For the authors boiling in envy

I have one. Every literary agent I’ve asked has one. And over the years—talking to hundreds of authors—I’ve realized that most of you have one, too.

I speak of the white whale: that one competitor who’s always just sort of there, winning all the contests and compliments and cash, kinda-sorta making you want to hurl in the process. If you feel me on this, suffice to say you’re not alone.

Envy is not the sole provenance of the personality-disordered lunatic. Almost all of us deal with it from time to time, particularly at life’s more vulnerable junctures. It’s just that most of us would rather not acknowledge our envy, even to ourselves. As a swarthy French duke named Francois de la Rochefoucauld wrote in the 17th century, people are often vain of their passions, even of the worst, but envy is a passion so timid and shame-faced that no one dare avow her.

When I tell you I’d rather not acknowledge my envy, I mean I’d really rather not do it. Had you asked me about it even a few years ago, I’d have told you I was among that blesséd minority of people who never feel envy at all. This would have been a lie—unconscious, mind you, but a lie nevertheless. I could have figured out I was lying based on the depth of contempt I’ve always felt for anyone who can’t hide their envy well. But I didn’t want to figure that out. I didn’t want to think about envy at all.

I know myself better now. I have the words to name this ugly little part of me. And yet even now as I write them to you, my body revolts, feral to cram them back in the hole. I got Botox in my masseter muscles yesterday morning, a TMJ treatment I’ve taken for five years without incident. But twelve hours later—as soon as I started writing this—my jaw twitched, clenched, then started swelling. From there, my entire head went supernova: spherical, neon red, coruscant with agony. I closed my laptop, took a liver-licking amount of Tylenol, then moaned in the fetal position till one in the morning, rubbing an ice pack all over my face. Gee, whatever could have induced this inflammatory response?!?

Now it’s the next day. I’m typing gingerly so as not to revisit tomato town. I’m planning to lighten the mood with a joke or jokes soon. I feel an urgent need to tell you that my personal problem with envy isn’t that bad, and everything I’ve heard about my personal white whale makes them seem like a lovely person, and of course my envy isn’t really about that person anyway.1 Plus, I have my own ludicrously privileged life and career.

(La Rochefoucauld again: Pride, which inspires, often serves to moderate envy.)

Nevertheless, I envy. I suspect you do, too. And I get the sense you want to talk to me about envy because you can’t stand how pathetic it makes you feel. You want it to disappear. You want to be content with what you have. You want to get the things you want without feeling sick about the people who got them faster.

Right?

Well, let me tell you what to do:

It’s your body’s way of telling you where you want to go, so go there! Make the necessary life changes! Don’t envy other people for their accomplishments, do ‘em yourself. And in the mean time, practice gratitude for what you have!!

We’ve both heard that advice many times, and we both know it’s stupid. You can’t girlboss your way out of envy. What a ridiculous thing to even imagine.

I have no idea who came up with the notion that envy was ambition in an onanistic sicko costume, inexplicably pretending to be something uglier than it was. Whoever it was, I suspect they have a world-historic allergy to bad feelings. You’ve got to hand it to them—what a feat of intellectualization and avoidance! But I digress.

Please:

You already know what you want. And OF COURSE you can’t gratitude-journal your way out of your envy, or we all would have achieved world peace in the 1990s when Oprah Winfrey popularized gratitude journaling.

(Wouldn’t it be great if people actually worked the way the Stoics fantasized and were capable of conquering their monsters through reason and virtue?)

(Another La Rochefoucauld quote—I’m kind of obsessed with him this week: Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it.)

No: you can’t neutralize envy with ambition, reason, or gratitude, because envy isn’t the opposite of those things.

Let me hold your hand and tell you what it really is: