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How I Stopped Sitting Around All Day Seething With Jealousy of My Peers
I learned the hard way: There are better morning routines than Googling people you envy and hating yourself as a result
I. On Jealousy
“So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”
―William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story
There’s a story I like to tell about the moment my life hit a major creative crossroads in 2004.
At the time, I was 28 years old, stuck in an unhappy marriage, unfulfilled in a PR job at my alma mater, ashamed of the burgeoning career I threw away after fancy stints at the Washington Post and the Village Voice, consumed with trying to promote my husband’s band — which he never wanted me to do in the first place, so that worked out really well — and perhaps most pathetic of all, obsessed with Googling peers who were my age but far more successful.
It was a great recipe for self-loathing and paralysis. The guaranteed one, I think.
