Jealousy Is Just GPS You Were Born With

Sometimes the green-eyed monster I like to pretend I don't have explodes out of my chest cavity and takes hostages. Sometimes it forms a kick line, prancing behind me like unfortunately complected Rockettes in sparkling green tutus and high-kicking tap shoes that batter my head until I get the point. Note to self: The point is never that everyone else has what I want and WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT THEM AND SO TERRIBLE ABOUT ME THAT THEY GET WHAT THEY WANT AND I DON'T and boohoo for me, cue sad little pity party for one.

Nope. Never is that the point. No matter how much it feels like the point when I click to Facebook and see the professionally photographed stream of life events that I would like but that currently feel less attainable than a throne on the surface of Mars, with a crown of moon rock and AMBER: GLORIOUS QUEEN OF THE MARTIANS carved into the surface of the planet.

(I have not yet been made the Queen of the Martians. But you bet your ass I'll be updating Facebook when it happens.)

Jealousy can leach away your power, if you let it. Because jealousy means you're focused so intently on how someone else's path looks that you forget to pay attention to your own. Maybe it's easier to glance at the apparent ease of someone else's journey and make yours wrong because it feels harder than theirs looks. But your reaction is packed with useful information. Jealousy is a guidebook your intuition is thrusting into your hands. You just have to learn to read it.

(Unfortunately, you rarely remember this when the alligators of jealousy are sharpening their teeth on your femur.)

In my quest to be vulnerable - no, but really this time - I'm admitting to a few days last week when I was stewing in the jealousy. I was jealous of friends with husbands, friends with babies, friends with jobs that looked kinda fun, friends that had published books, friends that have more money now than I may ever have in my life, friends with an adorably perfect Christmas tree when mine was only half decorated because half done is plenty for today, thanks. Even the alligators wouldn't approach me because my nostrils were flaring so violently. Let's just say that my inner toddler had a lot of opinions about how very unfair the world was and how deeply deficient I must be to not have exactly what I want exactly now.

But after burning through my jealous and self-pity via two bouts of sobbing on the carpet (yes this embarrassing and yes it helps), seven rant-ridden emails, three pep talks of the it's-okay-to-have-these-feelings-even-though-it-doesn't-feel-okay genre, and one run in the freezing wind, I couldn't even remember what made me jealous in the first place. Because cycling through all that emotion gave me enough space to realize that I wasn't happy - not because other people have things I think I want - but because I wasn't living the way I really wanted to be living.

The object of jealousy can often be the cure. If I hadn't spent several days getting so upset about what it looked like other people had and I didn't, I wouldn't have realized how badly I needed to shift my own life - and that would have deprived me of all the relief when I did.

Jealousy is just a nudge that tells you when something in your life is out of alignment. When you click that piece into place, jealousy disintegrates. And the green eyed monster disappears behind the couch for a little interspecies canoodling with the alligator.

Starting Again

I've perfected the art of being partially vulnerable. Giving away just enough so that I look vulnerable, but not so much that I actually feel vulnerable. How delightfully manipulative. Way to be crafty, protection mechanisms.

Life is a process of continually cracking yourself open. When my dad died last year, all the roiling dread and pain distilled down into a nail that tapped into my skull and split my brittle self right down the middle. All my defenses shattered and my insides felt splayed out for the world. And the world stepped up. I never felt so loved as I did in that time when I was wrenched open.

The cracks are indeed what lets the light in. Way to be pertinent, cliche.

Since then, I haven't been able to rebuild myself into what I was before. I've tried patchwork, I've tried denial, I've tried being mean to myself as a motivational exercise. But the cracks of my father's death reached into my foundation, weakening it until my carefully stacked ego began to wobble. In its wobbling, my ego finally revealed its scaly underbelly.

My self-esteem is deeply invested in this facade I've crafted for myself, the one of an adventurous woman who writes for a living and travels and has complete freedom. I've honed it and perfected it and crucially self-identified with it. I'm only now realizing my desperate need to control how the world perceives me - and that I've clung to that facade at the expense of the life I actually want to live.

It's not entirely false. It was true. For awhile. But then it became not so true and I continued to grasp at it. Rather desperately, truth be told. Until I realized that it wasn't what I actually wanted.

Yes, I do want a lot of freedom. I do want to travel. I do want to write for a living.

But my ego's attachment to Being That Person was keeping me from actually being that person. Because I was putting so much of my self-worth into being that person that I was boxing myself into a space where I felt deeply uncomfortable. I was trying to do a lot of things that didn't feel right for me because it felt like I had to. I was focusing more on client work than creation, more on trying to wrench business sense into myself than on nurturing what I feel my real contribution is. The need to bolster the facade kept me from doing what I really want to do.

I want to write books. I want to write screenplays. I want to write blog posts that feel true and urgent and don't need any purpose beyond that.

But if I want to do it that way, I need to separate my money from my writing - at least for now. I need to go deeply into creation mode so that I can write the book about my experience with my father's death and the Pixar-esque screenplay that I've been seeing behind my eyes for years.

But this is a very specific choice. It means buying the time to write. The price may be working retail again. It may mean learning how to operate one of those truly intimidating silver espresso monsters and appearing at a job at 6 a.m. It may mean letting the credit card debt I don't want anyone to know I have continue to sit there. It means letting go of this carefully constructed view of myself so that I can grow into the writer I really want to be. The self I really want to be.

The thought of getting a non-writing job always terrified me. I always thought that meant I had failed. And if I failed at writing, I failed at life. No one wants to fail at life.

But the truth is, you can't fail at life. No matter what choice you make. And I am lucky that I can make this choice. I have no responsibilities to a partner, to a child, to a pet. I don't even have a flowering hibiscus to resent my decision to live differently so that I can create what I want to create.

I will do anything to buy myself this creative time. I will sweep floors, I will learn how to use a cash register (the last time I worked retail we used the abacus of the credit card reader - contraptions that used carbon paper and thunked back and forth). I will do anything that doesn't drain me emotionally or creatively and leaves me enough time in the week to write toward serious forward progress.

It means no travel, for now. It means no real healing of my sad finances, for now. Or maybe it doesn't mean that. I don't need to make this mean anything but that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to finish two projects that have been my last priority now that I'm realizing they should be my first.

There are so many people who can write novels and work a full time job or who can take on multiple clients and still find the time and energy to do their own projects. I have so much respect for those people. I thought for years that I had to be one of them. But I'm simply not. At least not right now. Accepting this and choosing to live smaller so that I can give my work the room and the support it needs feels right.

Building invisible walls between yourself and the world of other people's opinions doesn't protect you. Because what you feel like you're protecting yourself from doesn't actually exist. Are any of my friends not going to be my friends if I'm folding sweaters at the Gap or making coffee for internet millionaires born the year I started middle school? Of course not. Is anyone who reads this going to think less of me for making this choice? Doubtful.

All my carefully-constructed plexiglass shields did were barricade me from truly connecting. Because no one else can know me when I don't truly know myself. Telling you that I am not always who I wanted the world to think I was feels honest. And there is peace to be found in truth.

When you recognize the truth about where you are, people can meet you there. And you can start again.

Be a Space Mouse

My brother is mighty fond of rodents. He always had a pet rat or two when we were growing up. They're still his preferred pets, fed bananas and cocktail shrimp and let out of their cage so they can climb him like a jungle gym. He's convinced his rats laugh when he tickles them. You can't hear the rat laughter because it's supersonic (or something), but he assures me it's happening. Arbiter of all things rodent, he recently told me about mice that were taken up into space. Confronted with zero gravity, most of the mice clung to the bars of their cage in terror, lest they be sucked into the black hole of the unknown. But one mouse let go. I can't imagine what the mouse felt at that moment of release, but he found himself floating in the air, twisting and turning gently in the warm gravity-less currents. Peaceful. Supported. At ease.

If that isn't a great goddamn metaphor for letting go, I don't know what is.

When I find myself resisting life or being cranky about something I can't control (or not doing what I could be doing about things I can control), I see those terrified mice in my head, gripping their cage and sending up prayers to their tiny mouse god to give them the strength to hold on. Then I see the mouse who let go, calmly floating. Maybe turning somersaults or doing a backstroke. Because he learned that he didn't need to cling, he needed to relax.

That's when I remind myself to be the float-y mouse.

Part of our job as humans is to take our fear and transform it. It's easy to try to transfer instead of transform, to try to convince our mice compatriots to cling to the cage with us so that we don't feel so alone. It takes a lot of courage to be the mouse who lets go. Or maybe it wasn't courage. Maybe his tiny paws slipped and after a moment of pure fear, he realized that he was floating, that the worst thing that could happen was actually the best.

Pulling the Trigger

Here's the thing about triggers: We all have them. And when one gets pulled, things explode. You know how it goes. We all have that gun that's pointed toward overspending the budget or being stood up or anything that might make us feel unwanted, unloved, or otherwise vulnerable. One trigger gets pulled by your friend on Tuesday. You're fine. The same trigger gets pulled by a coworker on Wednesday. You hold strong. The same trigger gets pulled again by a bank teller on Thursday. Smugly calm. Very same trigger gets pulled by the person you're dating on Saturday and your head explodes all over the living room wall. Whoops.

I've been working on dismantling my triggers - around money, around relationships, around my distaste for authority. (See: parking tickets and court summons and other things that go bump in the night and then blame you for the broken glass and slap you with a fine.) The second I think I've done my job and that thing no longer bothers me and I feel all smug in my personal growth, the trigger gets pulled again and I lose it to the tune of tears and ranting.

Really, I just need to give in to the inevitable tears and ranting the first time a trigger gets pulled and save everyone some time. The universe seems to like tears a lot more than it likes smug. Or maybe it just feels sorry for tears and wants to take smug down a peg or two. Hard to say.

Either way, I've been trying to let myself feel whatever I want to feel as soon as it comes up. Because if the trigger gets pulled by the wrong person, I can make a real mess.

The Microcosm of Happily-Ever-After

After so many years of dating and all the weird and complicated that entails, all the sunk hearts and baffling situations, I'm learning not to look for the happily-ever-after. Instead, I'm starting to collect small, perfect moments. Imitating Benny and Joon in a diner after midnight. Touching someone's hand for the first time. Digging past the layer everyone sees to meet the tender person beneath. That indefinable swell of feeling in your chest because someone is exactly who they are. Saying the perfect thing at the perfect time so laughter makes tears. Eating a chocolate sundae in bed because he went out in the rain on his skateboard to fetch you something to make you feel better. Arms around waists, not forever but for now.

There's never any guarantee beyond the time and space you're in. So I'm taking my happily-ever-after moment by moment.