Yesterday I went to a new women’s group where members are encouraged to tell vulnerable stories about their lives, past and present. The speaker shared a weaving narrative of her sixty-five years filled with adventure: from living as a new bride in Mexico City to growing a family as her husband’s various jobs moved them to four different states and three different countries before settling back here in Connecticut with her extended family. Though her travels were admirable, there was a consistent undercurrent of instability in her life and marriage–undoubtable struggles as she navigated these twists and turns, mostly alone physically and emotionally.

It’s special to hear others’ stories and to know that despite the shiny veneer, there are struggles that we all face. Many of her acquaintances or even friends may go to her house and see photographs of exotic locales, framed and scattered throughout an immaculate home, and think that they know who she is and the charmed life she’s led. They won’t see the struggle that accompanied those beautiful times or know that she, too, experienced hardship. Yet, here I was, making her acquaintance for the first time, reminded yet again that things aren’t always as they seem.

Admissions of Envy

During the discussion that followed, other members took to the center stage to discuss their experiences as they related to the speaker, or anything they needed to get off their chests. Not one, but two people admitted to the speaker that they felt envious of her life travels despite the obvious travails she exposed to us.

The Other Four-Letter Word

What struck me so deeply by this is that envy feels like a naughty word. Even in this new era of exposing deep feelings, traumas, and various other mental health aggrievances, people are rare to admit feelings of inadequacy, jealousy or envy in our culture. They’re unlikely to admit to feeling envy or jealousy to their closest of friends, or even themselves.

People aren’t always attuned to their emotions–they have different strengths. In cases of conflict, the more empathetic individual in a relationship could make up for that by asking probing questions: “You seem angry at me, but I’m not sure why. Let’s talk about this. Does it have something to do with X?”

In more trivial, cause & effect instances in an ideal world, this can be a simple conflict resolution technique. “You don’t clean up after yourself and I’m feeling resentful,” or “I felt unimportant when you didn’t invite me out with your other friends, so I’ve been pushing you away,” or “You lied to me, so I think you’re trying to sabotage my success.”

But envy doesn’t come up, and even if the more attuned one eventually rules out all other possibilities and concludes the other person has become a victim of their own envy, our culture disallows that person from naming the feeling as an outsider. “She’s just jealous,” will always come off as fighting words rather than an explanation for an obvious internal conflict.

What is Envy?

Envy is about have vs. have-nots. Growing up poor and without basic emotional needs met, if I let envy become a part of my life it would have been too debilitating. I do remember, as a sixth grader, admiring the girls with pretty ribbons tied in their hair and their perfectly bubbly handwriting, feeling a yearning to be like them, have the family or home or life that they do. Yet envy is when admiration turns sour.

Admiration can be a means of connection, as you bridge the gap between what they have and what you want. You could tell the other person “I want want you have. How do I get it?” opening the door for an opportunity for each of you to start stacking stones from your respective sides of the gap until you’ve crossed into their same place. Or, you could mimic details that are easier than being adopted by their family: write slower, make your lowercase As two story, have loopier hooks as you write your Ys. You don’t have to have the same story to write it in the same font.

Envy is when you have that same yearning, and instead of letting that connect you to another, you take that same bridge-building stone and hurl it at the person across the divide. They’re there and you’re not, so you can’t see that rock as an opportunity to move forward–all you see is that you’re not there, too.

My Experience with Envy

Maybe being a have-not created a barrier for me to be envious. Maybe the underlying low self worth I grew up with inhibited me from thinking I deserved anything enough to be angry at someone else for having it. I’m not sure, I’ve just always wanted to be in closer proximity to another when I’ve learned that they have admirable qualities. It’s been an ongoing joke around my house for the last decade, when I meet someone I’m impressed by. I’ll come home and declare: “I’m going to be her friend.” My husband will quip: “Target: acquired.”

When I moved to Connecticut, we settled in a pretty affluent area. Though I admired the wealth that surrounded me, it only took getting to deeply know one very unhappy woman, well into her forties, whose parents were responsible for maintaining her lifestyle with her husband and two children for me to note that nice homes, cars, etc. weren’t always what they seemed. I’d always rather eat my own shit sandwich than someone else’s.

On Being Envied

I took a deep breath as I paused before typing that subtitle. Talking about being envied feels just as impossible as talking about envying another. Admitting envy is like admitting defeat. Admitting being envied lacks humility, which brings many people feelings of disgust.

My first notable experience of realizing, long after the fact, that I was a victim to someone else’s envy, was a woman I considered a friend when I moved here. Though I thought we were close and had shared many moments and intimate details of our lives leading up, at some point, things went sour. She was constantly cutting me down, making passive aggressive comments, first in private, then in front of others. Especially about my age, or snickering about how I “do it all” when I made my son’s birthday cake from scratch.

It wasn’t until the relationship was long over that I realized that the things she was cutting me down about were insecurities of her own. I could have very well been the one jealous of her: a giant house, a husband home often, a close friendship with her parents and an unscathed childhood. But there I was, 15 years younger, new to town, weaker in the power dynamic, being treated like shit. For what? Because I was younger? Because I like to be creative and she misconstrued that as competition in the Mom Olympics?

And Again, This Year

I consider myself generally self aware. I know, for example, that my relentless pursuit of improvement can leave some people feeling…uncomfortable. When people take the time to get to know me on a one-on-one basis, they quickly learn that the reason I’m high achieving is in spite of a tumultuous life that they likely wouldn’t have chosen for themselves. They can see that I have far from a perfect Instagram life, that I’m very flawed and I consistently encounter struggles like everyone else.

I can’t help it when people don’t get to know me and they make presumptions about me, and that’s what happened this year. As I relayed the story, time and time again, to friends and, sometimes shared acquaintances, of experiences with this person, the same conclusion came up for all of them: “She was threatened by you.”

I didn’t want to believe this. I wanted to believe that it was something I said or did, that the world is more just than someone assuming your life doesn’t have enough struggles so that they’re willing to lie, cheat, and mistreat you in order to see you fail. I denied the possibility and I looked for my own failures that I could control. It wasn’t until someone who I consider a partner admitted to me their own feelings of inadequacy that my eyes opened up to a possibility that others were quick to conclude and I saw things more clearly with hindsight.

Back to the Meeting

When these women were quick to admit their feelings of envy, it was a reminder that these feelings exist in others, and it can be panged quickly in a brief moment of sharing, even if the listener acknowledges that the speaker didn’t have it all so easy.

Because people are fearful of admitting this emotion, it’s polarizing. When an emotion goes unnamed, unacknowledged, it infiltrates other aspects of your life. Resentment, fear, envy, grief–denying these human experiences that manifest in the body is like ignoring an injury–it’ll only cause more problems in the kinetic chain. It can’t be ignored.

I invite others to be as brave as these women. I gaslighted myself about what was apparent and obvious about a relationship with someone until it was unsalvageable on my end. Ultimately, we both missed out. She may have wielded what power that she had to prevent me from succeeding, but ultimately her envy won and prevented her from succeeding in a different manner.