The Magic of Jealousy

[Warning: Another HOLY-CRAP-not-again! long post ahead. You can read till the end if you've got the time, or just skim around the bold sentences...you twitter-length attention spanned person you]

Attending high school in a community where the compounds are overrun by Chinese students (hailing from Chinese families and nurtured by typical overbearing Chinese mothers) has given me a new perspective on one thing - Jealousy.

Jealousy, oh boy do I know a thing or two about jealousy. Quiet knife-you-in-the-back jealousy, bitchy in-your-face jealousy, jealousy between parents, between girls and their boyfriends, and jealousy between best friends.

Have I ever felt jealous of my friends? Is that even a question? Hell yeah I have. For one, there's the fact that the kids I hang out with can eat like there's no tomorrow, and STILL stay top model skinny (now that really gets under my skin). Or that my best friend ended up dating my best friend (And where does that leave me, you wonder? I'm still wondering myself.)

Then again, the feeling's pretty much mutual (A fact that I have denied myself to believe for years. I mean, how can anyone be jealous of me? Me? Pfftt get real...) Say for example, earlier this year when my friend started accusing me of trying to steal her boyfriend. Which would have made for a pretty hilarious moment if it weren't for the fact that he tried to hit on me first (How much more transparent can multiple messages saying things like "You're so pretty, lets go out. Are you free? What are you doing?"  get?) and that I lightly and SUBTLY rejected him AND that I told said friend to go for him if she was interested.

Yeah, that was sad.

So before people sitting behind their computer screens and wasting five minutes of their life which they'll never get back start throwing their hands in the air and shouting "OKAY, jealousy sucks, we get it already. Sheeeze", I better get to my point.

The point is, jealousy is only one part of an entire process; it's just one link in an entire chain of growth and understanding. Problem is, most people don't know how to cope with it. On one hand, some try to ignore the fact that they're jealous, punch it to the back of their heads and vehemently deny that darker side of themselves. But on the other, the rest of us start brooding like 6 year olds. In a way, its sort of like self torture.

First thing I want to point out is that jealousy isn't something bad in us. It's just a thought among many, and if you've spent enough time recognizing your thoughts, you'd realize that they don't belong to us. Thoughts can't harm anyone, they're like leaves falling off a tree; you can't tell when one will fall on your head, you can't stop them from touching the ground, all you can do is acknowledge that they're there and let it go. It's the attachment to your thoughts that causes the real damage.

So it's perfectly normal to see something someone has and want it for yourself.

That sucky feeling you get when you want what someone else has? That's just what happens when you know(or rather, believe) two things. 1. That only the person in question has it, and 2. That you don't.

If you knew that you had whatever it was inside of you, would you still feel bad?

Here's where the magic starts. That first inkling of something missing you feel is completely natural, it's your mind letting you know that it wants something (Whether that thing in question is beneficial or not is another matter completely) So someone else has a boyfriend that loves her like she's Jennifer Lopez, so your colleague got a promotion, so what if your classmate got first...again?

During the past months, I realized that I've been spending too much time looking at the outside world to actually care about what was going on inside of me. But then I heard someone say to my friends  

"The truth is, you're already beautiful, you're already handsome. It's just your mind that keeps telling you that there's something wrong with you, that if you lost more weight or wore more makeup then you'd be more beautiful, more complete.

That's just a lie they tell you to sell things, it's rubbish. You're already complete. If there wasn't anyone else on Earth except you, would you still think that you were ugly? Compared to who?? People just like to take themselves apart, examine each and everything until they find a flaw so that they can correct it. Nobody gets that you don't need correcting, everything you want is already inside of you."

That's my point, I guess. That love you keep wishing someone would give you? It's already inside of you. The promotion you want is inside of you. Getting straight As is inside of you too. Its freeing to know that what you want doesn't just belong to someone else, it belongs to you too. The magic of jealousy isn't it telling you what you don't have, it's figuring out what you can achieve.

P.s. It took me months for me to get enough clarity to put this down in writing...so go easy on me, kay?