✈️ My younger cousin settled abroad early and now every family conversation somehow circles back to her

My cousin, four years younger than me, moved abroad right after her master's degree and has genuinely built a comfortable life there fairly quickly, a good job, her own apartment, and enough savings by her late twenties that she recently helped her own parents renovate their house back home. I am happy for her honestly, we get along well and she has never once acted superior about any of it in our actual direct conversations with each other. The problem is really everyone else around her specific success. Every single family gathering somehow finds its way back to her name within the first twenty minutes, an aunt mentioning how well she is doing, an uncle asking pointedly why I never considered moving abroad myself at the same age, comparisons that feel less about her and more about using her as a specific measuring stick against my own choices and current situation. I chose to stay closer to my parents deliberately, they are getting older and I genuinely wanted to be physically present for that stage of their lives rather than managing it entirely through video calls from another country. That was a real, considered choice on my part, not something that just happened to me by accident or lack of ambition, though it rarely gets framed that way by relatives bringing up the comparison repeatedly. My own parents do not push this narrative themselves, if anything they occasionally defend my choice when a relative brings it up too pointedly in front of them, which I do appreciate genuinely. But the repeated exposure to this same comparison at nearly every gathering has started to genuinely wear on how I feel walking into any family event lately, bracing myself for it before it even happens most times now. Talking to my cousin directly about this feels unnecessary since she is not actually the one doing it, and bringing it up with the relatives themselves risks turning into a bigger confrontation than the comment itself probably deserves each specific time it happens. Has anyone else dealt with being repeatedly compared to a specific successful relative who never actually asked to be used that way themselves? How did you handle it without it damaging your relationship with the relative caught in the middle of it too?

Went through nearly this exact dynamic with a cousin who moved abroad early, and what helped most was my own parents doing exactly what yours are doing, quietly pushing back when a relative got too pointed about it in front of them. Eventually stopped bracing for it as much once I accepted the comparison said more about the relatives making it than about my own actual choices.