I’ve always said that I am ambitious. Directionless, but ambitious. However, recently I’ve been wondering whether I’ve been confusing jealousy with ambition. The meaning of the words themselves different, but their application becoming interchangeable in my mind.
Having ambition is considered a positive, driven, goal focussed, something you’d mention in an interview, or include in a dating app bio alongside a picture of a sunset and a quote about motivation, because you’re worldly and also so deep. But when you’re just ambitious generally, full stop, it has a tendency to lead one to thoughts of comparison and ultimately, and rather unfortunately, its close ally jealousy.
I’ll set the scene: I’m ambitious, I’m perky, I try to smile a lot, I’m living my life and like most millennials, though I proclaim that Facebook is so over, I’m not impervious to it’s pull. I see someone on Facebook that I haven’t spoken to in years, as is the case with most ‘friends’ on the friends list, because of course you need to keep tabs on what your peers, even the long forgotten ones, are up to, and more importantly, if they’re doing better than you. Said person has just climbed a mountain, you have never wanted to climb a mountain, but all of a sudden you are incensed, you could climb a mountain, why haven’t you climbed a mountain? I’m annoyed at myself, I should have climbed a mountain. I’m wasting my life. No one else around me is wasting their lives. They’re all too busy climbing mountains.
Whilst this climbing mountain story was for the purpose of hyperbole, I have had this same reaction to seeing others get married, go travelling, have a baby, get a promotion, open a new business and on my worst days, if they post a picture of a nice meal they’ve had somewhere. I’m jealous of conflicting things, like around the world travels and settling into forever homes, wild nights of partying and early morning trips to the park with children. Some of the things that I get jealous of are more tenable than others, but some, I don’t even want and some I don’t want right now. Yet here I am, looking like Kermit’s cousin I’m so green with jealousy. But why?
Lock down left me feeling far more comfortable staying in than venturing out. I’ve also undertaken the worlds longest renovation which has frayed my nerves and emptied my piggy bank more times than I’d care to remember. As well as me seemingly hurtling through my thirties, making some things seem a lot more imminent than they ever have been, children, marriage, finding my forever career. It’s left me feeling panic stricken, static and stuck. It’s heavy and daunting and it makes me act out in ways that I’m not necessarily proud to admit, namely, I’m jealous, or am I ambitious?
Definitely I’m ambitious I tell myself, I want to be successful, but successful at what? I’m lost and in trying to find myself, I look to others, and in the tug of all of these things there’s a confusion. Am I doing life right? Could I be doing it better? Should I be doing like everyone else? I want what they have because surely it’s better than what I have. Surely. I must be doing life wrong.
I’ve sat with this and thought, really thought. Am I subconsciously craving some of these things? Am I just a bad person? Am I bored? Am I lost? I guess it’s a mixture of all of the above, though maybe just to be kind to myself, hopefully not so much of the bad person thing. I’m just a human person. So then, is jealousy just a means of our deepest selves letting us know what we really want out of life? Is it just our minds chance to metaphorically try on different versions that our selves could be?
These are tough things to confront and so I don’t. I look at others and compare and it twists me, or rather as I twist to fit these ideals, I become twisted with jealousy. Maybe I’d be happier if I had done this, or I’d love to have done that. But instead I scroll. I don’t do. I sit and pass judgment, often judgements that I don’t truly believe in. Jealousy colours things in a way that obscures my vision, the opposite of rose tinted glasses, rather the sludge green turns my thoughts putrid. I want to be better and do better in all things, even the things that I don’t want.
I try to remember that the joys of others do not take joy from me. The successes of others do not make me less successful. The losses of others do not make me a winner, but they also do not make me a loser. My life is my own, to make mistakes and triumphs, to walk down paths that I then circle back around and then forge new paths and get lost and fall over and get back up and everyone else is doing this also. And maybe there are others who look at me with jealousy?
And they’d be right to be jealous, I have so many good things and good people in my life and of course from the outside, when you’re filling in the bits that you don’t know about a person with your own imaginings, it’s easy to think that someone has it altogether. But I wonder, do we ever have it altogether?
I am ambitious. I do crave success, but I am yet to determine what success means to me and as I try to figure that out, there will be times when I look to others and comparison overtakes me and jealousy crawls within me. But then I remember; I’m a human person and with that comes imperfection and self doubt and self sabotage and selfishness, but that’s ok. Maybe my new ambition could be allowing myself to just be, through all the messiness of life’s possibilities and the seemingly endless possibilities of others, I ride the jealous-sea (lol), letting it lap at my edges and sometimes letting it wash over me, but never allowing it to overtake me. I’ll just keep bobbing along and just be. And just be.
(None of these pictures are my own; W Magazine & Green finger picture: Zoey Grossman for YSL beauty BTS)
