on envy
Envy has long been a theme in my writing, in my thoughts. I had a whole stand-up bit about it. The last time I ever did stand-up, I "opened" for Pete Holmes (i.e. I went on right before him on a packed lineup in a comic store basement, but "opening for Pete Holmes" sounds better) and I did a lengthy bit about the strange lens of envy endemic to only children. When you have no one to compare yourself to, you compare yourself to, well, everyone. I've spent my life looking out.
This essay gobsmacked me, it's a must-read - the most potent writing on envy and the self that I've ever come across: There I Almost Am: on being a twin, and envy
“At the same time, twins have the right to be different and to create their own sense of themselves.” As an adolescent I was eager to exercise this right. Now I worry that, no matter what happens, I am unfinished, synecdoche, half the apple. In America, “How are you different?” and “How are you special?” are the same question. We must all be equal, but also different and special, and so with twins, who are the same but different, a dizzying, ever-vigilant accounting is necessary."
By contrast, the Dutch and Japanese champion the credo The longest nail gets hammered down. Better to be a twin there, then. Psychologically.
Right now, I'm envious of my future self, the one that's not only finished this new screenplay (I am, somehow, halfway there!), but the me that has also then edited it, shaped it into something actually funny. I'm envious of the future me who is positively rained upon with usable ideas, and that sits down to write in a way that doesn't feel like sitting a dentist's chair.
(To be fair, I actually love going to my new dentist -- there are rabbits in the waiting room and you get to watch Netflix while they work on your mouth. At the end of my last visit came the inevitable "Do you floss?", and I answered honestly:
"Not in 2020, no. It was the first thing to go. But I'll be better this year!”
"Eh, don't worry about it. If you don't, you come back in a few months and we'll scrape it all out." Generous, to be sure, but now every time I look at the floss in my drawer, I think -- what's the point?).
Back to the twin essay:
"WHEN DOES ENVY BEGIN? In her essay “Envy and Gratitude,” Melanie Klein traces it to the body of the mother...“Think of the breast from the infant’s point of view: I am suffering, I am wanting, I am alone. And then, as if by magic, a nurturing object appears and quenches every thirst, removes every anxiety, wraps me in a cocoon of safety and love. So, Mother has the thing that will end all discomfort. But she doesn’t always give it up, at least not fast enough, which must mean she’s keeping some for herself. That produces envy.”
“Wanting what someone else has,” I said.
“Wanting to destroy what you want that someone else has.”
----
I don't necessarily have that destructive impulse - I want us both to have it, equally, at the same time. More, say, communist than arsonist.
I've been thinking a lot about reciprocity. In just our few sessions together, it's come up quite a lot in therapy. Is it that I'm a Capricorn, or the daughter of a lawyer, or the only child-cum-witless referee that bore witness to so many parental arguments to that I'm overly concerned with a sense of fairness, of justness? The whole messy, impossible affair makes me want to just rely on the self (mine), but in one's emotional life, and in one's working life, one has to rely on others, and hope they lend out the kind hand, close the circle of humanity in the own small way that they can. It's horrible, this hapless reliance. It’s exhilarating, this hapless reliance.
In this magnificent essay (via Jess's perfect newsletter), the writer who saved my 2020, Helen Garner, writes:
"But where do I end and other people begin? I once went on holiday to Vanuatu. There I saw a row of tall trees across the tops of which a creeper had grown so hungrily and aggressively that it had formed a thick, strangling mat: the trees were no longer individuals, but had become part of a common mass. I found this spectacle strangely repellent. It filled me with horror. But the older I get, and paradoxically the more hermit-like I become in the wake of my spectacular failures to be a wife, the more I am obliged by experience to recognize the interdependence of people.
How inextricably we are intertwined! We form each other. We form ourselves in response to each other. It’s impossible to write intimately about your own life without revealing something of the people who are close to you. This has always been an ethical problem for me, and it always will be. Scour and scourge my motives as I may, consciousness always lags behind action—sometimes by years. Self-awareness is studded with blind spots. Writing, it seems, like the bringing up of children, can’t be done without causing damage."
In the car this morning, Rowan mentioned wanting to go barefoot in the pool at school. Zoe screeched “WHAT?!” and laughed, and laughed. “I don’t want to go blueBERRY foot in the pool!” I gasped in the absolute elation at witnessing her understanding of language take form. “BAREfoot and BERRY are different!” I explained, grinning. But without piggybacking off of her brother’s bigger word, she would not have been able to crystallize her understanding of the smaller one.
We crave connection, but are consistently confounded or disappointed or exhilarated at how messy it can actually look. We are the hungry, aggressive trees, yearning to become a common mass but with our own legs beneath, our own rings of years of experience, our own birds making nests inside, our own bugs creeping up our ankles, rot threatening our roots, songs of experience our mating calls back and forth, back and forth.