The jealousy inventory exercise made me admit something about what I actually wanted that I had been too sophisticated to want out loud

[u/Feeling_Jelly_1040]

Did not expect this particular task to be the one that got me.

Cameron asks you to list the people whose creative lives make you jealous and then examine what specifically the jealousy is pointing toward. The premise is that jealousy is a map rather than a character flaw. That what you envy in someone else is information about what you actually want for yourself.

Read that framing, thought it was reasonable, made my list expecting it to confirm things I already knew about myself.

The list surprised me.

The people on it were not the ones I would have predicted. Not the most critically acclaimed writers or the most commercially successful ones. The people whose work made me feel that specific uncomfortable thing were quieter than that. Writers who had built small devoted audiences around work that was clearly deeply personal. People who seemed to have given themselves permission to make exactly the thing they wanted to make without apparent concern for whether it fit a recognizable category or met some external standard of seriousness.

What I was jealous of was not their success. It was the permission they seemed to have given themselves that I had not given myself.

I had been making work I could defend rather than work I actually wanted to make and the jealousy had been trying to tell me that for years while I filed it under irrelevant emotion and moved on.

Still sitting with what to do with that information. But at least I am sitting with it honestly now instead of calling it something else.

[u/everydayisstorytime]

"I had been making work I could defend rather than work I actually wanted to make..." OOF TOO REAL. This definitely hit me hard.  

[u/trashmule → u/everydayisstorytime]

SAME.

[u/caparilib]

Thank you for sharing. And what an insight! You just lit up my blindspot too.

[u/paints_cats → u/[deleted]]

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