Dear Bea,
It has come to my attention that, in the past year or so, you have demonstrated tendencies of becoming what some might refer to as a “jealous hater bitch.”
First of all, congratulations for acknowledging that the six straight hours you spent last week reading gossip forums about bloggers who don’t know you exist was not one of your finer moments. Did you enjoy gorging on all that soggy McDonalds for your brain? You must also be commended for thus far being able to keep most of your haterade close to your heart, a feat aided significantly by your extended periods of sobriety, no doubt.
I fear that, left unchecked any longer, you would have slipped past the point of no return: writing hate comments in your underpants in a darkened room; Facebook blocking everyone wearing some semblance of a smile; allowing the slow-burning fuse of your own jealousy to smolder a hole straight through your soul, leaving the ashes of wanton hashtags in its wake.
You have what psychologists and armchair therapists commonly refer to as social media envy. As first world problems go, it’s right up there with hard water and oatmeal raisin cookies disguised as chocolate chip — but it is a problem all the same. It most likely began when your online life began to take precedence over your actual life, which is also the point at which your concrete visions of the future began to vaporize just as those of your contemporaries — I’m sorry, your competitors — began to coalesce. Not surprisingly, you also began using Instagram at this time as well, which is medically proven to exacerbate cases of pure envy, giving rise to the self-flagellating act known as the hate follow.
*
In fairness, social media is rigged to be a hotspot of envy. If you spend any amount of time on it, you are confronted daily with things to covet or be outraged about. These days, everyone is their own publicist. Announcements, shoutouts, and simple life updates now take on the exalted tones of a mini press release.
“Happy to announce that…”
“Wishing my dear friend of twenty odd years…”
“It’s official! I’m now…”
At least in your case, not everything good that happens to other people is a trigger for envy – that would just be exhausting. You’re fine, if slightly perturbed, with the endless stream of babies on your feed, reminding you of your fleeting youth. The weddings, the new homes, the new jobs and graduations are all invitations to share in your friends’ joy.
The ones that really get to you, the updates you harbor close to your hateful heart, are from people you consider to be just like you. People who are doing greater things than you could ever imagine, twice as fast. People who want the same things as you do, and get them, and share them with the world.
You’re no stranger to the sting that sweeps over you when someone gets something you really wanted. You also know what longing feels like when confronted with luxuries you will never have (thanks, New York!). Rejection and denial fade with time. They are reactions to external events you cannot control.
But envy is different. Envy eats you up from the inside out.
*
The corrosion starts from within and spreads. Envy takes your breath away, tightens your chest, and creeps up your throat. It makes your cheeks grow red and hot, and goads the dull roar behind your ears to life. It twists your face like a glitch in your skin, to match the grotesqueness of your heart. Your more astute friends ask what’s wrong (“Dude, what’s with all the staring?”) and you mutter something about a bad bout of gas, and sorry you can’t be perfect like them, okay?
It’s hard to forget envy once you’ve let it in. It lingers like a stench. You remember the people and the moments that made you feel this way. Sometimes they are petty and personal, like when a close friend shares the rates she can command for a mere blog post after you’ve just confessed what you’ve received for a big magazine feature. On the plane of rational thought, on which you operate maybe 80% of the time, you understand why this is. But for the remaining 20%, your eyeballs are burning with the fire of a thousand suns.
Sometimes they are not so personal: tantalizingly close, yes, but ultimately out of reach. Like when you’re scrolling through #sushiporn under the covers at night, gastronomically blue-balling yourself until dawn. In your case, it’s when the fanfic writer gets half a million dollars to publish her wish fulfillment story about a boyband star. Or when the girl who was always one step ahead of you at school pulls further and further ahead in the race, leaving ripples of gold stars and accolades in her wake. Or when an author your age has put out a major trilogy, the first of which has already been adapted into a major motion picture. Or Tavi Gevinson – no one thing in particular, just everything about her.
These are nasty truths to admit, not just to yourself but to anyone reading. Nothing about envy is pretty, which becomes all the more clear when you break it down into its components.
*
The Anatomy of Envy
Entitlement: “I should have been the one to get that.”
Arrogance: “I’m more talented than you.”
Derision: “What have you done to deserve that?”
Excuses: “If you weren’t a _____ and if only I had ____, the same thing would happen to me. Anyway, you only got it because [insert privilege of choice here].”
Insecurity: “Am I destined to fail? To never achieve anything of note?”
And of course, if you possess enough self-awareness, you might even experience Guilt: “Why do I feel this way?”
*
The easiest answer to that question is that you are are a terrible person. It’s easy to write off envy as a flaw in your personality, something that cannot be controlled. I don’t think this is the answer. It might indicate that you are selfish, maybe, but not terrible.
Another easy answer is that because other people take it too far. Can someone really be #grateful and #blessed all the damn time? Do people really have to insist that their life is amazing in each and every update? Yes, there are some people that you can envy from a safe distance, as one envies Ryan Gosling’s pillow every night. But there are others who share their success with an almost indiscernible malice, those who feed upon online validation, those you react to so viscerally because they’re projecting the exact same insecurities as you, just through more followers and a better filter. These are people for whom even hate following is dangerous. Cull them from your lists or learn to desensitize yourself to their like-bait: you only have room for one person’s neuroses.
For the most part, it appears that most of this envy is an expense of your energy into all the wrong places. Do you really want to spend all your time resenting others for what they have achieved when you could be…I don’t know…actually trying to achieve something yourself?
Maybe you are opting for the lazy way out of the commitments you’ve made to yourself.
How’s your book coming along, by the way?
*
Maybe your nasty, selfish envy might actually be good for you. It’s a warning sign that you haven’t done enough with your time, or with your life. You’re coming down from two years of saying yes to every interesting venture (which is a kinder way of saying ‘adrift amidst the winds of fuckall’) to now understanding that people who want to get things done actually have to say no. A lot. It’s called making a sacrifice.
No to things they might like to do more, no to jobs that might have been the safer choice, no to simple pleasures in favor of the pain of putting pen to paper. No to multiple hobbies, no to tackling big divergent projects without first perfecting one.
The next time you feel envy creep in, ask yourself: is this person being a legitimate asshole about their success? If yes, get rid of them somehow: ain’t nobody got time for that, least of all you.
Then work your way through the real questions: does this person’s goals align with yours? Do you actually care about what they did, or do you care more about the attention they’re getting? Does their success impact your life in any way? Are you making excuses for yourself by nitpicking someone else’s good news? What did you do today at work? More specifically, how much did you write today? Did you produce more words than you consumed?
And finally: do you even have the right to be jealous?
*
“With all Sugary affection, Elissa, you haven’t yet earned the right to be jealous of me.”
So said Cheryl Strayed when writer Elissa Bassist confessed to her own envious feelings in an interview two years after “Write Like a Motherf*cker” went viral. She’s right, of course. To paraphrase The Fault in Our Stars, some jealousies are greater than other jealousies.
Strayed was also right about the only solution at hand when you’re carried adrift by your own envy: get your ass down on the floor and produce.
Or, as another friend puts it, “Just do what you need to do.”
At the same age and in the similar mindspace that Bassist was in when she wrote to Sugar, you’re in no position to be doling out advice, but in no other time than now does the advice in “Write like a motherf*cker” ring true. Envy doesn’t go away just because you decide it to – hello, it appears a day after the world was created and hasn’t left since. But let the envy light a fire under your feet, not consume your dreams. Separate yourself from the online herd and venture through the bramble. The messy, unsexy, aesthetically bereft path of hard work.
Earn the right to your envy.
While others strain to find the perfect light with which to illuminate their lives, bide your time in the shadows. Skulk, if you must. Stay indoors, go offline, and be quiet. Embrace your anonymity, your obscurity, your unwashed hair. You have a lot of catching up to do, and the landscape that stretches out looks like quite a lonely place. But it is yours. What will you make of it?
Love,
Bea
