Dear Mercury,
Thank you for taking up my offer to talk about envy. I appreciate your honesty here.
This is the dilemma.
It is awfully hard to handle a situation like this one.
And I certainly don’t want to sound smug, like I wouldn’t have precisely the same feelings!
You are in the classic situation that engenders envy, because you are embedded in a context where you can see what you don’t have, and what they do have.
My perspective as a therapist might be able to help. I have met many a person with financial and material advantages who has had an easy life. Too easy. Far too easy. They suffer from a host of things that are difficult to face: feeling aimless, not knowing that there is a difference between talent and discipline, wondering if people like them for themselves or for their money, shallow attitude toward life, being co-opted by media and material things. The value goes out of life, and despair, self-destructive compulsions rule. If they are capable of feeling guilty about their advantages, they will internalize the guilty and not being able to enjoy what they have. Really. If they are like Bernie Madoff, guiltless, you would not want to have his life.
So what, you might say? That’s about them, what about me, in the meantime?
How can we help you to spend less time in envy, and more time doing things that matter to you? You are in the thick of it. In the moments that trigger your envy most, you have a (forced) choice: you can marinate in that moment, or you could quietly back off, attend to other things, find something that matters to you to move yourself forward. You may have to recommit to this step every two minutes, but keep doing it.
I am not going to be formulaic about envy. I am telling you what I would do. I am not in your situation, I know that. I would work hard to keep my own counsel, breathe my way through the worst moments (at work), get support and love from friends, and please forgive yourself for what you feel.
And tell me if anything I am writing makes sense to you.
Thanks again. You have the guts to raise a question facing others.
One more thing; it has hit you now, yet this level of misfortune has hit others before, you may not have noticed them back then. Notice it/them now. “how could this be happening to me!” has been happening to people somewhere forever.
Again, I am telling you what I tell myself. No stunning magic here, but no reductionistic formulas either.
I trust you will let me know what you think.
JL
