I Hate Her: How Jealousy Tainted My Teen Years
By Sadie Lane
Photograph by Hannah Lewis, modeled by Lucy Moore, edited by Kyla Rain
‘The Green-Eyed Monster’- we’ve all fought it at one point or another, whether we care to admit it or not. It’s an emotion we all try our hardest to stifle. Imagine, your sibling gets all the attention from your parents, you get a good grade at school and you feel like that’s brushed off as they are praised instead. Or imagine your significant other spends more time with a friend than they do with you. How would you feel? Although we all experience it, when we act upon these feelings of jealousy, things inevitably get messy. It’s risky business, but does society help encourage jealousy in some way?
At the age of fifteen, I felt I was in my prime; I had good grades, I was in my first band and I spent my weekends at parties sauntering my way through teenage life- tinned cocktail in hand. Gradually, throughout that year, things started to change. The changes were small, but added up; I lost my band, I was invited to less and less parties but what affected me most was when I felt my friends become more distant. What was once a close-knit group of girls was drifting, or so I thought.
I spent hours every evening scrolling through Instagram looking at what my friends were doing. I felt hurt by the fact they were speaking to other people, what was wrong with me? Why was I no longer their first choice? I felt threatened and like I needed to prove myself and establish a reputation just to be remembered. This battle progressed for months, I could never shake the feeling I was going to lose everyone and everything.
Jealousy is an anticipatory emotion, we try to take precautionary measures to avoid losing something or someone we care about when it feels threatened. It can make us feel abandoned, low and unattractive. I had let this pervasive emotion ruin my life: when I acted upon them, my feelings of jealousy made me hateful and angry at everyone because I felt so low myself.
The lowest point was when I started to blame other girls whenever I didn’t feel one hundred percent. I would sit and cry because I couldn’t understand why these girls I was once so close to were living a new life I wasn’t invited to. I couldn’t understand why they got all the attention for nothing, I couldn’t understand why they got the guys I liked or the parts I wanted in shows. Was it because I’m not as pretty? What made these girls better than me?
Eventually, I focused my jealousy on one particular girl. She won over all my friends instantly, she was so effortlessly cool and did everything I did, only better. The anticipatory emotions kicked in and I managed to convince myself she was trying to eliminate me from the group and it did happen, though in retrospect that was no fault but my own.
‘I hate her’ became a song that rolled off my tongue with ease.
Looking back, I am heartbroken that I would ever say anything like that about girls I was simply just jealous of because I felt insecure, it’s completely irrational to say the least.
I’ve always called myself a feminist; I’ve always claimed to love and support women and fight for our equality. I put in a lot of effort educating myself on feminist theory and issues- I read feminist literature and praised women who stood up for themselves and got on with what they wanted and needed to do. I never claim to be an expert, but I always try to educate myself to gain a greater understanding of women’s issues that I don’t personally face. I physically cringe at the thought of me being ignorant. This made me ponder the question, can I still be a feminist if I’m jealous of other girls?
My answer is yes. I am not going to justify my acts of jealousy; they made me a mean person, ruining what could have been amazing memories just because I was insecure. However, I never truly hated ‘her’ like I would say; underneath it all, I was really in awe of what these girls were achieving. It amazed me that the girls I knew were doing so well and all I wanted was to do the same.
Women are always achieving amazing things, literally all the time. However, a lot of the time when we see successful women achieve something, there is always someone pitted against them. It’s an age old practice; we constantly see celebrities hit with this in the media.
In a 2019 interview, actress Constance Wu spoke out about this exact issue. She described the situation as a hypothetical scenario set within a boardroom: “if you’re at a board meeting and there’s only one seat for a woman and all the other seats are for men, it’s not about being a woman- if you think there’s only one seat, it’s going to be competitive.” She then went on to describe working on the set of the 2019 film Hustlers; “nobody was fighting for the one seat at the table”. Constance’s interview strongly exemplifies that women are actively encouraged to be competitive towards each other by being forced to believe there is limited space for us. No wonder we feel jealousy or envy for one another, when there’s supposedly limited space for us at the ‘board meeting’ that is life.
Additionally, psychologist Dr Lynn Margolies explains “healthy competition is encouraged in boys but often seen as undesirable traits in girls. Because women learn that they are not supposed to be competitive and win at others’ expense, what could have been healthy competition becomes a secret feeling of envy and desire for the other to fail- laced with guilt.” This is the quote that really made me understand my feelings I had growing up.
To this day I still feel guilt for how I handled my insecurity and manifested it in jealousy, however, I now understand why it happened. Just like Dr Lynn Margolies theorised, I myself admired these girls at school and their success in their studies and extracurricular pursuits but felt as though I wanted them to fail just so I could simply catch up.
We all know it’s easier said than done to just stop being jealous, but I think it’s important to engage with these feelings and accept them rather than act on them irrationally. In order to break the vicious cycle of throwing women in the ring, we need to shift our perspective from what we don’t have (or could potentially lose) to what desires we are clearly passionate about as they’ve made us feel such envy. Additionally we need to enforce the belief that everyone can have equal ambitions; just because someone else achieved something you want, doesn’t mean it’s now complete and you can’t do it.
If nineteen-year-old me could go back in time and give advice to my younger self, I’d say trust yourself. If I had believed in myself more, I could have been doing things that made me proud. It has taken me years to finally believe I can do things I love, from writing to playing music. I even taught children how to sing to build confidence for a few months: young and spiteful me would have never seen that project coming!
I still follow the girls I went to school with on social media, they are all following their ambitions I was once jealous of, but I am proud of them. I am proud they stayed true to what they love doing and I wish them all the best. I, too, am doing what I love to do every day and I put that down to me finally learning to move on and trust myself.
To conclude, anyone who feels in a similar situation, honestly, just appreciate yourself. As cliche as that sounds, if I had stopped to appreciate myself and my abilities rather than basing success on a superficial level and measuring it against others, I would have been a lot more confident in my own talents.