Jealousy. It gets a bad rep. If I was Jealousy, I would hire a PR agency and overhaul my reputation, you know like when people started saying “I’m so jel”.
I’m using Jealousy to cover both Jealousy and envy. I think the popular distinction is that jealousy is fear of someone taking something that you have and envy is wanting what someone else has. Both are frequently used interchangeably so I don’t want to worry too much about semantics.
Raise your hands if you’ve ever said “I’m not a jealous person”. Like many other things in life, Jealousy has been reduced to the feeling you have about your romantic partner’s relationship with someone else. It is also used a lot in Nigerian films to set the tone for someone to poison someone else. Basically, it’s the basis of a lot of negative actions.
I think this is unfair. We’ve used the extreme to define the entire emotion, when an extreme of any emotion is negative. At it’s core, jealousy points to something you want, or something you wish you had. That in itself isn’t negative, it can be a catalyst to work on dealing with that desire, because you more than likely didn’t know it existed.
Say you’ve been trying to decide what to do for a career and you still feel like “I have no talents or interests” and then you find yourself repeatedly feeling envious of people with careers in accounting, you should look into that. Say you find yourself jealous everytime your partner is laughing a lot in conversation with someone else, then you probably feel like they don’t find you funny and it bothers you. Jealousy is an emotion, and like most emotions, there’s a source. It becomes negative when you ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. You miss your chance to really confront whatever it has shown you.
We all feel jealous or envious- every one of us- even the people that say “I’m always content and I never care about what anyone else has or may be doing”- be that as it may- we all feel the emotion. If you accept that it’s natural, you will become more attuned to whatever it’s showing you. My jealousy has always shown me my deeper desires and forced me to confront it. Absence of jealousy always shows me what I don’t want- it also shows that I’m secure in that area of my life.
I hope I have convinced and not confused you that jealousy as an emotion isn’t necessarily bad.