You Can Actually Transform Jealousy into Love—Here’s How

A few months ago, I reached a breaking point when my disgust with my own personal failures—I’ve never written a book; I don’t have my own podcast; I will never be Lena Dunham—fermented my thoughts into a putrid jealousy that started to rot the insides of my brain.

The foul stench of envy was suffocating me.

Facebook became intolerable. My inadequacies plagued me. Why don’t I have a boyfriend? Why don’t I have a child? Why don’t I have a blossoming mass of Twitter followers to affirm that my opinions matter? These kinds of thoughts bounced around my brain all day long.

I stopped writing. I stopped feeling anything but forced gratitude. And then, to make things even worse, I beat myself up for having these feelings in the first place.

What saved me was stumbling on a Buddhist workshop called “Overcoming Jealousy.” What saved me was listening to a Buddhist monk, clad in a yellow robe, say to the group: “Why do we feel angry when someone else experiences good fortune?”

Indeed.

As he framed it, envy wasn’t something to be ashamed of. It was something to be acknowledged so that we could then throw it away and transform it into love.

I learned this lesson a few months ago, but I still struggle with envy. That’s OK. It’s not the envy that matters, it turns out. It’s our own response to the envy.

At another Dharma talk last night, a Buddhist teacher named Kadam Mortem offered up a quote about how to handle our inner delusions:

Just as a storm has no power to destroy the sky, unpleasant feelings have no power to destroy our mind.  —Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Isn’t that beautiful?

A storm cannot destroy the sky. Envy cannot destroy the mind. 

We don’t need to identify with the passing clouds of envy, anger, jealousy. There’s a blue sky of love and happiness beneath it.

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Here are five quick tips on getting closer to the blue every single day day:

1. Stop comparing yourself to other people. Really. When you hear yourself saying something like, “She’s only 25 and has already done X. I’m 55 and haven’t done X,” just stop. You are on your own journey. Life is not a race. Compare you to you. Congratulate yourself for the small victories.
2. Get off social media—or cut that shit down. If social media exacerbates jealousies in your life, then stop looking at it. You don’t have to go cold turkey. You also don’t need to have Facebook on your phone. Removing Facebook from my phone means I don’t mindlessly scroll through a feed broadcasting everyone’s best moments. I look at Facebook when I’m in the right frame of mind.
3. Cultivate the joy you feel for others’ good fortunes. Even if it’s your first instinct to feel jealous, practice feeling joyful when someone else gets a promotion, gets married, has a baby, does something that initially causes you to feel that tinge of why-not-me-ness. If you have to fake it at first, that’s fine.
4. Celebrate your own small victories. I may have mentioned one, two, or two hundred thousand times that I envy other writers. This is because writing is my biggest challenge. In college, I had a boyfriend who was a superb and very fast writer. He’d write a five page paper in the time it took me to write a paragraph. This felt like a cosmic joke then. As it often does now. My gut instinct is to feel terrible that it took me too long to write whatever I’m working on. But then I just have to say to myself: I’m writing. That’s what matters.
5. Write fan letters. One of my closest friends is a writer who reveres other writers. If there’s any jealousy attached to that reverence, you wouldn’t know it. She writes a lot of fan letters.  I’ve started to do this more often. To sincerely tell people how impressed I am by whatever milestone they’ve reached.

 

 

How to Get Unstuck in an Hour

I’m stuck right now. Creatively. Mentally. Emotionally. Physically. I can’t seem to write anything worthwhile. Every word in this blog post already strikes me as unintelligent—and I’m about 10 words in.

Creative paralysis strikes me when my mood is low. These past few days, I’ve struggled to get out of bed and come to work and feel excited about anything. I can’t stop judging, envying, criticizing. I focus on all of the people who have achieved more than I have even though I know this is a recipe for disaster.

As stuck as I may feel, I’m committed to getting unstuck.

This morning, I opened up my bullet journal, and I thought about one project that I can’t seem to make progress on, which is this blog. I wrote down: “Finish Blog Post.”

And then I scheduled one hour to complete this task.

The task was not “finish amazing blog post.”

The task was not “write inspiring blog post.”

The task was simply to finish something in one hour and publish it, despite knowing it would be far from perfect and possibly shitty.

In journalism school, one of my favorite professors would tell me, “Better done than perfect.” He watched as I’d write and rewrite the lead of an article only to waste so much time striving for perfection I could barely meet my deadline.

The only way I know how to get unstuck is to finish something. Anything. Today, it’s a blog post.

Feeling stuck? Take one hour —or if you don’t have an hour, ten minutes, five minutes! —out of your day and do something, anything, from start to finish.

Check off that box on your to do list. And then give yourself permission to enjoy the accomplishment. Rinse and repeat.

The small steps matter.

Why You Should Stop Focusing on What You Haven’t Done

After I was hospitalized for an acute manic episode my junior year of college, I returned to school with a new medication regimen—Depakote, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Wellbutrin—coursing through my veins. On the Risperdal, my eyes wouldn’t focus. I could hardly read. The Depakote made my hands shake, Parkinsons-like, so that I couldn’t bring a spoonful of soup to my lips without some of it spilling on the table.

In the months prior to my hospitalization, I had enrolled in a Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald course where, sitting next to me in the lecture hall, a guy with curly hair and wire-rim glasses used “maudlin” in a sentence made me swoon. A few weeks passed and, soon, I was manic and not attending any of my classes. The hospitalization lasted 28 days, and then I moved back home—all of my courses incomplete. I never stepped foot in that lecture hall again, and because this was the late 90s, before the sticky web of Facebook and email trapped everyone you knew in the same tangled, social sphere, I never saw the guy with the glasses again.

Back at school the following semester, the Risperdal made reading impossible. I fell behind in all of my courses.

Because of the kindness of a dean I’d met at some point while dealing with the details of coming back to school, my transcript had no ‘incompletes’ to indicate that I’d started courses like the Faulkner course and then dropped out. Instead, my transcript marked a medical leave for a semester.

Now, I had to finish long papers about To the Lighthouse or Lolita, but I was too medicated and beholden to sleep to stay up in the computer lab until dawn to finish essays in the only way I knew how—at the last minute with the adrenaline of sleeplessness coursing through my veins.

My doctor tweaked my medication every few weeks. I got enough done to finish out the semester, but in three of my four classes I had incompletes. Winter break, I tried to finish the essays, but I was too anxious. After another semester, summer arrived, and over a few months, I finally finished the essays to ensure my transcript was not marred by incompletes.

At that time, the unblemished transcript was an accomplishment. It was the document that proved I’d finished something important. But I spent so much time thinking about what life would have been like had I finished the Faulkner course, had I dated that guy, had I finished that semester.

When I am depressed, as I was feeling earlier in the week, this familiar feeling that I’ve not finished anything of substance, that my life is not complete, washes over me. I decide that what I am missing — a boyfriend, a bigger salary, a recently published essay—defines me.

What I try to remember is that it is my responsibility to focus on what I have instead of what I don’t. For me those marks are my meaningful friendships, a healthy lifestyle, a job I can tolerate, a commitment to yoga and spiritual growth, a medication regimen that leaves my hands still and eyes focused. Have I finished a novel? Nope. Will I finish this blog post? Almost there.

Remember that you don’t need to define yourself by what you have not finished.

Remember: you write the transcript of your adult life.

Remember: you are complete.

All You Can Do

Sometimes all you can do is accept that you feel depressed.

Sometimes all you can do is order food online because you can’t cook for yourself tonight.

Sometimes all you can do is come home from work and let yourself cry into a throw pillow.

Sometimes all you can do is turn off your phone because to be tempted to look at others’ smiling faces on social media is depressing.

Sometimes all you can do is to type a short blog post to assure yourself that, even though it’s hard to believe right now, you will not feel this way forever.

Moving towards the light

Well darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable,
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.
—The Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine

Twenty-four hours ago, I was at brunch with a couple friends, sitting under an umbrella at a sidewalk cafe. “This is so perfect,” I said. “I love summer in New York City.” And by that, I really meant: I love my life. I often feel grateful for all of the things I have: my job, my family, my health. Yesterday, the possibilities of my day unfolded. I was energized. I went to yoga. I bought a cute pair of sandals.

Today, I woke up slightly hungover and a little despondent. Sundays always challenge my psyche. All of the things I might have accomplished during the week—more writing, more reading, more learning, more meditating, more yoga—slip away. I struggle to relax. I wonder why I can’t find the energy to write a blog post. Filled with envy, I stare at an article on the front page of the New York Times written by someone I went to grad school with. Then I feel bad about being a jealous person.

Depressive thoughts dig ruts in the pathways of our minds so that negativity flows with ease. Positivity, lightness, does indeed have a “call that’s hard to hear.” To move towards the light, we have to reject the voice in our head that tells us we’re not enough. We have to seek an alternative route. We have to carve out space to let the light in. For me, this means yoga. This means staying off of social media and staying present in my life. This means walking to the bodega to buy myself flowers.

Remember: There will always be something else to achieve in life. Something else to accomplish. Someone else who has more than you. But what matters is what you have, what you’ve done, who you are.

In yoga, my favorite teacher always reminds the class to stop looking at everyone else in the room. This is your practice, he will say. It’s your journey. When I started yoga, I couldn’t come close to touching my toes. Now, once I’m warmed up, my fingers graze the floor. It’s an accomplishment no less significant than the woman on the mat beside me who can fold over her legs and press her chest into her thighs. We’re both reaching from where we were to where we are.

A Chinese Proverb I love says it best: “There are lots of paths to the top of the mountain.”

Anonymous Blogging BreakDown

Many years ago, I opened a Blogger account and started a blog much like this one about bipolar disorder. The catalyst: I had no one to talk to about what I was going through. The disease was/is lonely. There seemed no better place to connect with like-minded (pun intended) individuals.

This was around 2006, when no one thought of the internet as permanent in the way we do today.  Print publications—”real” magazines, “real” newspapers—those were permanent. Anything published online seemed, for most of us, ethereal and fleeting.

Back to my Blogger account in 2005. After I opened that account, I unleashed myself onto the internet. I freely talked about my moods and whatever struggles I had with the disease. I connected with other bloggers. I felt completely empowered.

And then I got a comment from another anonymous blogger who told me that the way that I had opened the Blogger account—with my first and last name in the registration form—meant that the blog was not actually anonymous. Search results were showing my first and last name, he pointed out.

I will never forget reading that comment ten years ago. I was sitting in my small bedroom in the New Jersey suburb where I lived at the time. Horrified, I went into my Blogger settings and immediately deleted the blog in its entirety. That would fix it! Of course, a few minutes later, when I googled my name, the posts were still appearing because the Google cache—a concept I didn’t understand at the time—had not cleared.

Through the help section on Google’s website, I sent dozens of SOS emails. No one replied. I stayed up all night in a panic, convinced my blog would get me fired. The next day, someone from Google responded to explain that even though I’d deleted the blog, it would take at least a few weeks for the old posts to disappear from search results.

For the next month, I lived in agony. I obsessively searched for myself online, waiting for the posts to clear. At some point, I went on a mediocre date with a guy, and when he didn’t call me back, I was certain it was because he’d googled me.

Finally, the blog disappeared.

The weight of my embarrassment was lifted, but I was left with no blog, no outlet, no community. And so I eventually started this blog on WordPress. I registered with a pseudonym. I read lots of posts about how to stay anonymous and blog.

Today, ten years after that initial SNAFU with my blogger blog, I somehow managed to send an email to coworkers that went out with my “yourbipolargirl” email address. How did this happen?I’d stupidly tried to merge my whole life into Mac Mail and didn’t understand when I sent that note I was sending from that address. Terrible, idiotic mistake.

Fortunately, I’ve gained perspective over the years. The soul-crushing embarrassment I felt at the moment of this realization a couple hours ago has lifted. Life is simply too short to live in fear that people will find out who you “really” are.

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That all being said, if you’re thinking about blogging about your disease and want to stay anonymous, learn from some of my mistakes and do the following:

1. Register your account with a pseudonym using an email address you create for blogging only. It’s easier to do this using a site like WordPress.com. If you’re thinking of hosting your own site through WordPress.org or another platform, be sure that you understand the functions and limitations of WHOIS privacy.

2. Do not use one email platform (like Mac Mail) to read email from various accounts. This is my most recent mistake. You risk accidentally sending an email from the anonymous account to real contacts.

3. Don’t write anything you don’t want the world to read. While your anonymity affords you freedom to talk about something private, it’s the internet. Unlike what we all thought years ago, pixels are permanent.

The Mood Swing

Depression is vast. It’s plagued by thoughts that this life may not be worth it. Depression dwells on heartbreaks, on missed opportunities, on failures.

Mania is caught up in the minutiae. Mania is obsessive. Mania writes and rewrites the same paragraph and listens to the same song over and over and over again. Mania wants, craves, and needs more of everything.

Last night I was euphoric. Tonight I’m lethargic. Why? Who knows.

All we have to understand is that we’re sometimes up, sometimes down. That none of this is permanent.

Back to the Blog

I have not written anything of substance or consequence for two months. Instead, I’ve dedicated myself wholeheartedly to yoga, to thinking about spirituality, and to my job. The break from writing was deliberate. I realized that it wasn’t bringing me any joy. I realized that I suffer from the same perfectionism I suffered from when I was 14 years old, and that felt remarkably sad.

I also found out that my ex-boyfriend is having a baby with the 20-something woman he had an affair with while we were together for I don’t know how long before the relationship ended.

About the affair—I found out a couple months ago (see last blog post) because I have an aunt who live in Indiana who I haven’t seen for years who friended me on Facebook .  I spend very little time on Facebook, but whenever I would log on, I’d have a notification that she’d invited me to play some random game with zombie or candy or saga in the title. I clicked over to settings to see if there was a way to block her from sending these invitations and ended up on the screen that listed the people I had blocked on Facebook.

There, listed above my boyfriend’s name, was a name I didn’t recognize because it was her name paired with his last name, a pairing I couldn’t make sense of until a few seconds later, I realized: oh, they did actually get married. Then, a couple masochistic google searches later, I landed on their baby registry. This felt like the quintessential example of why living in the age of social media can be more soul-crushing than just about anything. So I stopped looking at social media. I stopped online dating. I started to go to yoga 4-5 times a week and to practice every morning and every evening at home.

And I have been feeling better—lifted up into more jovial moods than ever before. When I’m thinking clearly, I am grateful that my ex boyfriend left me. This led me to find yoga and friends I never would have made otherwise. Sometimes there are blessings tucked inside the tragedies of our lives. It’s something we all need to remember.

(This blog post is scattered, but I’m publishing it because I want to break out of the writer’s block and put myself out there.  I am going to start blogging more about yoga and Buddhism because it’s what has kept me going.)

Notice the Mirror

All my life, I’ve struggled with the limitations of my mind. As a child, it was a painful shyness. As a teenager, depression and anxiety. As an adult, bipolar disorder, a ruthless master that arbitrarily seemed to decide how I was going to feel from one day to the next. My mind would shift from feeling fine for a few weeks or months to feeling like a failure for an extended period of time.

Buddhist teachings say we need to change our minds to change our experiences. If you have bipolar disorder, you may struggle with your mind more than others, but you also have the privilege of truly understanding this Buddhist view of the mind. Think about it: oftentimes people think to themselves, if only I had more money or fame or wealth or whatever, then I would be happy. If you live with bipolar disorder, you understand that these factors that exist outside of you have no true impact on your mood. You know that your happiness doesn’t reside in obtaining some misguided goal. Your happiness resides within you.

Take yesterday morning. I went to my nephew’s birthday party where twenty two-year-old children stuffed cake in their mouths and danced in circles to songs played by a jovial musician my sister hired for the occasion. Two of the mothers at the party, women I went to high school with, were either pregnant or holding babies. I made small talk with them. And I smiled to hide my sadness.

The self that I normally indulge and listen to throbbed with intense jealousy of these women who are younger than me and have husbands and babies. My feelings of inadequacy and depression were only exacerbated by news I’d inadvertently stumbled upon on Facebook earlier this week: my boyfriend, who told me he didn’t want children and who left me two years ago for a younger woman, is now having a baby.

During my nephew’s party, mantras I’ve listened to my whole adult life—no one will ever love you—you’ve failed at your life—pulsed through my mind.

Then I remembered the Buddhist lesson I learned last week. The teacher Kadam Morten talked in class about shifting from the perceived to the perceiver. In other words, we don’t helplessly succumb to our negative thoughts. Imagine you are looking in a mirror, he explained. Instead of getting lost in the reflected image of ourselves, we can notice the mirror—maybe a dot of toothpaste—and shift from being the reflected to the reflector. We step back and understanding that our truest self is the person who is able to examine our thoughts from a comfortable distance. The jealousy, the pain, the hurt: these are all parts of the mind we can accept and acknowledge rather than succumb completely.

I love this concept of accepting our suffering and living with it. We’re so pressured by society to believe that if we become happy there will be no suffering. But we can find beauty and connection in our suffering if we are able to accept it.

Thich Nhat Hanh explains in No Mud, No Lotus:

With mindful breathing, you can recognize the presence of a painful feeling, just like an older sibling greets a younger sibling. You can say, “Hello, my suffering. I know you are there.” In this way, the energy of mindfulness keeps us from being overwhelmed by painful feelings. We can even smile to our suffering and say, “Good morning, my pain, my sorrow, my fear. I see you. I am here. Don’t worry.”

Here’s how Pema Chödrön conveys a similar message it in Taking the Leap

The sad part is that all we’re all trying to do is to not feeling that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening … so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.

Both of these books are worth reading in their entirety. Consider keeping them by your bedside, as I do, to remind yourself in dark times that you are not alone.

*Important note: None of this is to suggest we can “think our way out” of depression. I am a strong believer in medication paired with therapy to treat mental illness because it’s been so integral in my staying healthy. When I say that happiness resides within us, I mean that we can train ourselves to influence the workings of our minds.

Five Ways to Combat Loneliness

Loneliness isn’t a fact. It’s an emotion that feels like it’s informed by the truth of our lives, particularly for those of us who are often alone. I’m single right now, and I’ll often think to myself: I feel lonely because I live by myself and I don’t have a boyfriend or any plans for Saturday night and, well … insert more negative thoughts here.

Then I remember this: some of the loneliness times in my life have been when I do have a partner. 

At the end of my last relationship, when my boyfriend and I were losing our connection to one another, I would lay in bed beside him, close enough to hear him breathing, yet feel isolated all the same. That was worse than any loneliness I’ve felt on my own. Even if it was a reasonable emotion, it felt like failure. Why wasn’t he eclipsing my loneliness? What was wrong?

The problem may have been in my framing of that question to myself. It’s counterintuitive, but another person can’t keep us from feeling lonely. Being alone or not alone actually has little to do with loneliness. To combat the emotion, we need to first accept that it’s OK to feel lonely sometimes. That being said, chronic loneliness isn’t good for your health. Like depression, the state of being lonely can take a deep toll on every facet of our lives.

So what can you do when the murky grey of loneliness starts to drain the color from your life?

1.  Force yourself to make a schedule. Don’t let the week pass by and then, on Saturday night, sink down into loneliness because you’re alone. And, if you do have a partner, don’t succumb to that temptation of just assuming you’ll watch Netflix and eat Chinese food and that will be your Saturday. Sure, that can be fine, sometimes. But not making plans that stimulate your mind or your body in new ways can be depressing. This doesn’t mean you need to have an engraved invitation to some formal affair for the weekend, but plan something exciting. Maybe that just means trying out a new recipe or baking a cake. Maybe it means going to see a play or taking a long evening stroll in the park. It’s the act of doing these activities that will free you from feeling lonely.

2. Send out some texts or make some calls.
At a Christmas party last year, I found myself in a corner talking to an attractive yet solemn man. Out of nowhere, really, he asked me, “How many texts do you receive a day?” I paused and said, “It depends on the day.” He told me that he only receives one text a day. He was troubled by this. I asked him, “How many texts do you send out to people.” He replied, “None.” I’ve fallen into this trap before. Why is no one calling me? Why is no one texting me? Don’t stress out about this. No one receives phone calls all day long. Instead, send out some texts. Tell a friend who you haven’t heard from for a while, “I miss you!” Even if it’s as simple as those three words, you’ll find that giving leads to receiving when it comes to communication.

3. Complete a project.
Redefine what having plans means for you; you don’t actually have to have a group of people around you to “have plans.” Growing up, my parents always seemed to be going to parties and dinners with groups of people. I don’t have the same kind of social life that they did. Part of this is because their social lives centered around religion and our synagogue and I haven’t made this a part of my adult life. No matter. Instead of worrying that you don’t have something on your calendar, decide on a specific project you want to complete. This can be anything. Maybe it’s going for a longer run or walk than usual. Maybe it’s baking cookies. Maybe it’s reading 100 pages of a new novel. This afternoon, I read 50 pages of a novel I decided I want to finish over the next couple weeks. I so often feel lonely on Sundays, but just having this goal

4. Go to a yoga or spinning or other exercise class.
Earlier today, I didn’t quite feel like going to yoga, so I decided I would practice at home and then maybe catch up on House of Cards. I quickly admitted that this was a terrible idea that would inevitably depress me. Instead, I went to the yoga studio. If I could give my 20-something self advice the first item on the list would be to tell her to get her butt to yoga class. I never appreciated yoga or did it consistently until a few years ago. If you’re not a yoga person, I get it. It’s not for everyone. Maybe for you a zumba class or a spinning class would work better for you. Put it on your calendar

5. Stop looking at social media.
I don’t find Facebook or Instagram to be platforms that are particularly good for my mental health. If they’re platforms that bring you joy, by all means, continue to look at them. My best friend, who’s a very self-assured person, told me last weekend that getting off Facebook is the best things she’s done for herself in years. Remember that social media isn’t real. If you have a tendency like I do to feel pangs of envy when you scroll through a curated feed of all of your friends’ and acquaintances’ best moments, then there’s two things you can do. One, change your mindset and celebrate other people’s joyful moments. Even if it feels unnatural and you’re leaning towards jealousy, if you take on a mindset of celebrating with others the envy will dissipate. Two, stop looking at these platforms ten or twenty times a day. The easiest way to resist? Take the apps off your phone.

If you are struggling with loneliness, the irony is, you are not alone in feeling this way! Nothing on this list is a silver-bullet, but I hope something I’ve written helps you find the peace you deserve.