Dealing with Envy

What do you do when it seems like everyone is succeeding and you aren't?

Dear Sonal,

I’m a newish writer. I’ve been working daily on forming a practice. I’ve been trying to get a writing group going. I’ve taken classes and have been reaching out to people to build my writing community. I’m sending work out all the time. It’s not easy. Every success I’ve had comes after so much rejection, so much time and energy expended. But I get it—everyone has to pay their dues.

Which is why it pisses me off to see other writers sailing through this process and succeeding.

And honestly, often it seems like these are writers who aren’t any more experienced than I am, but they’re winning contests and getting book deals and going to residencies and presenting at festivals, and basically, living the life that I have been busting my ass to have.

I know I should be happy for them, but I’m not. I don’t know why they are succeeding and I’m not. And it makes me feel like all this work I’ve been doing is for nothing, because all the rewards are going to people who are… undeserving. I feel bad even using that word because I’m sure they’re also doing all the things, but it makes me so upset to see everyone else doing well when I’m not.

What do I do?

Sincerely,
Green With Envy

Dear Green With Envy,

Jealousy among writers is a bit like trying to emulate the minimalist style of that asshole Hemingway: we all go through a period of doing it, but most of us eventually get over it, even if it occasionally still pops up. So this is very normal, and nothing you need to feel bad about. After all, it's just a feeling.

My second nemesis--now an ex-nemesis, I've since moved on to a third nemesis who is simply an asshole--was born from jealousy. In many ways, that was very handy, in that I could focus all my mean-spirited misery in other people's success on one guy, and get it out of my system. This left me free to feel happy (or at least neutral) about everyone else. So if there's one writer who particularly gets under your skin, I suggest making them your nemesis. This relieves you of any guilt over wishing bad things upon them, since what else is a nemesis for?

Rather than feeling bad about being a human being with human feelings, my advice is to revel in it. I mean, don't pull a Yellowface* and steal your dead nemesis' manuscript and try to pass it off as your own or anything. But just revel in the feeling for a while. Wish horrible embarrassments upon them. Imagine scenarios where you are being feted at a writing awards ceremony and you spot them at the edge of your crowd of admirers and paparazzi and media (because surely book awards are like the Oscars, right?) and you very graciously acknowledge their presence with an airy wave in their general direction. As you and your entourage leave the room, they literally writhe with jealousy. The catering clean-up crew gives them a wide berth as they clear out the room; after all, now that you have left, nothing else matters.

Fun, isn't it? And you know, publishing is a funny business. Some people don't get the acclaim they deserve until much later, so theoretically, this could happen.... I mean, not the paparazzi part, that doesn't happen, but the realistic bits. Feel free to use this scenario to motivate you, because personally, I find spite is really useful as a motivational tool.

(*Also, if you haven't read Yellowface, you must. Pluck it off the TBR pile right now.)

Still, here's what I want you to take from this imagined scenario. The person you are jealous of may very well be jealous of you one day. Or someone else might be. But still, be gracious because nothing makes a jealous nemesis squirm more than you acknowledging them as a random well-wisher.

In any case, that’s what you do with the envious feelings while you have them. You let yourself feel it and you try to make it fun. The thing is, you will probably get over it.

Envy is often rooted in insecurity, and as writers, we deal in a lot of insecurities. We don't know when we start project if it will work out well. If it does, we don't know if we'll ever get published. If it gets published we don't know if it will sell well. And even if it does, we don't know if we'll be able to do it all over again for the next book. Heck, early in our writing life, we often don't know if we deserve to take time to write at all, so yeah, seeing all the accolades and success coming to someone else when we're sitting around looking for validation in the form of this same success and accolades? Kind of makes envy a given.

But you will probably get over it. The more you write, especially with an eye to putting your truest self on the page, the more you will let go of some of these doubts whether you "succeed" or not. I mean sure, you may never completely know if something will get published or if it will succeed. But you'll find that the outcome matters a lot less because you don't need those markers of success to make you feel like it’s okay to take time to write. You'll just take time to write.

Because ultimately, that’s the point: to write.

All the rest is something you have no control over. The awards, the publishing contract, the agent—those aren’t things you control and they aren’t the reason for doing this. As Kareem Abdul Jabbar elegantly put it on his Substack about LeBron breaking his scoring record: “It’s also about not making scoring your obsession. Otherwise, you’re Gollum and the record is your Precious.”

The outcome, the conventional markers of success are nice, but they aren’t your Precious. They aren’t the point, and the more you focus on the writing itself, the more you’ll start to really believe that this is true.

That’s probably about the time when you realize that you can’t even remember what your nemesis is up to these days, and more to the point, you don’t really care. Perhaps you’ll even value being in community with them, unless of course, they are actually an asshole, in which case they can remain your nemesis for a different reason.

But you're still going to write, and sink into the world of your characters and play there. You're still going to keep putting your heart and soul on a page. You're still one of those lucky people who know what they are meant to do in life, and you're still going to keep doing it.

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Readers, have you been jealous of other writers at times? Let’s share those moments, because much like bananas, locking feelings away and ignoring them for a long time makes them get all slimy and gross.