i’m fine, just in a weird jealousy spiral
i don’t hate myself, but i’m jealous of many girls (from time to time)
hi hi hi i’ve missed you all!!! i’ve had a HECTIC time since mid-december so sorry for disappearing on you all. i got rejected from college (booo) and then had to prepare for regular decisions so i had no time for substack posts </3 but i’m back, yay!! since applications are over, i hope i’ll be more consistent. this week, i wrote about how jealousy is a tug-of-war between contentment and longing for me. enjoy <33
Lying in bed the other night, I gave myself a pre-sleep monologue about everything going on in my life when I uttered the name of a girl I knew. This name triggered something in me, and I felt a putrid envy bubble in my throat. I don’t remember what I was jealous of or who I was thinking about when I woke up the next day, but that sharp jealousy lingered on my tongue.
This jealousy, funny enough, isn’t because I hate anything about myself or how I live. Jealousy, to me, is a fascination with what’s out of reach—things I don’t need but can’t help but notice the absence. I am pretty pleased with who I am but I’m weirdly envious. I get deeply obsessive about everything, and jealousy is one of them. I see how a girl talks, laughs, looks, lives—just is—and I suddenly notice its absence in my life. A sudden crack opens between us, and I see the lack of what I have and its presence in her.
This gap drives me nuts. I marvel at what she has and notice I don’t have it. But I don’t loathe myself for not having it, nor will I ever go out of my way to acquire it. I just know I don’t have it and remind myself of it. There’s a constant tension between wanting to change and being pleased with myself. This tension isn’t about self-loathing but the quiet dissonance of wanting something deeply and knowing you don’t need it to feel whole.
Some days, I’m reminded of how pleased I am with myself, now that I’ve left all the adolescent self-hatred angst behind. I’ve grown into someone I like. But then, there are days when I’m sucked back to freshman year me—who was cooler than I am now that I think about it—and think: “Damn it, I need to do more with myself.”
As I see my peers—specifically girls—succeed during these past few months, whether in college decisions, relationships, looks, money, or anything else, my mind is actively working against itself. I spent aggravating years coming to terms with who I am, and then I saw people seeping through the cracks of this fortress of self-love I built. These walls comprise years of awkward teenage moments, fleeting looks in the same mirror, ever-changing hairstyles, and clothes I grew to hate. These people create cracks in the walls but can’t fully seep inside, so I go back and forth between wanting to hate myself but can’t because I’ve been through all that. I’ve been ugly, weird, hairy, disgusting, fat, and everything else. It’s done—nothing to change.
Instead, those jealous feelings warp into a poisonous, wild beast in the pit of my stomach, coming out late at night during my nightly monologue. It sits there, restless and heavy, until I’m no longer excited by what I was jealous of.
For example, there was this one girl I’d never talked to who everyone praised for her beauty. She walked like the world owed her, and people orbited her. I couldn’t help but scroll through her posts, and as I did, I realized she was so cool. She was pretty like everyone said, but an unexplainable confidence radiated from her that I envied. I lacked her curls, her demeanor, and her confidence in being able to put herself out there. I never tried to recreate that confidence because I didn’t care to have what she had—I was just too self-aware of our differences. And yet, for a while, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
But this jealousy was on my mind until it wasn’t. I simply lost interest in her and moved on to the next thing to obsess over, to get jealous of, or to rant to myself.
In the end, jealousy is my demon to tame, but oddly, it is also my friend. It pushes me into unwanted spirals, obsessing over girls I don’t even know. Jealousy makes me stick to old ways, things I strive to change. On the flip side, jealousy reminds me of how far I’ve come in loving myself. The self-sabotage never works because the walls of my fortress are strong.
Jealousy is messy, raw, and untamable. It’s not beautiful—but maybe that’s okay. It doesn’t need to be beautiful to be mine—it just needs to remind me how far I’ve come and make me love myself all over again.
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First of all, I love your thumbnails. They've got a great vibe to them. A bit wong kar-wai color palette. And I really liked reading this! Jealousy... It's there but only if you give it power I think.