I’ll be honest with you, until a little while ago I did not grasp the difference between jealousy and envy. I thought they were synonyms for one another. So when I found myself being overwhelmed by writer’s block one day, I spent some time defining what was keeping me from my passion.
A listing of my “issues”.
In my journal, I started listing all the messages my brain was telling me about my writing. It’s too simple. It’s too boring. You just won’t ever write anything significant. The list went on and on and on…I have a very active negative inner voice. You can read more about it here in my article: https://thewespot.com/fighting-mean-girl/ . At the bottom of my list, my final comment was I wasn’t blonde enough to be a writer. To whom does that make sense? What would my hair color have to do with my art?
The Simpsons reveal it all.
While re-reading my list and countering my inner mean girl, I found out my biggest enemy was my envy of others. As you can learn on a great snippet of The Simpsons, jealousy is an emotion that expresses your fear that someone will take what you have and envy is wanting what someone else has. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmx1jpqv3RA
I was envious of all the wonderful writers that I admire that have an amazing beautiful platforms and who have worked really vigilantly to hone their craft. Most of them happened to be blonde. Simply I wanted what they had.
My art was stalling because of my envious heart. What are you losing because of what you envy? Has all the carefully edited lives of friends on social media emptied your tank of self-love and self-worth?
When reality slapped me gently in the face, I woke up to the fact that envy cheapens us all. Instead of focusing on the wonderful things we do have, we strive for things, experiences, and situations that aren’t for us. We focus on others as competitors, instead of allies and friends.
Envy robs us of our value.
Envy ultimately robs us of our creativity because we want to be just like so-and-so instead of embracing who we really are and what we are called on this lovely world to do. Uniqueness is our gift to this world.
The only way to extinguish envy is through gratitude.
The importance of daily gratitude checks has been a topic of thousands of blogs and studies. Your brain gets rewired to be more positive, lowers blood pressure, strengthen your immune system as well as many fantastic benefits to your overall well-being (https://positivepsychology.com/neuroscience-of-gratitude/). Daily gratitude also kills the envy monster. How can you be wanting someone else’s stuff when you are truly grateful for your own?
I still and will always struggle with a little bit of writer’s block. Who can run on full throttle all the time? Through voicing my inner mean girl and finding my daily gratitude’s, I have put a dent in my envy monster and learned to embrace my own unique voice and journey.
How does envy impact your life? Does social media fire it up? What are you grateful for? Take these questions and sit with them for a while in the school pick-up line or waiting at the car wash. The talented Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself; everyone else was taken.” You are a tremendously unique person put on this planet who needs you. Eradicate envy, sisters.
