7. Oh Jealousy
Last week, a good friend called me up to chat. “You know how our friendship has evolved as we’ve grown up?” Where was this going? She went on to tell me that if she wasn’t in such a good headspace, her subconscious shadow self might feel jealous of me.
Though jealousy has been present in my past friendships, it’s never surfaced to the light of conversation.
Alongside feeling incredibly grateful for my friend’s vulnerability and honesty—a testament to her self-awareness as a 30-something year old woman, I began to reflect.
Through my freshman year in college, jealousy played an unspoken, insidious role in nearly every one of my friendships. Fast forward to now, I can count on one hand the number of people I’m still close with from those first 19 years of life.
Here’s what would always happen:
I like you, you like me
We become friends
I admire your qualities, you admire mine
We compare ourselves (often silently and subconsciously)
I become jealous of the qualities you have that I feel insecure about (historically, your likability, social skills, and physical appearance), you become jealous of the qualities I have that you feel insecure about
We grow resentful of each other
The friendship fizzles away or explodes
I don’t like you, you don’t like me (usually as a coping mechanism to rationalize and create distance)
And if there wasn’t a foundation of friendship, I’d skip straight to steps 4–8: comparison, jealousy, resentment, and dislike. I’ve unfortunately gone through this painful cycle with countless girls in my childhood and adolescence.
Growing up, my mom would say that if someone wasn’t kind to me, they were probably just jealous. But it wasn’t until the past few days that I fully realized how often I was jealous of others as well—leading me to be cold, distant, and closed off at times. So I’m sure that those who crossed my path of friendship left as wounded as I did.
Jealousy is a two-way street.
Comparison is evolutionarily ingrained in us.
Yes, there are ways to avoid it. Since graduating college last May, I’ve been floating on a wonderful island. People my age are nowhere in my line of sight, in person or online, which helps mitigate my susceptibility to comparison. I have no clue what “Sally from Statistics” is doing with her life. And my closest friends in the Bay Area right now are in their 30’s and 40’s. It’s a beautiful thing.
Still, no matter where we are in life, how old we are, what we’ve “accomplished”, we’re all prone to comparison and, in turn, jealousy.
Today, as I was reading The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by the 14th Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I serendipitously came to the chapter on comparison and envy. I won’t attempt to paraphrase all their beautiful teachings on how to manage these human reactions. Instead, I’ll leave you with the chapter’s ending verse—a Buddhist prayer to cultivate mudita (“sympathetic joy”) from a well-known Tibetan text:
As for suffering I do not wish even the slightest;
as for happiness I am never satisfied.
In this, there is no difference between others and me.
Bless me so I may take joy in others’ happiness.