Jealousy is the main antagonist of many a story. For romance, it’s the jealous ex trying to keep the true couple separated. For fantasy, it’s the jealous younger prince who desires his brother’s throne. In a murder mystery, you can almost always guarantee the person who was once jealous of the victim in some fashion is involved, perhaps even the killer themselves. Jealousy (or, more famously in this context, envy) is one of the major seven deadly sins, after all.
I used to have an incredibly toxic relationship with jealousy. It would possess me in a way that blinded me, turned my sight red. I discarded too many friendships, passed up too many opportunities, let time fly by on too many occasions simply because I was jealous, fuming, unable to see past the fury it infected me with.
I had a friend one time that said, “Any person who’s jealous of their friends is a bad person.” Nowadays, I think such a statement is silly.
If you feel jealous, you’re not a bad person. You’re just a person.
Jealousy is a very human emotion. We all feel it. We’ve all, at some point, saw someone or something or some accomplishment and felt that tiny stab of anger, sadness, other negative emotion deep in our gut. A “Why can’t that be me?” or “Why did that happen to them?” or “Why can’t I do that?” or a flurry of other questions that are just why, why, why?
With being a writer, jealousy comes with the job. Even if it’s the tiniest little monster nested deep in the back of your mind, waking only once in a blue moon to growl, “Hey, what gives?” before going back into hibernation. Seeing other writers get published, seeing the amount of support they get on their writing, seeing the same ten names win the same ten contests, comparing how many subscribers on Substack someone has compared to you, seeing all kinds of things can easily trigger that “Why?” question.
So, what happens when that “Why?” question is triggered? Do you let it manifest, take over, completely consume your day, week, month? Do you let it color your opinion on a person, making it so you refuse to see any part of them other than the demonic entity you’ve created in your head from said jealousy?
There was a point in my jealousy streak that I wanted it to stop—I simply wanted to stop feeling jealous. It was a terrible feeling, constantly seeing the successes of others and only wishing that was me, or that I wanted them to fail in some way. It didn’t feel human. Pair that with Rejection Sensitivity, and even attempting to do the things I love in the presence of others who also loved to do it was a nightmare.
And you know what all the advice I could find was?
“Just don’t get jealous.”
Which further made me feel inhuman.
Of course, I now know just how unhelpful such general advice is. It’s impossible to not feel jealousy. Even if you only feel it in minute amounts, jealousy will always be with people in some form. It’s a human emotion, after all. “Don’t get jealous” is as bad of advice as “don’t get mad” or “don’t be depressed.” You can’t just not be those things.
But you can manage them.
One thing I learned about jealousy is that it’s always a response to something I feel about myself. It’s never wholly about the other person. Rather, it’s about something the other person is doing that I feel inadequate about. You’re simply taking that feeling about yourself and projecting it onto the other person, not wanting to face the fact that it has something to do with you.
It takes a lot of internalizing that late-teens, early-twenties me was simply not ready to engage with.
Take into consideration some of the examples I gave at the beginning of this article. The jealous ex: she sees her ex-boyfriend with another girl and becomes the antagonist of the story through her jealousy. What makes her jealous? Seeing him with her. Why is she jealous? Well, a writer might simply state she’s mad her ex-boyfriend left her for another girl. But if we look at this in a more humanistic, internalized sense, one question becomes clear: “What does she have that I don’t?” or “What makes her loveable?”
“What makes her worth your eyes and not me?”
And it could be something simple: maybe the ex-boyfriend doesn’t like blondes and prefers brunettes. Or it could be more complex: their views simply don’t line up as well as his does with the new girl.
So then the jealous ex, once considering this question, must then move to the next step: What should I change? Or should I change at all? Is this man worth changing my hair color or my views of the world, or should I move on?
(This kind of internalization isn’t very interesting to read, so just hating his new squeeze is a much easier route to take.)
Jealousy isn’t a cardinal sin that we need to bury deep, but rather a complex emotion that’s informing us about something we’re feeling insecure, inadequate, all the in-’s about. It’s how you handle these jealous feelings that informs your character, informs how you handle a situation when your faced with this moment of potential internalization.
I’ll give my own example. Recently, I came across a picture of an old friend group, all still together and happy, minus one person (being me). I’d removed myself from this friend group a while ago because, while they were healthy for each other, the group was not healthy for me. No sour feelings, no animosity. Simply looking out for myself and my space.
But when I saw this picture, feelings of jealousy rose up in me. I feel them very intensely initially: like bile coming up my throat, expanding in my esophagus, all my limbs going numb as a result. I let myself feel this feeling, because this is my body’s natural response to jealousy. I saw the picture, saw them all happy, and felt jealous.
It’s the actions I take after that inform just how I handle jealousy. I set down my phone, took a deep breath, and thought, “What about this makes me jealous?” I found this question, open-ended, helps me begin the journey of internalization, of digging deep into what’s going on with myself in order to find the root of the problem. It led me down to an answer: I was jealous they were all still happy with each other, even without me. That it didn’t matter that I was in their lives or not.
“Do I want them to be miserable?” I ask myself. No.
“Didn’t I step away from the group because it would make me happier?” I ask myself. Yes.
“Can’t it be simultaneously true that they are still happy together and you are doing what’s best for yourself by not being with them?” I ask myself. Yes.
“Do you want to go back?” was the final question. To ask this too early, when my emotions ran far too high, would lead to less-than-desirable results. It’s how you get the reputation of jealousy: people acting on their gut emotion when they first feel it, the height of their sadness or rage, and making poor decisions.
No was my response.
It was then that I finally got out of bed—yes, this all happened right when I woke up. I did my morning routine, took a shower, and generally let myself be distracted. And, before I knew it, the sour feelings were all but gone, and I had basically forgotten what I was even jealous about.
Jealousy doesn’t have to be something that you’re fighting, something you’re afraid will bring the worst out in you. Let it be what it was designed to do: to inform you of what you’re feeling about yourself. Take a step back when you’re feeling jealous and uncover what it is that it’s truly telling you, not what it’s disguising it with at surface level.
FEEL jealous. Just don’t let it consume you. Let yourself feel it, and consider why you’re feeling it. What this jealousy is trying to tell you. What you can do about it that’s within your control. If you don’t know where to start, start where I do: “What about this makes me jealous?” Just asking myself that question usually leads me down a path of self enlightenment.
And don’t ever let someone shame you for your jealousy. Because, chances are, they’ve felt jealous too.
There’s probably dozens of other effective strategies to handle jealousy, but what I outlined above has always helped me time and again.
(Also, like I said, when you try to research the topic, a majority of people tend to just tell you to stop. Not helpful at all.)
I think what really helped me open my eyes about jealousy was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a fantastic work on writing that every writer should have under their belt. She has an entire section dedicated to jealousy, and in it she talks about how unabashedly jealous she felt towards one friend of hers who would simply not shut up about how successful they were compared to her.
And it reminded me of that friend who told me the quote above, because that’s exactly how our dynamic was.
What I enjoyed about her talk on jealousy is that she didn’t deny she had it, nor did she try to downplay it. Lamott talked about how her jealousy made her feel, especially that she felt terrible for feeling it about a friend. But she took actionable steps because of it: not to bury her jealousy, but to work harder.
I really appreciated it. It was something I needed to read in a world that automatically stamps jealousy as forbidden taboo. Something only antagonists engage with.
(Also, jealousy and envy are separate in a sense: jealousy focuses on relationships while envy focuses on aspirations. But I feel like what I’m talking about here covers both aspects, so ‘jealousy’ is the umbrella term I’ve decided to use to cover both. Before someone “erm, actually…” about my use of the word ‘jealousy’ here.)