Hi! Hello! Welcome to your monthly free column. I hope you enjoy it – if you do, here’s where to click to receive another one in two weeks. Anyway, I’m going to stare out the window.
I have great friends, a good job, a supportive family and generally feel OK about myself physically and mentally. But I can’t stop getting jealous, to the point of real bitterness, when anyone I know has something I want. When someone at work gets an assignment I didn’t, when a close friend finds a perfect partner (I’m single), or when someone who I feel is like me, at a similar level to me, does better than me. I really try to be a good friend and be supportive, and I hate that I feel so frustrated and compare myself every time. How can I fix this?
Qualified therapists will tell you (I think) that the first step in fixing a problem is identifying it. Self-awareness isn’t the endgame, but it’s a hell of a step to acknowledge this nastiness you feel brewing inside. I really think that can’t be neglected – because if you don’t recognise it, you’ll end up acting as a consequence of this bitterness and anger without knowing what’s brought it on. That’s when things become really upsetting for everyone involved – you change, and it feels like things are slipping through your fingers when trying to figure out why.
So, first of all, that’s a victory – admitting you’re coming up against this enormous iceberg brings you one step closer to melting it. Secondly, I want to reassure you that, to my knowledge, it’s pretty rare to not feel like this. I feel like this all the time. I don’t know how many people know that I do, because, as you say, I try my best to be a good friend, daughter, employee, stranger on the internet, etc etc. But I think that a problem like this can feel quite visceral and isolating when you forget that it’s not brand new or unique or dangerous in a one-of-a-kind way. It matters! But you’re nowhere near alone with this.
You list a number of different areas in your life that you’re happy with before listing a few scenarios which can tend to bug you. I think, then, that answers to your letter involve a fair bit of list-making too. Trust me, I realise how pedestrian it sounds, but when this kind of irrational anxiety – because that’s what that bitter jealousy feels like to me when it hits, a sudden pang of fear, a big old wave of panic washing over me – rears its head, the only way to respond is by breaking it down plainly.
A close friend finds a perfect partner. Lovely! Do they have any friends? Either the close friend or the perfect partner? Is anyone on an app waiting for you to message them back? Are there any first dates you never got round to moving forward with? In situations like this I used to wallow, worry about myself and probably spend a few hours sifting through the Instagram accounts of every person I have ever met who is in a relationship. I will not say which parts I still do and which parts I don’t, but approaching my ugly jealousy with a sense of logic where there previously wasn’t one helps me make sense of it. Nobody DM me on Instagram after this.
Someone at work has got an assignment you didn’t. Cool! Good for them. What have you been working on recently? Is it something they were involved with? How about the week before? The chances are, the assignment that person just completed took up their entire life while you were busy putting the finishing touches on any number of brilliant projects too. I can only speak for the world of journalism, but if your career is anything like mine and very much exists on social media, first of all, when something like this happens: get off it. Not forever, but if you see something like this that upsets you or makes you panic, there’s honestly absolutely no reason to put yourself through it. Nobody will know if you saw it, ignored it, adored it, were busy or bitter or anything in between. What you give your attention to when you are alone is no one’s business but your own. There is a way to support your friends without beating yourself up for not being like them.
Despite my best efforts to be as rational and direct as I’ve ever been in this newsletter (and probably ever will be), this problem, like most of the ones we talk about here, isn’t one that I think you have to worry about “fixing”. There is a way to understand and accept what you’re going through, and be a little kinder to yourself about it. Also, it sounds to me like your concern is how it might be perceived by your loved ones for having this bitterness. But do they really need to know? I think there’s a difference between bottling up a feeling that you don’t admit to yourself, and allowing that feeling to exist without necessarily shouting it from the rooftops in front of the people who have made you feel that way.
When one of your friends finds a new partner – who do you know, in your circle of close friends, who is single? Are they busy right now? Do they know this other friend? Could you have dinner? I’ve often found that the best friendships come from the moment one person slips and complains or confesses just a touch more than they thought was acceptable – there are some people I always thought wouldn’t tolerate my complaining about my love life, or lack thereof, because of their dissatisfaction with their own – yet that brought us even closer together. I always worry about talking at people too much, and I’m sure I’ve done it more than once – but also that’s the only way, in my experience, to expand your relationship and see just how much ground you can cover.
But then as mentioned before, I think this state of mind is one that can only become a little less daunting by coming to terms with yourself. By making lists of where you are, and blocking out everything else. I know how hard this is, but I find the physical obligation to write it down, to actually spend that time on each bullet point which takes time away from scrolling further, further, further down, more helpful than anything. If nothing else, I find it therapeutic. Anything to stop me scrolling and spiralling. I know you probably know this already – but by reading my textbook tools for the most basic form of self-preservation, did that at least stop you thinking about the thing you’d currently been obsessing about?
I wanted to bring a few quotes into this piece because, well, I always do. The first is from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights which, first of all, if you haven’t watched it in a while let this be the little push to rewatch it (or discover it!) very soon. It’s a quote from Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler, a rising porn star in the late 1970s, as he’s looking to camera and filming one of his first jobs. “I only am who I am because I was born that way,” he begins. It might sound trite but that’s crucial, in instances like this, to remember. You can better your self and you can work hard and learn so much, but a lot of who you are has always been within you and always will be. However many jobs or relationships or gigs another person gets, all the good and rich and valuable and complex things you were born with aren’t going anywhere. Dirk then adds that “jealousy will get you nowhere” which, sure, we know, but I think you can also kind of flip its usual meaning – it won’t get you anywhere but that also means your jealousy itself doesn’t have to go anywhere. It can exist, you can write it out, you can acknowledge it, without it having to affect anyone else.
Anyway, Dirk then concludes his message by reminding the world: “I’m going to keep rocking on.” And I think we could all do the same.
The second quote for today’s letter is from a film I didn’t really care for in its delivery, but I do think its premise, and its people, have some merit. Malcolm & Marie, starring John David Washington and Zendaya, is so bitter and grating. He’s playing a filmmaker who forgot to thank his girlfriend on the night of the premiere of his new movie. They frown and shout all night long and eventually kiss and make up. Anyway – at one point, Zendaya as Marie talks about some other guy she was talking to and points out to Malcolm that it didn’t even seem like he was jealous about this at all. “Some people would say a lack of jealousy is a good thing,” he says. And, sure, this is what we’re working on here, right? But Marie replies: “Not when it borders on indifference.”
To loop back to the start when we were talking about self-awareness as a major, really good thing, I’d agree with Marie – indifference infuriates me. This obviously relates to an awful lot of things, but I always believe that it is better to care too much, than too little. Caring more can often mean hurting more, but then it also lets you love more, laugh more (I won’t say the third one if you won’t) and just experience things a bit more vividly. Caring too much about another person’s relationship, or job, or accomplishment versus your own can feel heavy – but I also think it reflects on how much you care about your own progress. On how much you want to believe in yourself and reach higher. And isn’t that the most rewarding thing there is?
You could be indifferent, you could be cooler, calmer, more measured, less jealous. If you were, I’d love for you to teach me how to do it. But also I really think it’s fine that we’re both so far from that. Your lack of indifference, your bitterness, your ambition, isn’t hurting anyone as much as you think. You are a good friend, a good person, supportive and thoughtful. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t care about any of this and wouldn’t have written about it. If you weren’t, you would be sheltered by your indifference and the world would spin on. Everything would be fine, but nothing would matter quite so much. And when we have to endure so much on a day-to-day that makes us feel numb or dull or unexcited, I think having a bit of fire in your belly is something to be grateful for.
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Next time, we’ll be talking about, deep breath, the guilt and panic that comes with discovering your favourite artist is a terrible person. And how to reconcile it. If you’d like to write in to respond to this week’s letter, or to ask questions of your own, you can email me here.