Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, is a helpful and honest guide for writing fiction. She pulls back the curtains to confirm what we all already know about writing. It’s hard! Lamott paints the writing process as one riddled with insecurity, self-doubt, and despair. But she does so with a light heart and a whole lot of humor.
Her chapter on jealousy stood out to me as one of the most insightful and one of the funniest. In it she describes a severe bout of jealousy she experienced when a less-skilled writer friend started to have a lot more success than her. She writes:
My therapist said that jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born out of feeling excluded and deprived, and that if I worked on those age-old feelings, I would probably break through the jealousy. (…) She said it was once again that business of comparing my insides to other people’s outsides. She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.
She goes on to detail the small pieces of advice that strung together a solution for her jealousy. I would summarize this string of advice as follows:
- Show grace to yourself and others, knowing that we will all die someday
- Practice mindfulness to get a little better day by day
- Use humor to make negative feelings funny
- Accept negative feelings and defuse their impact on you
- Talk and write about your feelings
I’m a big believer in using strategies from Stoicism (see “7 Stoic Lessons on Living Life to Its Fullest”) and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to overcome any negative emotion that is preventing you from experiencing more fulfillment in life. This is exactly the stuff Lamott used to move past her jealousy. After putting these strategies into practice, she was able to reach a point of compassion for herself and for her friend, with whom she graciously decided to part ways. She writes:
And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful…
The very day I read this chapter I learned of another resolution to a conflict involving shades of jealousy. In early June, Charli xcx released her album, BRAT. On the song, “Girl, so confusing,” she addresses an unnamed artist and the struggles she experiences in their relationship. Immediately following the song’s release, many speculated that the artist she was referring to was Lorde. This was confirmed when just two weeks later, Charli xcx released a follow-up single, “The girl, so confusing version with lorde.” On the remix, Lorde actually has a verse in which she responds to Charli’s lyrics about their relationship. She responds, in part:
Well, honestly, I was speechless
When I woke up to you voice note
You told me how you’d been feeling
Let’s work it out on the remix
You’d always say, “Let’s go out”
But then I’d cancel last minute
I was so lost in my head
And scared to be in the pictures
‘Cause for the last couple years
I’ve been at war in my body
I tried to starve myself thinner
And then I gained all the weight back
I was trapped in the hatred
And your life seemed so awesome
I never thought for a second
My voice was in your head
This is still pop music. Such a public display of resolving conflict is going to promote the work of both artists, and as the song suggests, “make the internet go crazy.” But I hear the dialogue between Charli xcx and Lorde as being vulnerable and honest. The very act of putting your work out into the world makes you vulnerable. The song’s subject matter brings me back to what Lamott’s therapist told her about jealousy:
She said it was once again that business of comparing my insides to other people’s outsides.
I try to remind myself on a daily basis that everyone I encounter is experiencing some kind of suffering, even those who appear to be happy and successful. Often times their sufferings are internal and go unnoticed, maybe even to the closest of friends. Knowing this can help us all give one another a bit more grace, reconcile the conflicts that divide us, and ultimately, reach the potential that each of us carries.
