Do you have a 'life nemesis'?
The compulsion to compete and compare is hard-wired into all of us, not matter how high up the pecking order you sit. Here's how I finally set myself free...
There are countless individuals that I have been envious of throughout my life. I’ll start with the basics, shall I? Almost certainly women who are taller, slimmer, and smarter than me. Then there’s the women who are more ‘together’ than me, more accomplished, more zen, more able to conceal their anger, their pain, their over-excitement when the occasion calls for it. Those sorts.
Next are the women who have written better books than me, edited better magazines, managed to choose properties in better postcodes. There are the women who somehow manage to actually do the things we journalists write about (but never do), like line every single item of their holiday wardrobe with tissue paper to prevent creasing. Or keep spare birthday cards in drawers, because, you never know when you might get caught short. There are the women (and come to think of it men) who can roll into a room on casters of unadulterated confidence, and who, when asked a question that is clearly out of their ‘wheel house’ (also people who use the phrase ‘wheel house’ understanding what exactly that means) and can then give an answer that silences a room. I’m envious of them too.
You get the idea. The green-eyed thug has walked with me through most of my adult life.
But these envies are small fry compared to what I call ‘my life nemesis’. That is to say those individuals, whose lives, when viewed from afar, make me feel like I am suffocating. Every win they have, every accolade they collect, every goal they smash, leaves me feeling wounded. ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,’ wrote the late Gore Vidal, America’s great man of letters, lover to thousands and owner of the most ravishing home on the entire Italian Riviera. Because if you’ve got everything you ever wanted in life, what’s the one thing left to desire? Other people’s failure. Or at least, so it seems.