When envy works & when it doesn't

I think most writers are envious. Chekov said writers are as envious as pigeons (I know this because I just got done looking up writer quotes about envy). I think envy comes with the territory, at least for any writer who wants to be read. Because to be ambitious is to be hungry and if you’re hungry, you work a little harder to get to where you want to be.

Worrying that there might not be enough at the great big universal buffet for you and every other hungry person is made worse if the only thing you want to eat up there is the fancy-schmancy gourmet seven layer cake that only serves six. Which is why some people will knock you over to get to the front of the line but others will stay steady on course but not insane — after all, there’s always pie.

My take is that if you believe that only the cake is worth eating then you’ll knock people down to get it. I’ve been knocked down before. There ARE people who will steal your words and your ideas or step on your back to step up to an editor or swipe your sources or badmouth your expertise, etc. etc. Yes, there are. And some of them will be successful even though they don’t deserve it. But I do believe that the cake will taste bitter because when someone is that hungry, nothing ever tastes good and nothing is ever enough so I don’t want to be that person even though I like cake.

On the other hand, if you’re so afraid of causing offense or so afraid you’re not deserving and always hang back from the buffet or if you’re so tensely afraid of getting knocked over that you refuse to move up at all, then you’ll always end up eating stale cookies and I don’t want to be that person either. Especially not the one who shrugs affectedly and says, “I could have the cake if I wanted but I am choosing these stale cookie crumbs as a sign of my superiority over the buffet line” all to try to cover up their fear that they can’t compete with the rest of the line. (Because I have been that person — spent most of my teen years being that person — and not only does it do NOTHING to assuage one’s hunger but everyone sees through the pose anyway.)

All of this is why I think a little envy is a good thing. A little envy keeps you just uncomfortable enough to keep trying. A little edge to your hunger means you won’t tolerate it when someone steps on your foot to push to the front of the line. It’ll make you say, “Hey, no ditching! [We called cutting in line ditching, I don't know what y'all called it.]” And as long as envy isn’t your total driving force, you can be happy when you get pie and really, really appreciate it when you do get that fancy-schmancy gourmet seven layer cake.

Where I don’t want to be envious is in my personal life because that doesn’t help me at all unless I understand that jealousy is always about me and never about the person I’m jealous of and then learn something from it, which I am so sick of doing. I am so sick of learning from all my mistakes and weaknesses. (sigh) But I’ve never bought that ignorance was bliss so I’m stuck with always taking my life’s little after-school lessons to heart.

I remember lamenting the case of the person on whom the sun always shines at my therapist’s office way back when. This person has had not just a good life but a great life. This person is attractive, cheerful, smart, funny and has scads of friends. S/he has never had any real challenges despite going on many adventures and trying many new things. S/he has had it easy in love and easy in marriage and easy in the getting of children who have turned out to be great sleepers, extremely obedient and adorable. S/he has a nice house, a great job, a decent income and lives in a great town with lots of opportunity for travel. This — to my unhappy mind — didn’t seem fair. After all, I work hard. I am a nice person and yet! And yet back then infertility was casting a pall over it all. It made my small house smaller, my (at the time) good job less terrific and my darling son was not enough. It wasn’t fair! IT WASN’T FAIR! I was bitter. And so I railed against this lucky person. I railed against his/her good fortune like it was stealing from mine.

“But it’ll even out, right?” I begged my therapist to tell me. “I’ll have my good times and they’ll have their bad times, right? Right?”

“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe s/he will always be better off than you in lots of ways. Maybe his/her life will always be easy.”

I couldn’t believe it.

“But s/he isn’t really happy, right? Because to have real, true, deep happiness means you have to suffer some, right? I mean, I’m getting wisdom and character-building opportunities and will be a better person and the WINNER eventually somehow, right?”

And my therapist shook her head and gave me the sad, sympathetic look she could give that always made me cry and said, gently, “Dawn, life is not fair and some people just have it better than other people.”

This was not good news to my broken little barren heart desperate for some soothing schadenfreude. I didn’t want to hear that some people would get unending joy and privilege while most of us would have a more equal measure of happiness and hardships.

(Because hearing how much better I had it than other people didn’t make me feel any more grateful — it just made me feel worse for being not only unhappy and envious but also greedy, which does not inspire good behavior in myself. It is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy where I admonish myself, “Gosh, Dawn, aren’t you glad you’re at least not homeless, you selfish little pig?” And I answer right back to myself, “Well, as long as you’re calling me a selfish little pig I may as well act like one and seethe uselessly about all the things I want and don’t have!” And back in the day it meant that I would will all those pregnant people to have babies with colic, which is ironic seeing as how when I did eventually get a baby I got one with colic, which proves one of three things: that The Secret works and I was in vibrational harmony with colic or that God has a sense of humor or that life randomly happens in funny and ironic ways.)

Somehow hearing unequivocally and baldly that “life is not fair” in the desperate context of trying to overcome my infertility gave me the stark kick in the pants I needed. I could either stay unhappy with all I didn’t have or learn to be happy with my fairly nice lot in life and learn to manage my envy for good instead of evil.

I’m still jealous of that person who’s life looks so sunny (and it hasn’t gotten any darker in the seven years since I was seeing my therapist either). Especially now that s/he moved to an even more architecturally interesting house in the retro-modern style I so adore.  (So unfair! I would love that house!) But that goes with the territory that is me. I no longer take it as a personal affront that his/her house has a nicer entryway than mine. I mean, I still want the entryway but am able to see that having a nicer entryway doesn’t mean that God loves him/her more than me. And it no longer keeps me up nights the way it used to when I was so unhappy. Because that’s key — when I am eaten up by jealousy it’s because there is something else in my life that’s demanding my attention. Either I need to do soemthing major like resolve that life crisis (i.e., infertility) or I need to do something minor like clean my crowded entryway and put a basket out for everyone’s shoes. Or (in the case of professional jealousy) I need to ease up on the whining and get busy on my goals. Because no one is going to get that cake for me. That, my friends, is all up to me.