Meeting My Envy for Drinks
Analyzing my own envy, Annie Ernaux's "The Posession" and how to make the sticky feeling useful
Here’s an original experience: In high school, there was a girl that I envied.
There were several reasons for this. For one, her style was mature and beyond her years. She wore secondhand pieces and walked comfortably in suede block heel boots. She had many friends, all in the more creative circles at my high school that I didn’t yet know how to define or feel a part of. She was both stylish and intelligent, artistically inclined and charming — in my eyes, at least.
But most of all, I envied how everything seemed to come easy for her: good grades, close friends and cool outfits. Even her name was just cool, yet familiar, like you’ve heard it in a indie film. Not like mine, which at the time I was ashamed of for being too difficult to pronounce or remember correctly.
Conversely, I felt like my personality at the time was too dull, somehow unfinished and lacking depth. I seemed to follow with the crowd, wear what everyone else wore and everything — from math homework to doing my hair in the morning — seemed so difficult.
I wrote many love letters in my head about her during this time. But they weren’t to her exactly but rather in a daydreaming state where I became her. At one point, this envy almost began to transmute into hate. I didn’t want it to, but after admiring her from afar, day in and day out, my envy was leaning into resentment.
And then a weird thing happened; we became friends, almost on accident after bonding over a common interest. After that, my envy didn’t exactly go away but I became immediately embarassed of it. I tried to shake it off like a bad cold or a mosquito bite that wasn’t itchy anymore. That envious person from before seemed like a stranger to me I was trying to distance myself from. I remember a close friend called me out on this shift right away.
“So what, you’re friends with her now?,” she asked.
“Well, yes”, I would tell her now. Now, I feel free.
A quick disclaimer: throughout this essay I use the words “envy” and “jealousy” interchangeably a lot. I realize that isn’t entirely correct, however, I decided not to stress over it too much because many of us use these two words interchangeably in our everyday lives anywa.
The point is: they both fill us up with feelings of scarcity. That’s the overarching, common denominator here.
But anyway, as I was saying:
In a way, jealousy and envy are forms of daydreaming. A fantasy of your own scarcity. In this way, the highlighted elements of the person in question become the hollow gaps we see in ourselves. Gaps that we maybe wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
That’s why it’s so interesting when it starts to go beyond your racing thoughts and invades your physical reality. When we stalk the person on social media, when we take the time fixate on them compared to when we start to figure out ways that we can mirror them in a way. What are they wearing? How are they doing their hair? Which words are they using?
In Annie Ernaux’s book, “The Possession,” the writer lays bare her feelings of envy towards a woman who is in a relationship with her ex-husband. Ernaux is championed for her work in the genre of autofiction — a blend of memoir and fiction — and the topics of envy and jealousy fit perfectly into that format.
Because what is jealousy, if not a bending of reality? A smoke screen over who the person is in front of you.
Ernaux writes: “I was no longer free in my daydreams. I was no longer the subject even of my own fantasies.” Ernaux doesn’t even know the woman’s identity, or even what she looks like but simply the knowledge of her existence, sends her into a spiral that gushes over the page like an open wound.
There’s a moment where Ernaux’s fixation causes the object of her obesssion to materialize in front of her eyes — or so she thinks. The mold of this woman that she created had become so real that when she sees a certain woman in public, she’s convinced it’s her.
There’s even a hilarious line where Ernaux claims that the very fact that the woman is ignoring her is the evidence she needs: “This way of conspicuously ignoring me constituted devestating proof: It was her.”
In the end, it wasn’t her. Her envious fever dream starts to fall away. And for a moment, even the reader believes it. You follow along with Ernaux’s delusion until it dissapates. Ernaux reflects on how the mere existence of her book shows how much real estate she has given to this woman in her mind:
“Then I began to think that the clues were insufficient. My conviction was based less on these clues…than on my having found in the silent room of the university calloquiium a body, a voice, and a haircut conforming to the image that I carried around in me; on having found the ideal type that i fabricated and, for months, detested.”
The thing that this book succeeds in is painting the very real power that envy can have over you. Her jealousy for the “other woman” is described as something that breaks into the apartment of your brain and overstays its welcome, rather than make a pit stop and leave.
Ernaux does an incredible job of recording exactly, like a medical examiner, how this sensation holds her hostage for so long. She continues in another section of the book:
“I have succeeded in filling, with words, the absent image and name of the woman who for six months continued to put on her makeup to go about her business, to talk and to enjoy herself, without suspecting that she was also living elsewear, in the head and the skin of another woman.”
The very act of documenting this feeling, ends up being (I think) the very thing that frees Ernaux from it.
Because we’ve all been there, making the choice to soak ourselves in envy and bitterness. Like a long day in the sun, we absorb it — we linger in it, we romanticize it. And in a way, we need a place to release it.
Looking back, I see that feeling envy towards the girl in high school was equally enjoyable as it was painful. While the comparison stung, it also provided a blueprint for who I wanted to be. Because now, as an adult, I reflect on familiar attributes about myself that feel like me: my creative circle of friends, my vintage clothes, my suede boots clicking on the sidewalk — all of these elements that I first saw and felt a hunger for through a random person in my class over 10 years ago.
While envy often feels too grimey to touch and play with, there were moments where it brought a lucid clairity of finally knowing what I wanted.
Perhaps, the romantic optics of envy and jealousy need to be fine tuned. Yes, it can be tragically poetic to stew in your desire to be someone else, but what can feel even better is transforming it into something useful and powerful, rather than destructive.
The answer isn’t to slap a band-aid on your envy or masquarade it as something else. And it may not even be making friends with the person you’re envious of. Instead, I invite you to challenge your envy. Not by rejecting it or badmouthing it but making nice with the feeling for once.
Maybe, we need to take envy on a slow stroll through the park and learn about her. Meet her for drinks. Ask the questions you’re afraid to ask. She might be able to tell you something wortwhile. Maybe, she’s trying to tell you a hard truth about yourself that you would rather see through another person.