and now your eyes are starting to sting. If you could see you know your vision would already be blurred over with teal tears. There's no one around but you and the memory projection of your lusus, but you still pull down the hood of your dragon cape as far as it can go to cover your face as you slump down by a tree. There you finally let a few hot tears slip down your cheeks and you don't even bother trying to wipe them away.
This is why you aren't as good as her, you tell yourself. You're weak and you let stupid things bother you. You sit crying under a tree like a wriggler while she's probably around having fun and being this amazingly likeable person. You think maybe you can understand how Sollux felt when he got into one of his self-deprecating moods. Maybe there's someone out there right now who would think you were being ridiculous as you always thought he was being. You don't even care right now, you decide. You are just going to sit there and marinate in your own self pity. That is until you hear someone coming…