Hello, dear internet friends,

Summer is officially here (in the northern hemisphere, that is!). For me, full-on summer busyness is starting . .  . well, basically right now. One of my favorite things about this season, whether I’m filling hours while traveling or spending quiet days at home, is having time to explore fictional worlds—or the ideas of very real people!—by reading a book or listening to a podcast. I hope to bring you a couple book recommendations in the next month or two, but for today, I wanted to share a podcast episode that resonated with me.  

In the last month, I’ve been listening to the podcast Dominant Stories by Jess Weiner. Jess’s work has long been influential on my life and career, as is well-documented throughout this blog! In this podcast, she speaks with different creators in each episode to break down different types of “dominant stories,” or narratives that we build into our lives that keep us stuck in place. In one episode, she interviews therapist and author Lori Gottlieb. At one point in the conversation, Lori calls attention to the fact that people tend to label emotions as “positive” or “negative.” Happiness is positive, but anger or envy are negative, right? Lori emphatically disagrees: “No! I always say, like, follow your envy. It tells you what you want. It tells you something about desire.”

That statement sent me back a number of years to the moment I came to see envy in a new (positive) light. I was eighteen and admitting to my dad that I felt jealous of someone I knew who was socially way more successful than me, at least in my mind. (For starters, she had a boyfriend. I’d never had one and felt woefully behind in that area of life.) He pointed out that what I was feeling wasn’t jealousy but envy. The distinction he made—at least as I remember it!—was that envy means wanting something similar to what someone else has, whereas jealousy is wanting exactly what the other person has. The difference between wanting a boyfriend versus wanting their boyfriend.

I googled “envy vs jealousy” to check if I was characterizing the distinction correctly. As it turns out, there are varied opinions on what, if any, meaningful differences exist between the two! Merriam-Webster said that “envious” and “jealous” are largely interchangeable (aside from “jealous” having an additional meaning in romantic contexts). On Psychology Today, a social psychologist explained that there is a key difference between the two emotions, but it’s different than what I thought. (He wrote that “jealousy is when something we have is threatened by a third person.”) A Reader’s Digest writer suggested that a difference exists in their intensity. (Jealousy runs deeper, she noted.)

While the various takes on the topic fascinated me, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent here; it doesn’t actually matter if they are semantically or psychologically different in any agreed-upon way. What matters is that once I believed in a distinction between the two, I realized my feeling—my envy—wasn’t about the person it was seemingly directed towards. It was about me. It was about what I wanted in life and currently felt I was lacking.

I saw envy in a new light. It wasn’t a “bad” feeling. It was an informative one, just as Lori says.

Continuing on in the podcast, Lori demonstrates how other “negative” feelings can be instructive, and she sums it up really beautifully: “Our feelings are like a compass—they tell us what direction to go in, and if we don’t pay attention to them, it’s like walking around with a faulty GPS; you have no idea where you’re going.” I love that. As I mentioned a few months ago, I’ve also been re-listening to author and life coach Michelle Elman’s podcast In All Honesty, and she shares the perspective that “bad” feelings are useful when we know how to work with them. In this episode on anger, she explains that emotions themselves aren’t negative, but sometimes our reactions to them can be. It doesn’t help if we avoid engaging with what we feel; in this episode on emotions, she shares her belief that feelings will keep coming back until we process them and learn what they’re trying to teach us. Just wanted to highlight her work because it has been very influential on me lately—and now you have a bonus podcast recommendation!

While I long ago made peace with envy, there are other emotions I struggle to sit with. Sometimes it’s really hard to sort through what they’re trying to say, because the surface-level answer isn’t always the right one. Using envy as an example, I have many times felt desire for what someone else has based solely on what I see of their lives on social media. But it’s not that I really wanted a body/career/social life just like them. Or I did, but only because I thought those things would make me happy. I wasn’t fully content in my own life, so I sought out solutions in the shiny pictures of others. Anxiety can be similarly deceptive. Mine often tells me to deal with this imminent problem it’s just discovered at once!! But rarely—if ever? probably never—is anything it presents as urgent as it claims. An indirect approach, when I can muster one, is almost always more helpful. Exercise. Get a good night’s sleep. See if there was any truth at all beneath the alarm bells tomorrow.

I could stop there and leave the impression that I’ve mostly got every confounding emotion mastered, but that’s not really true. Lately, my challenge has been that when I feel overwhelmed—understandably so; I’ve got a lot going on this year!—I crumple into an emotion that I don’t have a good name for yet. It exists somewhere on the frustration-to-anger spectrum, but neither of those terms fit quite right. Since I don’t know what to call it or do with it, I can get easily overtaken and either fold into tears or get amped up in irritation over anything remotely provoking. Often inanimate objects. (I see you, laundry pile!!)

And that’s a vulnerable thing to admit—I’m considering deleting what I’ve written even as I continue—because it’s hard to admit to not knowing. It’s hard to not feel “in control” sometimes, because I have always thought of myself as someone who’s good at keeping things in order. And also, I’m inarguably an adult at this point. Aren’t I supposed to have a full handle on this feelings stuff by now? But control is the wrong goal. I see now that the aim should be understanding, using my feelings as an emotional compass, like Lori said. There’s power to be found in bringing to light the emotions we’d rather sweep under the rug. Power in asking questions, stepping into unfinished sentences, and making room for things that are ready to be spoken, even if we don’t have the words just yet.

Not just power, but growth. Which often requires overcoming challenges. And what is a “challenge” but a “problem” that’s been given a purpose? Just like with feelings. They’re not so bad if you can put them to good work.

xoxo

Marie