BABYGIRL!

You are scrolling through your feed, and there it is: your friend’s vacation photos, someone else’s perfect outfit, or the news that a girl you know just got the exact internship, boyfriend, or achievement you wanted. Your brain immediately starts mapping out reasons why she doesn’t deserve it, telling you that her parents paid for it, she’s not even that smart, or it is all filtered anyway. Congratulations, you have just met your jealousy.

Jealousy is treated like a social crime. We are taught to be supportive friends who lift each other up every single second of the day. Because of this, when we do feel envious, we panic and experience intense guilt. We usually handle this by either projecting it outward through gossip and tearing the other girl down, or swallowing it whole, letting it rot our self-esteem from the inside out. But we need to stop running from this emotion and learn how to sit with it without letting it destroy us.

The secret to surviving jealousy is realizing that it is a map of your own desires. You do not get jealous of things you do not care about, meaning the green monster only appears when someone else achieves something you secretly want for yourself. Instead of letting that energy turn into poison, you can use it as a tool by asking yourself what exactly they have that you want, and what small steps you can take to build that for yourself.

Sitting with this discomfort takes serious emotional muscle because it requires you to acknowledge the spike of envy without looking for flaws in the other person to make yourself feel better. It helps to actively remind yourself that someone else winning does not mean you are losing, because life is not a pie with limited slices. Confessing these feelings to a trusted person or writing them down in a journal strips the emotion of its toxic power by exposing the shame to fresh air. 

The ultimate goal of sitting with jealousy is to stop wasting your precious energy on bitterness. When you let envy rot you, you spend hours overanalyzing someone else’s life, leaving you too exhausted to work on your own goals. But when you sit with it, understand it, and accept it, that uncomfortable energy transforms into ambition. The next time you see another girl winning, let it hurt for a second, and then let it fuel the journey toward who you want to become.