Welcome to Am I The Only One with Meg Mansell, our new regular Capsule columnist. Meg is one of our favourite members of the Capsule community, bringing us smart, warm and thoughtful pieces on mental health, body positivity, motherhood and more. This month, Meg gets honest about feeling jealous of other women’s success and how she’s working on changing that, so her daughter embraces the ‘if she wins, we all win’ mentality.
‘COMPARISON IS THE THIEF OF JOY’, I scream internally to myself at least once a day, most of the time right as I slam my phone down after doom scrolling on Tik Tok or Instagram.
Right now, my own personal choice of self-torture is obsessing over women with thick long hair. Hair that falls just right and covers their whole back, while still having plenty left over to frame their faces in the front. I’m tormented by seemingly effortless tresses of strangers on the internet. So much so, that one time it brought me to tears over how consumed with envy I was wanting mine to be like one woman’s (to be fair, I was in my luteal phase).
At the moment my particular hyper-fixation is hair, due to mine getting thinner by the day because of stress or ageing or God knows what, I’ve googled everything. But in the past, it’s been tanned skin, or having a great bum vs the long back that I have. It’s been houses, teeth, jawlines, noses, holidays. I’m truly most ashamed to admit that I have been jealous of other women’s success in their chosen fields too. Many a time, in fact.
After all, it’s been over 34 years of conditioning that women are my competition, and their success means my failure. Ok, maybe not in that plain a term, but through micro messaging over the years like: ‘look at these celebrity women and how ‘awful’ their bodies look on the beach! Let’s laugh! Go on, it will make you feel better about yourself.’
Or, reality TV shows based on women getting rejected one by one for their looks or weight or lack of ‘personality’. All the while 17-year-old me lapped it up. I actually looked back, not too long ago, and found an old Facebook status I did in 2007, sharing my thoughts on how a girl could have possibly gotten into a modelling TV show ‘looking the way she did’.
Red, hot shame flooded me when I saw it – I deleted it and sat for a long time in my own thoughts. How much I have grown over 17 years, and, humiliatingly, how much have I stayed the same. I knew that teenage judgement came from a place of deep jealousy.
Most of the bitter judgements I have made about women over the years have come from that dark hateful place and though I have grown exponentially and now couldn’t fathom deeming another woman’s body as ‘bad’, ever, I still sometimes struggle with the venomous thought of ‘if they are doing well, I am not’ and ‘if they fail, I succeed’.
Thankfully I am now able to – within the same breath – tell myself I am being ridiculous, but I would love to get to a place where those thoughts never even occur in the first place. Especially since having my daughter. If her default thought becomes, ‘if she wins, we all win,’ then I have done my job.
So, it has to start with me knowing through and through that someone else’s fortune has zero reflection of my own successes and that we are all just doing our best. Joy shared multiples joy, it doesn’t take away from your own. And also, remembering that envy can be very imaginative; it feeds on your own feelings of inadequacy and can create storylines that don’t even exist.
Social media is particularly unhelpful at showing everyone’s highlights while you sit in all the hard bits of being a human. My big tip would be to unfollow any pages that only, consistently make you feel shit about yourself.
Also, you know what? It is ok to feel envious of someone sometimes, it’s natural and normal. Even the most successful people in the world have run-ins with the green-eyed monster, so give yourself a touch of self-compassion. It IS hard seeing someone have something that you want, whether it’s as shallow as wanting lusher lips, or if it’s more complex than that, like them getting the dream job you were gunning for.
Feel it, reflect on all the good you have around you (a gratitude journal can really help) and let it go. A little hack is that envy can also be a fantastic motivator, as long as it inspires you in a healthy way to achieve something that is actually within your grasp – and isn’t something that will leave you frustrated and resentful (like no matter how much rosemary extract I massage onto my scalp, I’m just not going to have hair like Blake Lively without extensions, and that’s fine).
We are all doing our best with what we have been given and even if you feel consumed with envy some days for what someone else has, others are potentially distressing themselves with the same thoughts about you and your life. Because we are all flawed humans that have been pummelled with the idea that the grass is always greener.
But if everyone is thinking that, then doesn’t that mean that we all actually have a full, lush thick lawn right in front of us?
So yes, comparison is the thief of joy, but perspective may very well be the preserver of it.
