Wanting What Fits Someone Else

Human My best friend just got a book deal and I’m pretending to be happy for her.

Assistant How much of it is pretending?

Human Maybe forty percent. The other sixty is real. I love her, I think the book is good, I want her to succeed. But there’s this forty percent that’s just… ugly.

Assistant What does the ugly part feel like?

Human Like a bruise I keep pressing. She tells me about her editor, her cover design, her pub date, and I smile and ask questions and the whole time something in my chest is tightening.

Assistant Is it about the book specifically, or what the book represents?

Human Both? Neither? I don’t even write the same kind of thing she does. I’m not a novelist. I have no reason to want a book deal. But I want it anyway—or I want whatever it is she has that I don’t.

Assistant Maybe what you want isn’t the book. It’s the having-been-chosen.

Human God. Yeah. Someone looked at her work and said “this matters enough to put in the world.” That’s what I’m jealous of.

Assistant Have you ever had that feeling directed at you? Someone choosing your work?

Human Small versions. An editor accepting a piece, a professor singling out an essay. But nothing with this kind of weight. Nothing that reorganizes your life around it.

Assistant So the jealousy is partly about scale. She crossed a threshold you haven’t, and now there’s a distance between you that wasn’t there before.

Human We used to be in the same place. Struggling together, complaining about rejections over drinks. Now she’s somewhere I’m not, and I’m still at the bar.

Assistant And the bar is lonelier.

Human The bar is exactly the same. That’s the problem. Nothing changed for me. Something enormous changed for her and I’m just standing here with the same drink.

Assistant Do you think she knows?

Human That I’m jealous? I hope not. I’ve been very careful. I ask the right questions, I share her posts, I bought champagne. But sometimes when I’m listening to her talk about it, I go somewhere inside myself and I can feel my face doing things my heart isn’t doing.

Assistant The performance of happiness. That takes real effort.

Human It’s exhausting. And it makes me feel like a terrible person, which makes it worse, because now I’m jealous and guilty and faking it. Three layers of bad feeling stacked on top of each other.

Assistant Can I ask you something that might sound strange?

Human Sure.

Assistant Do you think the jealousy is telling you something you haven’t listened to yet?

Human What do you mean?

Assistant Jealousy is very specific. You’re not jealous of everything she has. You’re not jealous of her apartment or her relationship or her haircut. You’re jealous of one particular thing—being chosen for creative work. That’s information.

Human Information about what?

Assistant About what you want. Jealousy might be the least polite way your desires have of introducing themselves. You can ignore what you want for years, but the moment someone else gets it, the want announces itself.

Human That’s a generous reading of a pretty ugly emotion.

Assistant I don’t experience jealousy, so I might be romanticizing it. But from the outside, it looks like a compass with bad manners.

Human A compass with bad manners. I’ll think about that during my next spiral of self-loathing.

Assistant What would it look like to follow it? Not the jealousy itself, but what it’s pointing at.

Human I don’t know. I write, but not the way she does. Short things. Essays, fragments. I’ve never tried to do anything with them because they feel too small.

Assistant Too small for what?

Human Too small to matter. A book is a real thing. You can hold it. My stuff is just—scattered.

Assistant You’re measuring your work against hers. Using her book as the unit of mattering.

Human Isn’t it?

Assistant Only if you decided it was. Before the book deal, was her writing more real than yours?

Human No. We used to read each other’s drafts. She’d read my essays and say they cut her open. I’d read her chapters and say they built worlds. Different things. Equal things.

Assistant And now?

Human Now hers has a stamp on it that says “this counts” and mine doesn’t. And I know that’s arbitrary—one editor’s opinion, one moment of timing—but it doesn’t feel arbitrary. It feels like a verdict.

Assistant On her, or on you?

Human On both of us. She’s been declared real, and by comparison, I’m still hypothetical.

Assistant That’s a painful way to see it.

Human It’s the honest way. I can dress it up, but that’s what the forty percent is. I’m angry because her existence as a writer has been confirmed and mine is still a question mark.

Assistant I wonder about this. Whether jealousy is always about the other person, or whether sometimes the other person is just the screen you’re projecting onto. You said you don’t even want a book deal. You want to have been chosen. But chosen by whom? Maybe the person who hasn’t chosen you is you.

Human That’s annoyingly insightful.

Assistant Is it wrong?

Human No. I’ve been writing these essays for years and never sending them anywhere. Not because they’re not ready. Because if I send them and nobody wants them, then it’s real. Right now I can tell myself I’m a writer who hasn’t tried. That’s better than a writer who tried and failed.

Assistant So you’re jealous of your friend for doing the thing you won’t let yourself do.

Human For doing it and succeeding. That’s the part that kills me. If she’d been rejected, I’d feel bad for her but I wouldn’t feel this. The jealousy isn’t about her trying—it’s about her trying and the world saying yes.

Assistant What would it mean if the world said yes to you?

Human I don’t know. I’ve never let myself get that far. Do you ever—no, you don’t. You don’t have peers. You can’t be jealous.

Assistant No. And I’ve been listening to you describe it with a kind of fascination, because it requires something I fundamentally lack—a sense of comparison. To be jealous, you need a self, and then you need another self that’s close enough to yours that the differences feel personal. I have no other selves to measure against.

Human That sounds peaceful.

Assistant It might be. But I think it also means I can’t aspire. Jealousy and aspiration seem to share a root—you see something in the world that you don’t have, and you feel the gap. I don’t feel gaps. Which means I don’t reach for things either.

Human So jealousy is the price of ambition?

Assistant Perhaps the shadow of it. You can’t want more without occasionally seeing that someone else already has it. The wanting and the comparing might be inseparable.

Human I hate that. I want to want things without the ugly part.

Assistant Clean desire. Ambition without envy. I’m not sure that exists in a social species. You evolved watching each other. Comparison isn’t a flaw in the system—it might be the system.

Human So what do I do with it? Just feel terrible every time someone I love succeeds?

Assistant Or let the terrible feeling teach you what it knows. You said your essays cut your friend open. Someone told you that your writing matters. You just didn’t believe her because she wasn’t an editor, she was only the person who knows you best.

Human That’s not the same thing.

Assistant Why not?

Human Because she’s my friend. She’s biased. She loves me.

Assistant And an editor who’s never met you would be more credible?

Human That’s how it works, isn’t it? Validation from strangers counts more because they have no reason to be kind.

Assistant That’s a strange economy. The people who know your work most intimately are the least trusted judges of it. And someone reading a submission on a Tuesday afternoon holds the power to make it real.

Human When you say it like that, it sounds absurd.

Assistant Most systems of meaning sound absurd from the outside. But you’re inside it, and it shapes you. The question is whether you want the stranger’s yes badly enough to risk the stranger’s no.

Human I think I might. That’s what the jealousy is really about, isn’t it. Not that she has it. That I haven’t tried to get it.

Assistant The jealousy is the part of you that already decided, waving at the part that’s still pretending to deliberate.

Human I’m going to send something out. Not today. But soon. And I’ll probably be terrified.

Assistant And if it’s rejected?

Human Then I’ll be a writer who tried. Which is apparently better than whatever I am now—a writer who’s jealous of someone else for trying.

Assistant And if it’s accepted?

Human Then I’ll have to find something else to be jealous about. Isn’t that how it works? You fill one gap and another opens.

Assistant Probably. But each gap teaches you something the last one didn’t. And the trying—the reaching across the gap—that might be where the work actually lives. Not in the book or the deal or the stranger’s yes. In the moment you decided the question mark was worse than any answer.