Positively Envious

Let’s face it, we are not good at handling our emotions. Our society is plagued with a myriad of physical ailments, many of which can be linked back to holding on to negative emotions.

Then there are the icky ones - the ones we are ashamed to admit that we’re feeling. Envy, jealousy. We have all felt them at one point but have been resistant to admit. I want to take a second to re-frame how we view our emotions, in particular envy.

IF emotions are nothing more than messages and signals to us about how we are perceiving our environment, envy isn’t any different. In the past, when I’ve felt envious I immediately shut that part of myself down. I told myself that it wasn’t okay to feel or was secretly embarassed that I even had these thoughts. But what envy is actually telling us is something deep within us that we desire. It’s much less about the person who has it but about what they have. If it’s a car, or their job, or something deeper, like a longing for respect, it’s a signal to us that there is something within us that we may want to investigate or take a look at.

I once felt envy for my friend’s job. She was a Kindergarden teacher and it may sound strange but I just envied her career. She was happy, excited about her work, and she was tenured, but most of all what I saw was fulfillment. At that time, I didn’t have any of those. I woke up dreading going to work, had little work stability (I was in the fashion industry) and was utterly unfulfilled. At the time, I was just flooded with what I thought were negative emotions but now I understand that it was an opening into how I felt about my own job. Deep inside, I knew I didn’t like where I was but I was making good money and afraid to take the leap into the unknown. Those fearful thoughts and instincts would lead me to go to work every day hating life, creating migraine headaches and many other physical ailments I don’t struggle with today.

Now, when an emotion comes up, especially one like envy I take a second to peek inside and see what it could be about. Sometimes it’s as simple as buying a dress, and other times it could be telling me something deeper within. All I know is I’ll never spend 4 years of my life doing anything my heart tells me otherwise.