Can't we be more like trees?

These days when I find myself in the middle of a story I’m telling myself about whatever is going on in my life—about social interactions, my work, other people, relationships—I have learned to pause and ask why I’m in the middle of that story at all.

Observing your thoughts, one after the other, instead of identifying with them, makes you realize they hardly make sense, even when they appear to. You start to see through them, the arbitrariness of their order, how they cannot really proven as true or false. They are theories borne of your mind, your past and conditioning, which we automatically believe and seek to confirm in all events.

For example, if you have been abused by llamas before, any new llama you meet might be tinged with conscious or unconscious suspicion. Potentially neutral actions or comments from the llama could be interpreted through that familiar lens. Your reactions to them (through perhaps the fascinating process of projective identification) may then end up causing what you fear—the previous unpleasant outcomes or situations with llamas.

Our psychological wounds become conscious to us through re-enactments of the past, this time with the hope that we can master the previous terrifying situation, until we learn the lesson enough times to heal the wounds driving us, to love ourselves for what we’ve been through, and reprogram the mind to create new, more favourable realities. This repetition-compulsion explains common dysfunctional patterns: women with absent fathers chasing unavailable men; somehow working with the same toxic boss figure in different workplaces; moving from one addiction to the next, etc.

Life then demands we operate with the discernment our past lessons have given us, without their baggage too—meaning, we have to also stop expecting our patterns to repeat wherever we go, just because we have understood them intimately, because this would make us jaded and paranoid.

What a task!

Some of my recent lessons have involved learning to protect myself. It has been a rude awakening to learn that people can actually be jealous of me. That they could dislike me I can easily believe. I have attracted polarized reactions in social settings for a long time. People tend to either be drawn towards my outspokenness and ‘aura’, or the total opposite, where they think I’m ‘too much’, or provide some other negative framing of an attribute that another, more clement perceiver, might consider neutrally or kindly.

It took me a while to recognise some of these subtle negative reactions as jealousy. While describing anecdotes to other friends—casual unprovoked putdowns, needless minor criticisms—one pointed out, “they hate us cause they ain’t us”. I was surprised because I hadn’t ascribed to myself the kind of self-importance that I think you need to have to think you have enemies.

Who, after all, has enemies? What is this, a Shakespearean play?

And does a jealous friend qualify as an enemy?

Remember, though, that Julius Caesar was assassinated by his bestie, Brutus, for fear that Caesar had become ‘too ambitious’. I revisited Mark Antony’s speech after Caesar was assassinated. Antony praises Caeser’s commitment and care towards his job of leading the Roman republic, slowly and sarcastically calling out Brutus’ negative framing of Caesar’s competence as ‘too much ambition’, Brutus’ insecurity being the real reason behind the assassination.

In writing this I am investigating the roots of my difficulty in recognizing and dealing with jealousy. For starters, it isn’t something you want to spot in a friend. Secondly, it usually comes well-disguised, for it can present in more favourable and polite forms at the start, like flattery, worship, or pedestalisation, which may sound great but are really dehumanizing. Thirdly, if you default to seeing the good in people, and are relatively secure in yourself too—which does not mean not having insecurities, but knowing you’re flawed as fuck, a limited human being, and dealing with these burdens somehow—you tend to not want what others have, but to work on yourself so you can be the best you can be. Fourthly, I never took it seriously even if I admitted the possibility of jealousy. How could it really, materially, harm me?

But I’ve learnt that jealous friends can fuck with you unless you have built up psychological armour. And it is exactly the kind of self-security that attracts jealous characters, perhaps. Heck, I would be jealous of someone like me if I weren’t me.

But I have known that whatever trait or outcome I want, I can cultivate or work towards and eventually have; when I can’t, I am satisfied with my pure-hearted efforts and/or disgruntled with the limits of reality and myself, rather than filled with ill will for another’s talents or good luck. You should know that even as I write this, a part of my mind is going, “As if! You are never this nice about your shortcomings. You’d rather berate yourself for everything you think you’re incapable of. You also sound full of yourself right now.”

When I do see someone with something I admire or want for myself, I might also end up with a crush, which I have learnt to finally see as a signal for what we want for ourselves, among other things. Jealousy is perhaps the shadow side of a crush. You can easily develop a crush on the opposite sex. But if you are not bisexual … well, that’s where murders come in.

This attitude of mine doesn’t contradict my neuroticism, my ambition, me not liking myself a lot of the times, etcetera. All of it is true, and the awareness of it all being true means I accept myself as good and bad, secure and insecure, full of contradictions, whole, on my own path.

We would all be better off if we saw individual growth should be seen as something like the life of a tree. Robbed of human self-importance, all of us serve some function, tangible or intangible, in the fabric of existence. So, like trees, we should be unbothered about what other trees are doing, and just consume our O2 and produce our CO2 without comparing ourselves to one another in all sorts of neurotic ways.

A related reading/movie/ “consumption” list:

• How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy

• Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori and Lucille Clerc

• The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell

• Mudita: The Joy of Joy: How delighting in others’ happiness, rather than wishing them less, can double your well being. Meditation teachers suggest using mudita to counter jealousy, fostering a feeling that there is "no enemy".

• Nerdwriter on Mark Antony’s insanely passive aggressive speech

• Dabbe: The Possession: Wait for my reel on Instagram on how I connect this crazy horror flick to the themes of this newsletter.

In case you haven’t yet, get a copy of my book, Famous Last Questions, wherever you get good books. Those of you who’ve read it—please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. It really helps.