jealousy, jealousy

let's work it out on the remix?...

I’m spending my Thursday afternoon doing something totally, entirely normal, as all normal people do: zooming into your latest Instagram post. Frantically studying you, top to bottom and side to side. Every slide of your well-curated carousel looks just right. Another announcement of an event you’re attending. I’m in a frenzy, on a quest to dig deep enough to expose the secrets you’ve been hiding. How are you so skinny yet toned? Why does your hair look so good? Are you a nepo baby? Be honest. I’m trying to decipher something unarticulated, not sure what exactly, like a one-man rodeo I’m riding out until I’m at the finish line and I can watch you trip and fall. Oh, but you never trip or fall — you just keep soaring. As if your commercial success wasn’t enough to break my spirit, you also have abs. Unbelievable. I know what you are: a personal attack on my existence. I can picture you effortlessly slipping into a business casual two-piece and jumping into an Uber on your way to a meeting with white-collar executives, and I know that for you it’s realistic and probably an actual scenario, and it makes me sick. I’m not a pretty cheerleader or a girl power advocate, I’m an insecure hater: I roll my eyes at each one of your interviews, your butterfly-esque personality, your creative outlets, and the neverending opportunities that seem to fall into your lap on command. You’ve got so much energy, so many accolades, and all I’ve got is a mute button to never have to witness what you’re up to. I’ll mute, but I’ll still come back to stalk you. Because of course I will.

And you know what drives me insane? You’re nice to me. You always want to meet for coffee, even though I was down for a week after we spoke because I had nothing to brag about. You want to catch up and tell me you’re proud of me, and I feel inadequate in your presence. You sing praises to my writing and I can’t help but think you’re lying to my face — wrapping my mind around someone so accomplished sincerely enjoying anything I do is an impossible task. You think highly of me, and I feel like a gimmick. My hatred is one-sided and unrequited, so I chalk it up to fake niceties: it’s easier for me to presume you’re performing a condescending little number than to admit you’re simply a good person who wants to be my friend. Your grace is yet another echelon of perfection I’ve never touched, and I think I’d hate you less if you were just a tiny bit more flawed.

How we relate to other women will always be a multifaceted dynamic: sure, there’s friendship. There’s empathy. For queer women, there’s romantic and sexual feelings. But there’s also jealousy. Envy. Competition. Shame we don’t acknowledge, ripe as summer fruit, ready to burst at any moment. I can talk all day about the women who inspire me — but if I'm honest, they terrify me just as much. I know we’re not supposed to say this or even think this, but I can’t observe women from any place other than comparison. I’d like to think my comparison mindboard is just a warped attempt at relating to a woman — a sort of “you’re just like me” taken too far, contaminated fraction of sisterhood, where any deviation that isn’t playing out in my favor switches on the inadequacy light in my brain. I can’t acknowledge brightness, intelligence, and success of another woman without simultaneously coming to terms with my own lack of brightness and all the parts I’m missing. I’m standing face to face with everything I could be, and it clouds my judgment in the worst way. Simone de Beauvoir articulates this particularly well in The Second Sex (1949), explaining that patriarchy limits our ability to relate to other women. Our empathy goes only as far as assessing their place in the world against our own. “She’s successful” becomes “she’s more successful than me”, “She’s beautiful” turns into “She’s more attractive than me, therefore a direct threat to my beauty.” The more we seek to affirm ourselves equal to men, the more we compete with each other and internalize the rules of a patriarchal game that benefits from our competition. This mirroring breeds mutual hostility. What should be sacred — that is, the connection between two women — is contaminated to the core by all the systems in place designed to keep us apart. Is it up to us to change it? I’m not sure. It seems like a lot of progress has been made, but nowhere near enough.

The hardest, and maybe saddest, thing about sharing a space with another woman is that we were never taught or explained the abundance a woman-to-woman connection entails. The potential of such love could move mountains, and yet we’re apprehensive and scared to stand closer to one another. Stripped of their purity and communal love, our relations with women are still about rivalry, guilt-ridden hatred, and competition; another woman’s success is juxtaposed to your own no matter how hard you try to hide behind the girl power bravado. It’s an insidious practice: we’re taught to support women yet we must “stand out” from the rest; we’re taught to publicly associate ourselves with our female peers and identify with their positive qualities, yet secretly disengage from the unspoken principles and values of womanhood. Instead of eating together, we practice who can go hungrier in silence. Instead of bonding over our insecurities and the stinging impossibility of adhering to every standard, we play a losing game of who can play-pretend the most effortless in the room. Instead of wiping tears off each other’s cheeks, tears we all know fall far too often and far too lonesome in the comfort of our bedrooms, denying ourselves the warm embrace of the only group of people who can truly understand us, we put up an impenetrable facade against the perceived villains and attacks of our own making. Instead of showing empathy and bonding over shared interests, we call girls pick-me’s and publish thinkpieces on the absurdity of trends (don’t even get me started on this, I’m guilty too) when in reality those are nothing but an avenue of trying to find a sense of belonging in the world. We stand together in the face of the problems, guilt, and loneliness that unite us, and yet we’re all alone, pointing fingers at “the other” every opportunity we get. We know that female companionship is important — we’re just not sure how to sustain it outside of the neverending race for the prize. A prize none of us even want or can conceptualize.

Looking at envy and inadequacy we feel towards other women from the perspective of shame helps piece the puzzle together. Brené Brown in The Gifts of Imperfection explains that shame thrives in secrecy and is perpetuated when we hide our true selves, contributing to envy. She notes, "Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it—it can’t survive being shared.” And it’s true: you can’t just openly admit to these negative feelings without coming across as a bad feminist, a crazy bitch, or a petty hater. Our shame goes hand in hand with silence: sharing how we really feel requires courage, and courage is not always cute. In fact, courage often means saying the ugly, diabolical, outrageous thing out loud.

I wasn’t initially going to write about it, as I am nothing but meta-metabolizing what’s already been said a thousand times. Female jealousy… groundbreaking. But I was so moved by Charli XCX’s new track Girl, so confusing — particularly the Lorde remix and Ella’s verse on it, I just had to. She put into words what I’d been trying to say — or avoid saying — all along. The complete uno reverse Ella is pulling on what is usually expected of women to think and say is quite genius. She’s voicing what we’ve all been guilty of, and does it brilliantly with just enough introspection and self-awareness at play. Ella bites the bullet for all of us to reflect on. What a vulnerable, sophisticated thing it was for her to lay it all out in the open: her struggle with disordered eating and weight, her projection of a perceived “perfect life” onto Charli, her canceling plans out of inadequacy and not passive aggression (and who hasn’t been there??) and, finally, the conclusion she comes to that sent chills down my spine upon the first listen:

“Forgot that inside the icon there’s still a young girl from Essex.”

I think this is where the solution lies. Compassion is the remedy. Not girl power, not trying to relate to every woman you know, not cheering on others out of necessity. Compassion! The distrust and the turmoil were never about Charli. Ella failed to see that beneath a successful chart-topper is a young girl who doesn’t quite know how to love herself or let herself be loved and admired by others. Even outside of the music industry where image is everything, each one of us is that girl, no matter how tough and unbothered the facade is. At some point we have to question whether our desire for self-protection sabotages our potential for connection, leaving us to bleed out on our own. It’s just self-defence until you’re building a weapon. Indeed. When I hold enough compassion for the women I encounter, my shame and envy cease to have power over me — we’re both just trying our best, so what am I getting defensive about? My guard goes down. I can lay my armor to rest. I don’t feel the need to fight anymore: a girl that’s hurting just as much as me is not my enemy. I want what’s best for her, for me, for both of us. Her joy is now my joy. We’re not mirrors to each other’s flaws — we’re two pieces of the same broken mirror glass.

And now, back to you, the woman I’m deeply and abrasively jealous of. I don’t know how I feel about you. I’m not going to pretend we’re BFFs now that I’ve come to my senses — I don’t see laying a friendship on a shaky foundation of my deep-set insecurity feasible or worthwhile. I still have lots of work and self-digging to do on my part. I see a strong woman, one that knows what she wants, and it terrifies me. What I can do is acknowledge and understand that how you make me feel is not about you — it’s about me. And while your graceful kindness continues to shine upon me, it’s probably okay that I’m not ready to accept it. Someday I’ll come around to it. You are admirable, and even though building conspiracies in my head on whether you’re blessed by nepotism, luck, or genetics is much easier than seeing you for all the beauty and grace you embody, maybe I can take it one step at a time and let you know, at least through this post, that I think you’re very cool. And I’m proud of you, too — being a girl is confusing as hell, and you’re doing a great job.