How I Tamed My Envy of Almost Everyone But Especially Elizabeth Gilbert

The 'green-eyed monster' became my indispensable guide

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I used to struggle so much with envy that I not only had to get off of Instagram, but I had to ask my husband to stop telling me what people we knew were posting there.

He could ruin my day with a casual comment about a colleague's success or a trip a group of women we knew took together. I would feel left out and jealous and have all sorts of irrational feelings about situations that had nothing to do with me.

"I struggle with envy," I finally confided to my befuddled husband after snapping at him for forgetting my injunction against Instagram news. He would remind me of my own successes, my extensive network of friends, and the fact that we had a pretty nice life.

None of it mattered.

Reason cannot contend with envy.

I intensely grasped the truth of the saying, "comparison is the thief of joy," and felt deep shame for my behavior.

But I had no idea how to stop feeling this way.

If I had understood sooner why envy occurs, it would have saved me a lot of misery and wasted time.

Envy can be overt, as it was with my reaction to people’s fun and good news on Instagram.¹ Or it can be more covert, leaking out as judgment, disdain or worse.

In my case, I could not read an article about Elizabeth Gilbert or listen to friends coo about her books, without feeling something that I couldn’t quite name. It never occurred to me that it was envy. I just thought I didn't like her, even though I did not have one good reason for feeling that way.

What I eventually learned is that whether envy is covert or overt, we are almost definitely projecting.² Usually, when we think of projection, it involves negative qualities in ourselves that we have disowned (what Jung called ‘the Shadow’), which we then start seeing all around us in other people.

However, what is less known is that we can also project buried talents and positive qualities onto others. Jung called this the ‘Golden Shadow,’ which contains the creative potential and greatness in ourselves that we are unable to see (except in other people), perhaps because we were shamed for these qualities or maybe because owning them would be too disruptive to our lives.

So, if you find yourself reacting badly when you see a person announce they’ve just published their first book or started their own business, pay attention. Your unconscious is telling you that you not only have the desire to do something like this but that you actually possess the qualities required to make it a reality in your own life.

What we miss is that the people we envy are not our competitors; they are our guides.

Often, the Golden Shadow is projected as admiration or even hero worship. But it can also take on a slightly more sinister aspect when we instead feel a simmering rage toward people for having the nerve to do what we are afraid of or feel incapable of doing.

The person who may be labeled a nemesis is actually expanding our awareness of what is possible. They show what we have buried in our unconscious that is desperate to be manifested.

We can have trouble accessing this truth because society tells us that envy is bad. It’s one of the seven deadly sins, after all. So when the green-eyed monster rears its head, it can feel shameful.

But feeling envy isn’t the problem. It’s what we do with it that can become problematic.

It’s not just that we so often miss the cue about what envy is trying to help us see about ourselves; we can also become incredibly nasty about the people who have triggered our envy, leading us to gossip about them, cut them out of friendship groups, or revel in schadenfreude if bad luck comes their way. When they are celebrities, it can cause people to irrationally “hate” or “love” people they have never met and even go so far as to join online mobs attacking or defending them.

“I hate-scrolled my nemesis’s posts, picking them apart, ranting to a few close writer friends about my frustrations,” writer

Elizabeth Austin

shared in a terrific essay about befriending her envy of a fellow writer. “I’d read her Instagram captions out loud in a snarky voice to my friends,” Austin remembered with regret.

Who among us has not been guilty of some version of this behavior?

Austin eventually realized that there is enough room for everyone and that another person’s success wasn’t robbing her of the opportunity to be a successful writer herself.

This kind of realization is a big part of moving past envy.

But first, you have to admit you are envious.

For me, the biggest shift came when I finally realized that I actually didn’t dislike Elizabeth Gilbert—I envied her.

I resented how she had charted her own life as a writer while I had spent most of my career taking orders from editors and producers, at least when it came to the topics I could cover. I was better known for my work as an on-air political analyst—a job I stayed in far too long for financial security, or so I thought—than I was for my writing, even though writing was what I valued more.

Gilbert seemed to like herself a lot also, which I now can see triggered me because, for a very long time, I did not like myself very much.

How dare she? Who does she think she is?

As I did my inner work and became more integrated, I started to like myself, too. I noticed that my outer critic sounded a lot like my inner critic. I was projecting my feelings about myself onto Gilbert. Who did I think I was that I could be a full-time writer focusing on the topics that I thought mattered?

Just as importantly, I knew that because I had buried so many of my dreams and abilities in my Shadow, I was only able to see them by looking at another person who was in touch with theirs.

My envy turned out to be a huge gift.

I used the insight I was gaining from my envy to relaunch this Substack publication to focus on issues I cared about, and in fairly short order, it started to connect with people. It was growing quickly. It wasn’t Gilbert-level success, but I was really happy. I was excited about the places I was going with my writing and loved the community that was growing up around me.

Around the time I was having this dawning awareness, Gilbert showed up on Substack and began doing interviews with some of its writers. In the past, I would not have been able to read such interviews without my insides churning. Now, I read them and thought, I really like this lady. Not only was I not triggered; I was reading aloud things she said in these interviews to my husband and marveling at her insight.

I think if you had asked the version of me that struggled so mightily with envy of Gilbert what it would take to make it go away—if you could have even gotten me to see it was envy—I might have guessed that I would need to have Elizabeth Gilbert’s career or even just one book that performed at the same level as hers, knowing that the statistical likelihood of this was close to zero.

But this notion completely misses the point. I was shocked when I realized that I actually wasn’t envious of Gilbert’s professional success. I admired it, but it wasn’t what had triggered me. What ignited my envy was the fact that she was doing the work that she wanted to do and was willing to chart her own course in a way I had been afraid to do.

Just the act of showing up and writing about what lit me up and connecting with my comparatively small community was all it took for the envy to disappear, not just with Gilbert but across the board. I now scroll Instagram with impunity, cheering on other people rather than resenting them or coveting what is meant for them. Instead, I enjoy what is meant for me.

When I was leading a misaligned life, particularly with my career, I was always looking outside of myself, believing that if I had what other people had—or at least said they had on social media—perhaps I would be happier. It was easier to engage in envy than to see that I had the solution within me if I could gain the courage to step outside my comfort zone.

I won’t pretend I never experience envy, nor would I want to stop feeling it now that I know what kind of gold it contains. But, my orientation toward it is different. If I feel that familiar twinge, rather than running from it and the uncomfortable feelings that arise, I treat it with curiosity. I learn from it, and when it’s done teaching me, it goes away.

It seems too easy to be true, but if we can befriend our envy and listen to what it is trying to tell us, it will lead us to exactly where we are meant to be.

Today, perhaps sit with the questions: Who triggers feelings of envy for me? What can I learn from this about where I am staying small or not seeing my own capabilities? What good qualities about myself have I disowned and put in my Shadow? What step do I need to take in the direction that my envy is leading me?

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1. Yes, I know Instagram is where people go to lie about how great their lives are. But in these cases the people really were on amazing trips with their amazing tribe of friends and really did just win an award for their super top selling book and so on.

2. See this post for a more in-depth discussion of projection.