What makes you envious?
When I was in my early twenties one of my mum’s friends used to pass all her copies of “Woman and Home” on to me when she’d finished with them. I was most definitely not the target audience of the magazine, but I absolutely loved the articles about the women who’d given up their corporate jobs and started their own businesses, whether it was bee keeping in Cornwall, a gin distillery in Scotland or a florist in Yorkshire. I used to read the articles with a pang of envy and tell myself that it was because I was unhappy in my corporate role and saw these articles as a sign that it was possible to escape. What I never told myself was that it because I was a budding entrepreneur. That was not the path that people in my family took or people like me in general. I saw it as a signal that I wanted to escape my current job, but not a signal that I wanted to be my own boss. How wrong I was but it took nearly two decades before I realised that.
A couple of years ago I read a post by Gretchen Rubin (I’m a big fan of her writing) where she said, “when I was thinking of switching careers from law to writing, the extremely uncomfortable emotion of envy helped show me what I really wanted; when I read class notes in my alumni magazine, I felt only mild interest in most careers, including the people with interesting legal jobs, but I envied the writers.”
This made me start examining my feelings of envy whenever they arose and I discovered that if I was willing to stop and consider my envy, rather than let it eat away at me or try to ignore it, I could usually learn something interesting and useful about myself.
We are so often told that envy is a bad thing, the green-eyed monster or a destructive, that we fail to see what this feeling may be trying to teach us.
It’s so easy in these days of social media scrolling to have feelings of envy triggered, but I would argue that it’s better to examine that feeling rather than squash it. Better to face it than let it eat away at us. This is not about comparing yourself and finding yourself wanting. Comparison really is the thief of joy! No, this is about seeing what it is that little niggle of envy can tell you.
Envious of the friend who’s just signed up to do a part time Masters degree? What is it that’s making you envious? The thought of studying and learning again? The idea of doing something just for you? The career opportunities that this will open up? The creativity it will involve?
Envious of the friend who has posted on Instagram that she’s had a short story published? What is it that’s making you feel this way? Being a published writer? Writing at all? Being creative? Having the courage to put the work out there?
Taking a little time to sit with the uncomfortable feeling and examine why we are feeling it can begin to tell us what we would really like for ourselves. There are few of us who feel envy from a place of resentment. We don't resent our friends their success. We feel it from a place of wanting more for ourselves, to expand our life and our experiences, to play bigger in the world. What is your envy trying to teach you?
