I Spent Months Being Consumed by Envy - And then I Found Myself Again
And this week's hard pass, food for thought on knowing yourself, and journaling prompts.
Heads-up to paid subscribers: Thanks to a sore throat, there isn’t the usual audio in my voice, but you should be able to listen to what I assume is AI reading the newsletter if you’re reading inside the app.
Hard pass to having the last word
It’s always interesting when someone says something that reveals an old chain of events or perception of you that you weren’t aware of. What are you supposed to do with this information? It can be oh-so tempting to set them straight, to maybe even drop your own revelations into the mix even though minutes before, you didn’t give a rat’s.
Recently, I found myself in the above situation and noticed I went into ‘observation mode’ where, while listening to what was being said, I was aware of how I was feeling and the choices I had in that moment. The younger version of me wanted present-day Nat to go to bat for her and be like, ‘Um, hold up a second. Did you know this, this and this? And another thing…’ I, on the other hand, couldn’t be arsed. I realised that my ego cared, but the real me, my inner voice, was like, Meh, okey dokey, whatever. This whole thing really doesn’t matter.
So I didn’t try to have the last word because doing so would have taken me down a path I didn’t want to go. On deciding, it was so funny to observe the instant loss of interest I had in the whole thing. It reminded me that sometimes we forget that we’ve grown and moved forward and that we don’t have to use our people-pleasing ways to try to control the past or what others say or how they perceive us. By making it a hard pass to having the last word, it was a happy yes to moving on.
Food for thought on knowing yourself
“Our expectations thwart empathy.”
What WorksYikes! I heard this while listening to Tara’s fantastic podcast and it stuck with me. How do our expectations of ourselves or others get in the way of empathy? For instance, a common struggle is expecting people to be, do or feel a certain thing because of how we are or what we think we’ve done for them. If it were me… But focusing purely on our expectation and our people pleasing stops us from recognising their position.
In 2019, not long after a painful career rejection1 resurrected old buried feelings around abandonment, ‘failure’, and not being ‘good enough’, I went through a very discomforting period of comparison and envy2. It felt all-consuming for several months, and, at times, I felt ashamed of feeling this way. Conversely, I also knew there was nothing ‘wrong’ with my experience and that it was Professor Life revealing where I needed to confront something.
I wanted to be ‘above’ feeling this way, and then when I couldn’t be, I wanted to get over it quickly. Of course, this perfectionist mentality didn’t help and compounded the feelings. It was only when I stopped shaming myself and became mindful around the baggage behind my feelings and what, at times, felt like obsessing that I let go and moved forward.
Comparison, jealousy and envy are commonplace but often silenced, shamed, and misunderstood.
Comparison is estimating ourselves (e.g. effort, relationships, achievements, possessions, appearance, life stage, something) against others. While there are undoubtedly times where comparison is healthy and useful (it can give us clarity on next steps), we often weaponise it and carve at our self-esteem, especially when it’s essentially become our pastime or even warped self-soothing tactic that distracts us from other feelings while also feeding a sense of inferiority or superiority.
Jealousy and envy are often used interchangeably, but there are differences.
Jealousy has the marker of feeling territorial. In feeling under threat and like somebody is trying to take what belongs to us, we feel compelled to defend and protect whatever’s at stake. Jealousy has a component of envy in that comparison has likely contributed to the feeling, but the driver is possessiveness.
Envy is driven by conscious and unconscious comparison that creates a feeling of discontentment and a sense of ‘awayness’ because of picking up on a similarity or our superiority and then wondering why we don’t have what the other party does.
Sometimes envy highlights goals, needs, and desires that we’re not showing up for; and sometimes we’re giving ourselves a hard time about things we don’t truly want or care about simply because it’s our habit to compare and make ourselves feel bad - idealised self. Often envy is quite simply that, for all intents and purposes, we’re okay, even great, but we tend to question how well we’re doing whenever we hear of certain people’s ‘success'.
When I reflect on why I felt so triggered by [the person I compared myself to], it shines a spotlight on what many of us grapple with.
I’m a recovering people pleaser who learned to tie her worthiness and purpose to effort, which taught me to please via perfectionism, overgiving, overthinking and over-responsibility. When outcomes don’t match my perception of my efforts, it’s easy to feel like I mustn’t have tried hard enough or that I’ve experienced the success version of a car jacking.
I grew up being repeatedly compared to someone based on looks, racial identity, intelligence, social, everything and learned to feel as if my identity and how well I’m doing was in a race with someone else. And then I ‘forgot’ about it. Life moved on. Then a perfect storm of conditions arose, and I came face to face with buried pain.
I experienced a painful setback (that really wasn’t the setback I thought it was), and then this person people compared me to so much as a child experienced success at the very thing I’d ‘failed’ at. And it didn’t matter that I’d watched umpteen people in my circle do the same and been okay, because when she did, it triggered a meltdown.
When I reflected on why she bothered me at that particular moment when she hadn’t before, it was the combination of vulnerability after the setback, grief, and feeling like her success was an example of where my mother would have said I’d failed or wasn’t living up to my potential. My forty-something self was wasn’t actually that bothered, but my teenage self was. She felt like her entire world was caving in and needed my attention so that we could heal and move forward.