in defense of jealousy

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Of all the range of human emotion, jealousy may be the one we’re least comfortable admitting to: it’s petty, ungenerous, immature. As children, we’re taught to either overcome or suppress it, treating it as a moral failing.

I don’t remember much from my religious education as a child, but I do remember being eight years old, staring at my Sunday school teacher incredulously when she told us that “thou shalt not covet” was on the same list of mortal sins as “thou shalt not kill.”

Like, that’s crazy!

Lately, though, I’ve been ruminating on jealousy. And I think it’s actually one of the clearest signals of desire we have—and we’ve been taught to misread it as moral failure instead of narrative information.

Recently, someone I tangentially know from college—a friend of a friend—announced they were publishing a debut novel with a Big Five publisher. The book sounds genuinely excellent. Early readers are raving. ‘Bookstagram’ is already in love. I even preordered it, happy, sincerely, to support someone adjacent to my world.

And still: the jealousy arrived immediately.

I did what jealous people do. I researched. Publisher’s Marketplace listed a six-figure deal—not unheard of, but incredibly rare for a debut novel. I compared résumés. We went to the same college. They studied English; I studied journalism. Their master’s degree came from an Ivy League MFA program; mine was a nice buy-one-get-one from an almost-Ivy journalism program deal when I finished undergrad early.

I reminded myself that they’d spent years working on this book while I’d lived several different professional lives in quick succession.

All of this explanation was an attempt to make the feeling go away.

It didn’t.

What struck me then wasn’t the jealousy itself, but the specificity of it: I’m under-employed right now as a freelancer, and money has been tight for months. By any reasonable metric, I should be jealous of people with stable jobs, benefits, and paychecks. But I’m not. Not really.

My jealousy has a narrow focus right now; it knows exactly where to land.

I then realized that I’d felt this kind of clarity before.

As a teen and young adult, jealousy followed my body everywhere. Instagram and Tumblr were minefields of sharp collarbones, sculpted abs, and thigh gaps (ugh I hate that expression now). Back then, every image triggered that familiar jealous lurch in my stomach.1

Back then, my sense of whether a day would be “good” or “bad” hinged on exercise. If I worked out hard enough early enough, the day felt salvageable. If I didn’t, everything tilted off-kilter. There was science to justify it, of course— endorphins, discipline, routine—but underneath it was the belief that worth had to be earned through bodily control.

As much as I told myself and others back then that I wanted to go to a good college, or get good grades, or have a cute boyfriend, I really wasn’t jealous of people who had those things. Not in the way I was jealous of people’s bodies.

That’s not to say I didn’t want any of those things; rather, my overarching desire, the thing that plagued my thoughts daily, was perfecting my body. (I’m definitely not proud to talk about this, and certainly not condoning disordered eating, but I know there are plenty of folks out there who had a similar teenage experience).

It makes me sad, now, to think about how my brain worked back then. Now, images of pointy clavicles and thigh gaps barely register for me. The envy has been replaced by distance, indifference.

My jealousy has morphed at various points over the years to focus its hungry gaze on people my age winning the Pulitzer Prize, managing to stay in the ever-shrinking journalism field, getting promotions at work, going viral on social media, and getting their books on the NYT bestseller list.

In short, I am a proud jealous bitch. Have been for 29 years.

Which is why I feel confident about my next point.

At the beginning of 2025, I was so tired of having the same New Year’s resolution every year. In 2023, I was going to write a book! But I got distracted—2024 was going to be my year. Then, last January, I took a hard look at the few sparse pages of my novel I’d actually completed and decided something was going to change.

I decided to finally listen to jealousy I’d felt watching other people achieve my dream for almost three years. Then, I made myself acknowledge that I hadn’t been doing the work.

Instead of asking how to get rid of the uncomfy feeling, I started thinking about what my jealousy was actually pointing at.

Now, the thing that determines my day is writing. Mornings where I sit down and put real work into my book feel aligned, regardless of what else happens.

This is where I start to really defend jealousy.

The envy I feel toward that friend-of-a-friend isn’t about a desire for prestige or money, not really; it’s about proximity to the life I want to be living. Jealousy, in this sense, is as strong a signal as my body has.

We tend to think jealousy tells us who we are failing to be. I’m starting to believe it tells us who we are trying to become.

That doesn’t make it pleasant. Jealousy is still sharp and uncomfortable and, at times, embarrassing. But it’s also pretty precise. And if we listen to it, it reveals what we really value after stripping away what we think we’re supposed to want.

Throughlines is about the stories we inherit—like “thou shalt not covet”—and the ones we quietly choose instead. If jealousy has something to teach us, it’s how to read ourselves more honestly. And that’s something I’ll defend endlessly.

Let’s get through this together.

xoxo Ashley

P.S. The Throughlines paid tier gets a reading list on jealousy, desire, and ambition—the books, essays, and cultural touchstones that helped teach me how to read this emotion. Upgrade to paid today so you don’t miss it: