week 24
taking a hard look at envy & resentment (two sides of the same coin)
I am going to write about something I have a very hard time admitting. I am going to write about my insane envy/ resentment/ raging irritation by someone in my life, that in my shame I have tried and failed for many years to deny/ push down/ hide/ shoo away/ fight to the death. I will of course not name this person, and I will also avoid stating our relation, and I can only hope that the handful of people who would know who I am talking about will not read this post or not horrifically judge me if they do. In the off-chance that you who are reading this a) are this person b) know this person or c) love this person, please know that writing this is my healing and I wish the best to you all.
I will refer to this person simply as She. She IS all the things that culture tells us we should be as women:
a career woman
a wife of a doctor
a mother
extraverted
pleasant and sociable
left-brain dominant and analytical
DOES all the things that culture tells us we should do as women:
attended prestigious schools
climbed the corporate ladder
got married
reproduced seemingly effortlessly
gave birth easily
HAS all the things that culture tells us we should want as women:
impossibly thick hair
a stylish wardrobe
a newly constructed house finished with an interior designer
robust childcare
attention
means to make choices that are in her and her family’s best interest
It has been so hard for me to not resent the absolute living hell out of her, from the time I first met her to the first time I watched everyone fawn over her, through my struggle with infertility as she announced she was having twin girls (what had long been my dream). It’s not fair to her, because she has done nothing to personally attack me. It’s not fair to me either, as I deserve to have my own life and choices treated with the upmost respect, especially by myself.
I almost but can’t quite fully figure out my issue with her, because I truly don’t want anything in her life as my own. Is it the attention she’s flooded with without seeming to need to put in effort? Is it the respect that seems to just swirl around her, so presumed that there is never a question of when someone will hand it over. She seems very happy with her life, and I truly hope that she is.
Maybe it’s because She has become a proxy in my mind for CULTURE, serving in my weakest moments a big shiny reminder of all the ways I have failed to live up to cultural pressures and norms and expectations and ideals. She is everything the culture says I’m not, and the things that I am she is/ has/ does them more. I know trying to be/ do/ have these things would never make me truly happy, and when I’ve tried they’ve made me absolutely f***ing miserable. And yet it’s so hard when I have the tendency to feel so unseen by the people who put her up on a pedestal.
When I can separate myself from all of the noise of CULTURE, I can hear my own values and needs and desires. Some of these values, needs and desires do not overlap with culture on the Venn diagram, and even when they do: my truest self wants to cultivate these elements in my own authentic way, and I know they often will manifest very differently than the picture we’re sold of what it all “should” look like. I also know that the biggest gift I have ever received is my personal brand of failing to live up to the cultures because if I had in any kind of big, public way, I would have been addicted to the praise and would have never found my way off the never-ending treadmill of more, more, more. When I have failed and failed at accomplishing anything that anyone else cares about, I get to be fully myself, move through life with nothing to lose, and just have fun messing around and seeing what sticks. As soon as I remember this, I can laugh about my desires to make myself fit into the sparkly box of cultural horrors— it’s as if I had been asking for an addiction to crack and instead the universe gifted me a permission slip to be my truest, happiest self, thank you very much. I can also have empathy for the enormous pressure I can only imagine she must feel to keep it all going.
Then there’s my other envy which I have tried for maybe just as many years to deny/ push down/ hide/ shoo away/ fight to the death. I will also not name this woman other than calling her Her, but will tell you that it’s the younger sister of one of my best childhood friends. I’d watched her run around in diapers, a good seven or so years younger than my friend and me. Living under a rock for the most part in an attempt to be spared the horrors of the internet, it might have been years before I was exposed to this person’s celebrity, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was a singer for this interactive book project I was working on in my first publishing job. Suddenly she was 15 and quickly rising to fame for her blog and website, when I was about 24 struggling in publishing and to write something of my own that I found worth sharing. It’s a quick 15-minutes of fame, I told myself, though I was so, so, so impressed and envious.
I helped promote the book (for the limited amount I knew how to do for someone just out of college who hated social media), and helped throw the launch party with the author of this book and this new celeb. I saw her parents there, of course the parents whose house I went to for so many years as her older sister’s friend. I felt so… small. I felt so small that I couldn’t even reintroduce myself and say hello, to them or Her or anything. I sat glued to the sales table, surrounded by the author’s and her book that I was supposed to be selling.
I started burying my head back under the rock I’d been living under, not able to stomach seeing her beyond the occasional flashes on the TV shows I watched or a New Yorker article she happened to write (that killed me). I knew that I could not go down another rabbit hole of her work so I just pushed her to the far crevasses of my mind and tried to not think about Her. Until this week, when my mom showed me a clip of her on a talk show discussing a new Broadway or off-Broadway play she is in, and though that is not my particular brand of dream, all the envy came flooding over me. I admitted it to my mom, who told me that she didn’t want to make me feel bad but thought I might be interested. The rest of our conversation went something like this:
“It’s just hard for me to not be eaten alive by envy of those who make a living being creative and living their dreams.”
“Well, I can tell you that she’s probably not making much money being in that little play.”
“Um, she’s worth millions. You can look up her estimated net worth.”
“Millions?”
I looked her up and found her listed as number one on a particular list of ‘x’ number of famous and rich people under ‘x’ number age. It was quite a bit more than the last time I’d looked it up, about a decade ago. “Guess how many million?” I dared her.
“Two.”
More.
“Five.”
More.
“Ten?”
More.
“TWENTY?!”
MORE.
Many more estimated millions guesses later, I told her the number and she looked surprised, maybe a bit confused, and also pretty sorry for me. The rest of the afternoon was spent doing nice things together with me trying not to cry, trying not to pout, and trying not to lose it, and her buying me ice cream and talking to me delicately, punctuated by verbally gifting me writing ideas that felt like suffocating itchy ugly Christmas sweaters I’d have to wear to be polite at best, and great ideas that I would never be able to pull off at worst.
Where does the envy lie with Her that is different than She who shall not be named? Definitely part of it is her finding success in areas I would kill to be successful in (mainly writing). But it’s more than that. It’s deeper than her ‘x’ number of millions (though I wouldn’t say no to a couple mil), and I couldn’t give a rat’s behind about her fame because fame has always sounded like my worst nightmare.
Her personality and fame and work and being is held up and applauded by culture, but it is applauded by culture for being kind of… countercultural. When she wrote about fashion she also showed her wearing her own handmade/ very uniquely styled outfits that were nothing like what was lauded in magazines or on the runway. She could be weird and delighted in being weird, and fully herself. And I remember how unconditionally loved her and her sisters were, and the freedom of creativity that reined in their house. I remember going with her family to the Salvation Army and getting art supplies and fabric and making things, and their parents letting the house get messy and be cluttered and thinking the most important thing was that the kids were happy and getting to be creative. On the other hand, I was bought tons of beautiful new art supplies and the newest Klutz craft kits, but got yelled at when my new magic markers leaked through the paper on the nice dining room table, and told that my spilled beads was the reason our very sick and hospitalized family dog was going to die. (It turned out that he’d eaten ant poison that the grown-ups left out, not my beads).
Most of all I just got the implicit message over and over that I couldn’t and definitely shouldn’t be “weird” in front of other people. Maybe I wasn’t a prodigy, maybe I wasn’t going to Northwestern, maybe I wasn’t going to be a doctor, maybe I had nothing my parents could brag about other than maybe being “nice,” but I could be safe and practical and compliant and normal and that would be fine.
I want to move through the world feeling seen and having the freedom to be myself, and being recognized for work that I do and personally find satisfying. I want to feel unconditional love, and unburdened creativity, and freedom to be my freaking self, and to be respected enough that I can be given the space to do things simply because I find them important and worthwhile or just plain fun, which is also as important and worthwhile as anything else.
Maybe I resent She who shall not be named because she represents everything I have been told I should want, and I envy Her because she had the audacity to be fully herself and get rewarded for it. Meanwhile I can’t fit myself into the compact little box of perfection that She represents, but I haven’t quite figured out how to completely throw out the rules and show up in the world in full authenticity like Her. She found success playing by the rules, and Her success stems from never having tried to play by the rules in the first place, and I am not where I want to be because I tried for so long to play by the rules and failed yet still hold onto the rulebook, somehow unable to throw it away even though it most certainly does not spark joy.
* * *
My goal for this week is to be a little so much easier on myself. While I want to burn the rulebook, so to speak, I have been trained for so many years to live by it. I am “doing the work” as they say, and deprogramming the unhelpful lessons I’ve been taught, while practicing gratitude for all I’ve been given. I have so much I want to do and so much I want to be able to let go of, but neither one is going to happen by clenching a tight fist of control. I forgive myself for my envy, and I pat myself on the back for trying to let go of old grudges and wounds, and I also have been dead tired and distracted and pulled in a lot of different directions and have still managed to marvelously failed at things like pitching my tv script to my lovely writer’s group. In nearly every area of my life I am not where I want to be, but I sure am proud of myself for being able to recognize and acknowledge it, and in continuing to do the work to recalibrate my compass.