Why I’m Embracing My Envy

I have a friend. She is as brilliant as she
is beautiful, transcendently talented – by which I mean that as well as possessing exceptional ability, she has a hard to define, old-fashioned movie-star quality. She is the Debbie Harry of what she does. Fifty years ago, she would have walked into a room – any room – and been ‘discovered’. And I’m glad that this is her time because she hasn’t needed to wait for anyone to see her. She has had room to tell her story on her own terms.

Only there is part of me that isn’t glad at all. When she won an extremely prestigious award I willed myself to feel proud – but all
I could feel was sick. Our working worlds are similar enough for me to be in a constant state of comparing and despairing. I don’t hate her, I’m not angry with her, but I have spent the last couple of years feeling nauseous with the shame of not being her. I don’t have the movie-star quality even though I really, really hoped I might. Having spent a long time living as an ugly duckling, I feel quite irrationally robbed of my swandom.

According to some definitions, envy is what you feel when you lack something. Jealousy is what you feel when something is taken from you. I think that what I am going through is a hefty dollop of the former, laced with a tiny, toxic drizzle of the latter. Anyway, my envy is like herpes. When it first arrived, I thought my life
was over, and now it is more or less under control as long as I manage it carefully. But if I’m run down or my routine is disturbed, it flares up. It is very painful to the touch.

My friend is now in such a lofty stratosphere that comparing our trajectories might seem ludicrous. Still, once upon
a time, our careers, achievements and disappointments were quite similar. We cheered for each other and commiserated with each other. Sometimes, she’d do something excellent and I’d find it mildly irritating, but never debilitatingly so. Her work was great and I enjoyed being a fan as well as a friend. (She has always treated me with great warmth and generosity. Being her friend has always been a source of joy, but it does mean that I have never been able to roll my eyes and mutter, ‘What a bitch!’ when she is showered with plaudits.)

Maddeningly, I am learning, this isn’t about her at all. This is about me. To stop myself from being caught out by envy, I must come to terms with myself – neither duckling nor swan. Sometimes I have failed, sometimes I have succeeded, and I’ve had the opportunity to make work that I am proud of. The universe has not cheated me out of anything by making me frumpier and dumpier than my friend. There is much for me to be grateful for and cheerful about – it’s just impossible to notice it when I’m struck down by a case of the Not Mes.

Because that is what envy is, I think. It has nothing to do with the person or situation that we furiously blame for causing it, and everything to do with perceived lack, a black hole in the psyche. It’s your brain inviting you to do a lot of painful self-reckoning, to look yourself in the eye and make a queasy peace with your lot. This is what I am aiming for, with grudging grace.

I’ve been the fortunate recipient of many opportunities, it’s just that nothing yet has shot me straight up into the sky and made me feel as though I’m finally beyond failure. That’s impossible. There is not one thing that can make any of us feel beyond failure, ever. As the writer Anne Lamott says, ‘There is almost nothing outside you that will help you in any kind of lasting way, unless you are waiting for an organ donor.’ Having my friend’s career would not fix my faulty brain, or make me feel serene, peaceful or complete.

This isn’t a comforting lie I tell myself, either. Through our conversations, I’ve discovered that her success doesn’t make
her life any easier than mine. Hers is much more glamorous, admittedly, but drinking champagne at a fabulous party gives you exactly the same sort of hangover as drinking white wine in your flat. Great achievement offers no protection from pain.

At the same time, I don’t deny my envy any more. I have spent a long time ignoring its throb, pushing all of my emotional weight against the door in order to keep
it out, and believing that if I refused to entertain it I’d be allowed to deny the
truth of it; that someone else had achieved something wonderful, something I’d tried to attain and was unable to reach. Pretending that my envy didn’t exist caused my soul to fester. It stopped me from seeing my own goodness, because I was so terrified of examining my own not-greatness.

And though my situation is unique, I am far from alone. If Boomers are the original ‘Me’ generation, then maybe Millennials
– some of us – are the ‘Not Me’ generation. It is difficult not to be tormented by a sense of scarcity when the having of others is so well and endlessly documented online. For a long time, I thought this documentation was supposed to be inspiring. Look at what’s possible! See what my peers can do! I can do it too! But then the doubts would creep in. Why didn’t I think of that? Why haven’t I done it already? How can I make my life that covetable?

Now, in attempting to understand my envy, I’m realising that this constant comparison is suffocating my sense of possibility. I will never best my friend,
but instead of aching for her sleekness, her imagined security, I can get down in the dirt and make something completely different.

I am not the Debbie Harry of what I do. My work does not always bring me the external validation that I have convinced myself I crave. Yet it enriches my life and brings me pleasure. Perhaps, in the end, the greatest challenge is to find the reward in the process, rather than pain in someone else’s result. And that’s where true success will lie.

‘The Sisterhood’ by Daisy Buchanan is out now

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