Jealousy.

Good morning my loves and happy day 17 of our Dry January journaling series.

Here is today's prompt:

"Who are you jealous of? List the things about them that you are jealous of."

It's not a difficult task to think of who I am jealous of. Not even kind of hard. The two women's faces spread across my eyes and I am reminded again of who I feel inferior to.

One is an old friend and one is a long lost one. Both of them have finished their seasons in my book and while we once held each other fondly, I am oddly jealous of both of them. They are so different and yet so similar.

Jealousy can be so scary at first. It was to me too. When I first hate stalked, gossiped, or even talked to my therapist about them - I thought "wow, I better learn to love these women instead of hating them" but that actually wasn't the way out of the jealousy hole.

To stop being jealous of them, I had to ask myself why I was jealous in the first place? This is uncomfortable at first, I know.

It feels weird to be curious about yourself instead of judgmental about others but this is where the magic happens.

Ok so in order to get real with our jealousy we have to say it out loud - shame free.

I also am jealous of how happy they seem all the time. Of course it's social media though and I know there is no way this is true. But as someone who so openly struggles outloud - I really struggle with people who don't. Not in a judgmental way, in a confused way - I have to say how I'm feeling out loud and I think I'm jealous of people who don't always feel the need to let the world know their unmentionables.

I sort of love bonding over the unmentionables I guess, I like making them mentionable.

Anyways - what else am I jealous of? OMG THEY ARE SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. Seriously these two people are so gorgeous and I really cannot critique anything about them. That's the part that makes me extra jealous too. Even though I know the nature of existing in this patriarchal world is insecurity, they don't seem to have it. They seem so strong and confident and sure of themselves. It's actually really beautiful.

So what does all that shit talking tell me?

It tells me what I want. Jealousy reveals to us what our inner needs are. What we think will make us happy. Sometimes people who have lives we think we want make us jealous and insecure because it seems like they are winning at being a human.

But the lie is that anyone wins at all. Lives are not be won, they are to be lived.

This life can only be lived by YOU - the person living it. Jealousy is a teacher, like all emotions it is a message from our subconscious that tells us a little more about ourselves. In this case, I learned about parts of myself that felt like we were lacking or things I needed to explore and work through in order to find true peace in the life that I have.

Because the truth is, I am only capable of living my one wild and precious life. Wishing that someone else do it and believe they would be better is a lie told to me by the patriarchy. Because this system that wants to profit off of my failure and my perceived weakness.

But someone else's strengths are not signs of my weakness, they are actually messages of my wants and strengths. They are signs to help me learn who I actually want to be.

If I get stuck competing with the world, I'll never understand myself. Jealousy is just another part on the road to radical self acceptance. Curiosity about who we actually are and what we want unlocks the parts of ourselves we've hidden away.

Instead of shooing your jealous away, invite it into stay. Learn from it, don't shame yourself for feeling because no one has ever hated themselves into loving themselves. Love yourself enough to learn about the parts of yourself you've hidden so you can heal the wounds you've been ignoring.

Also just so we end on a very human note - I regularly avoid looking at these two women's social media accounts because of the thoughts that come up. I am not ashamed of them nor am I trying to reject or banish them from my brain. Because this is something I have not mastered, I avoid them. Maybe one day, I will interact and be perfect and love everything they say or maybe I won't. That really isn't the goal of all of this work.

The goal of introspection is to learn about who we are and what we really want. We don't have to conquer it or be perfect at it, we are just learning and we cannot learn about ourselves incorrectly.