On Envy

I was crying in public in the rain, sitting up to my waist in a pond of self-pity for a very embarrassing reason: someone I went to school with is more successful than me. And not just a little successful: very successful. Like, the success a writer hopes for at the top of their career, plus a side-helping of other good shit that most people don't even have the temerity to dream about, before the age of thirty. And infuriatingly, this person doesn't even have the decency to be a nepo baby. They're actually just a brilliant, hard-working normal person who managed to succeed in this system apparently based on their own efforts (?!!) They're even nice! It’s horrendous.

And of course they're younger than me. I am turning 31 this weekend, and I don't understand how people manage to tie their own shoes by the end of their twenties, let alone launch international careers—I mean, the year that this person was starting their career, my only achievement was getting myself home that one time on acid:

And to make it worse, everything that evening had been going wrong. This is a phenomenon that people who went to a pushy college full of competitive people will know well. You go to school with all these brilliant and ambitious young adults who are now succeeding, in some cases, on the world stage, and those people will always land their greatest achievements on days when you got charged for paying your rent late and you were asked to work on Saturday; and just when you'd hope the universe would extend a tiny shred of extra kindness to you in the way of, say, a smile from a stranger, or the arrival of a medium sum of money from a class action lawsuit, it proceeds instead to unceasingly pummel you with tiny indignity after tiny indignity.

And because I live in Chicago, these petty divine torments came, as they always do, via the Red Line.

Reader, I do not know why, but I have lived in the Chicagoland area off and on since 2011, and every single year since, the Red Line has been partially closed for repairs. When I last lived here, the train stop nearest to me was entirely closed for renovation (a long-promised palatial renovation with ramps and escalators and idealistic mosaics of a functional transportation system) and now, seven years later, I once again live near that exact same station, and it has been renovated, oh it's palatial all right, and ninety percent of that vast new space is now closed for repairs.

And so I should not have been surprised this evening when, after riding the Red Line EXACTLY ONE STOP, we were informed that the service was canceled, NOT because of a fire or something else respectable, but because the CTA had decided to cut service for a PLANNED SERVICE UPDATE right now during HIGH TRAFFIC HOURS, and I realized I might as well wait another twenty minutes to take the 22 bus now, and the 22 is to the bus system as the Red Line is to the trains.

So I was waiting for the bus on a freezing street corner in the rain, and it was then that I began to overhear a conversation happening by my left ear, and I realized all at once that it was about the successful person who is my classmate. The two people behind me were college students from the very college I attended, where, of course, that successful person is now a looked-up to alumni. And with the easy regality of two people still confident (probably correctly) that they're the protagonists of the known universe, these two infuriatingly good-looking and promising young people were talking about a variety of things that I did not want to think about right then, for instance, the student theater coalition whose acceptance I once desperately craved, where they both apparently have achieved a high level of success; and their post-graduation plans, which involved wildly impressive internships that I probably couldn't even land now, let alone at their age; and I considered turning on them like the Ghost of Marley to terrorize them about their career prospects, but I didn’t, because I thought, with a sudden sickening feeling, that they’ll probably achieve all their wildest dreams, and then they, too, will be more successful than me.

It was at this point that the bus arrived, and we all got on, packed shoulder to shoulder and face to face, and I descended into late-stage envy: utter self-pity. At this point, the envying brain (a hungry dog) can no longer remember anything good that has ever happened to it; it feels itself to be the most persecuted being in the universe. Yes of COURSE I should practice fucking GRATITUDE, it snarls, and it would probably WORK, but at what cost? 

So my self-pity began to mentally recite a list of tragedies the length of an epic poem, some of them legitimate, others very much not, such as: the fact that I am alone and single when many of my friends are married; the fact that, while they've all managed to achieve stability and happiness, I stay broke and underemployed year after year; the increasing fear that I might not really have a personality at all, but might just be sixteen dysfunctional coping mechanisms in a trench-coat; and that nobody will ever love me again and IT’S ALMOST MY BIRTHDAY

and meanwhile of course I was standing nose to nose with one of the students who was trying his best not to look at me when I began to uncontrollably weep (NOT prettily mind you, my nose was running, there was no dignity in this weep), to sob, to sniff, even to wail (a little) in incompletely controlled BURSTS, and so I got off the bus to cry

(and this is the essence of envy, this feeling: the childish longing to be the hero of the tale, because envy is the wound of the thwarted ego, and that is the secret of envy: that it is a comforting feeling, as that pain reassures the ego that it exists — if the gods aren't giving you the things you so painfully pine for, it must be because they personally have it in for you, even if it’s just because you suck — and it is preferable to the ego to have failed because of its own efforts than for its efforts not to matter at all, and the awful idea that success isn’t in the ego’s control, the awful idea that failure isn’t personal, the awful idea that the universe is just a popular girl who doesn't have anything against you, per se, she just has no idea you exist, the objects of her attention all being supermassive blackholes (and HOW can you get her notice you if you DON'T even have a Schwarzchild radius of at least one AU (find out next week in the new hit teen comedy, If Only the Space-Time Continuum Had Ten Things She Hated About You)) is so uncomfortable, so difficult to face that many people would rather feel the bitterest envy than ever face it,

and if you ever did acknowledge that maybe life does not reward and punish based on merit, and that people in this world are mostly suffering because of bad luck, you might have to come to some uncomfortable realizations, such as: the understanding that there is not some massive compensatory structure to the universe that evens out everything in the end, and so every human being who dies unjustly on this earth just dies unjustly, end of story; the understanding that everyone in the world is brilliant and beautiful and deserves so much, and so few are granted the privilege to be financially stable, let alone successful; that instead almost everyone has to use every last ounce of their brainpower and passion to do some crap stupid job to enrich a shitty corporation that is destroying the planet, the priceless minutes of their life extorted from them for less than minimum wage; and that many humans don't even have the good fortune to live out their lives in shitty labor situations because they are, instead, murdered as children while the world looks away because of their race or religion or country of origin, statistics in the footnote of a history book about the heartlessness of a world system that decided that war and genocide are morally acceptable as long as they’re only happening in certain countries,

and considering all this, you would be forced to realize that, in an unjust society in a heartless universe, the only power that could ever care about people is other people, and it is therefore up to us alone to make our world kind asap; and if we could do that, the world is already so beautiful and with so much to be grateful for in its very essence, that, if we could only share the wealth, we might have paradise at our fingertips; but in order to do that, we’d have to really fuck some shit up, and that would be massively inconvenient)

and then the rain stopped, and I walked the rest of the way home in the clear evening.