Jealousy

Jealousy is not easily spoken about, and even less so personally, as a reality that touches any of our actual lives. Its admission feels ugly, a touchstone to the troubling truth we are once again dissatisfied with what we have, perhaps even who we are, and generally our sense of lack in life. Our shame around the marring nature of jealousy is slightly surprising given its deep roots in human development where jealousy appears not only in evolutionary history, as an adaptive mechanism that may have served us well for safeguarding relationships, but also in religion. The Hebrew god el was described as jealous on more than one occasion, for example, suggesting a less idealized notion of divinity than many are accustomed to imagining, or, conversely, conveying an uncanny conviction in jealousy’s nobility, a belief in something sacred about this often shunned and misunderstood emotion. Indeed, not only the Hebrew people but many other ancient cultures from the Aztecs to the Zoroastrians also depicted their deities as familiar with jealousy. Should we label these depictions as mere anthropomorphic tendencies toward the holy in a bygone age, or, might these narratives be rightly regarded as also anointing and even divinizing the richly colored, complex emotional canvas of the human journey? Whatever the value of such claims, it is nevertheless clear that jealousy not only stings us from time to time but also, more so, serves us as a litmus test to our restlessness, revealing the difficulty we find in being, let alone celebrating our idiosyncratic and always imperfect location in life.

Jealousy is both difficult to define and experience because it is a knotted conglomerate of varying drives and propensities, less like a single color and more like many, or maybe many different shades of one. Jealousy can include admiration but also fear, competitiveness and comparativeness, neuroticism, low self-esteem or a deficit in self-confidence. All of these hues and others combine to paint a picture of jealousy as an emotion of confluence more than a feeling of singularity, a sentiment of nuance, resulting from a culmination of twisted thoughts and impressions centered not in celebrating what one already has and, more importantly, who one is but fixated instead on a perceived abundance elsewhere, inversely proportional to a perceived personal lack: the deeper the felt lack, the greater the potential jealousy. If jealousy were to be identified with a single color it would surely be green. We can be green with envy, as Shakespeare suggested, as we fantasize about how green the grass is on the other side of the fence. And herein lies one of the unexpected gifts of the jealous spirit, namely, the realization that this fantasy, when imagined fully, when taken to its logical conclusion, with us “there” on the other side, would have us be, or quickly become, just as dissatisfied as we were before, albeit in a different spot. How ridiculous! Perhaps this is what Ram Dass meant when he said we would do well to wake up to the absurdity of our own predicament.