Saturday, March 31, 2012

It Wasn't Me, It Was That Crazy Jealousy

            “I shouldn’t care! I don’t care! Ugh I don’t know why I care! Why do I care? Nothing is going to happen anyway.”  I couldn’t say anything. I just had to let her talk.  We have all felt it before.  That bubbling feeling that fills us when we get those pangs of jealousy.  We can get it over almost anything from boys to grades to jobs to boys, pretty much if it affects us we can feel jealous about it.  Our first reaction is to reject it, to blow it off as something evolution just forgot to get rid of like appendixes, but maybe we shouldn’t.
            We may be creatures of emotion, but often that we forget that the basis of emotion is innate logic.  No, that doesn’t mean that you were right that the girl talking to your boy of the moment is truly a whore, but it does point to something deeper.  When we feel jealousy, we are given a window into exactly what we actually want.  Although other forces are pushing you toward that perfect romance, being truly jealous (not just the fake kind that you say to her) of your friend who has just gotten a cushy raise can tell you something about what you really want.  If you really break down why you are jealous, you can discover exactly what is important to you.            We are born into a world that tells us to want so much.  From individual things to lifelong pursuits in order to be happy, everyone is telling us to want something.   Advertisers are telling us to buy now, universities are telling us to be deep thinkers, our employers tell us to work hard, our parents tell us to find happiness, churches are telling us to make God happy our friends our telling us to have fun.  In all of this noise can it really be possible for us to know exactly what it is that we want.  Jealousy is like an alarm going off inside of us, telling us to stop and look that there is something you really want. 
            So why then is jealousy such a problem? Simple, it is how we react to it.  Because it is such a private emotion, for the most part no one has ever taught us how to properly deal with it.  In our own frustration of what to do with this strange emotion, we become angry and often attack.  Who do we attack? Often the very person we are jealous of, to rip them apart and take away what they have in order to feel better about the fact that we ourselves have not achieved it.
            This poses a bigger problem, because we have taken a person we have seen achieve our goal often coming from the same place we have, and we have turned them into an enemy.  What we should be doing instead is turning them into a mentor and to learn from their tricks to get what we want.  There are tricks to every trade, and odds are in addition to hard work, your friend has used them.  Studying how they did something can help you achieve it also.
            Instead of taking a moment to attack, we should be taking a moment to change our own course, to recognize what we want, and to become our own greatest accomplishment.  We are all capable of achieving what we want out of life; we just have to recognize that we want it enough to go after it.  After all, if you don’t want it enough to go after it, did you really even want it at all?
           
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