#67: friend jealousy
is a redirecting queue to help you focus on where you want to go in life and how you want to feel when you get there
Hello and welcome or welcome back to Caught Up in Char’s Web!
If you are new here, my name is Charlotte and I post about once per month - you can expect to find reflections on personal growth, meaningful connections, how to get creatively unblocked, and finding wonder in everyday moments as we navigate the very messy beautiful journey of becoming more ourselves
Today’s newsletter is about the obnoxious challenge that often arrives soon after we get clear on where we’re headed in the next chapter of life. After that initial wave of excitement for figuring it all out, sometimes there is this period of what can feel like relapse or backtracking because you trudge up fear stories from the past that have to be addressed in order for you to move forward. Today’s newsletter is about how to walk through these moments and what awaits on the other side.
Alright… let’s get into it!!
Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you, Philipp Kaspar, for the intro music!
Your brain feels like a burnt battery sometimes. The noise in your head screeches like an overheated laptop. Too much comparison, too much scrolling, and too much focus on the gap between where you are and where you’re headed.
Sometimes, when you get really clear on what you want in life, you can accidentally fall into the trap of fixating too much on our distance from it. What starts out with questioning who in your life has the qualities, attributes, job, relationship, body, that you want to emulate turns into comparison, judgement, and lack.
You put so much pressure on yourself to become this new version prematurely and it’s stripped away the vibrancy that the initial clarity brought. All of your fears come to the surface and tell you that you’ll never fully make it to where you’re headed unless of course you cling with a iron clad grip. So you latch on TIGHT and suddenly you’ve invited in your board of directors from hell to the table. And by that, I mean all of the parts of you that try their mightiest to help you but they inadvertently make your brain feel like leftover taco meat. Completely detached from any semblance of its original life form.
One of your board of director parts highlights all of the differences between you and your sources of inspiration, pontificating about how you will never be anything like them.
Another tells you that unless you put a date on the calendar by which you will have made all of these changes in your life, you will never end up getting there. You are trapped in your comfortable little golden handcuffs. You’ll never leap far enough to make the change, this director keeps repeating.
And now you’ve lost the plot.
The purity of the desires that you once held have been perverted into an intense ego trip that strips you completely of the feeling that you were trying to cultivate by making these changes in the first place.
Ever been here before? Do you remember how you got out of it?
For me, it’s brutal honesty with myself. Sometimes that takes the form of long walks and talks with people that I love. Sometimes it’s calling the friend that I have been doing the most comparison with and confessing it to them. Always, it’s an uncomfortable but powerful enough moment of shift that transfuses my ego comparisons and jealousy back into the clarity of my desires.
When this happens, your board of directors from hell are severed from your mind and you snap back into your stride. Finally, you can start building momentum again. You are even more clear on where you want to go and the whiplash of frustration has allowed you to take your desires more seriously. You start giving yourself time in your day to work towards the thing and you slowly start to build confidence in it.
It puts you back into a seat of empowerment. You realize that you had temporarily grown disconnected from the most important part of calling in a new desire… that is, the feeling that you get when you are doing that thing.
Let’s say you want to build a brand that you care deeply about. When you first imagined the version of you that was doing this you felt inspired, uplifted, empowered, calm, and guided. When you momentarily gave too much priority to the distance between present and future you, you felt disconnected, robbed of joy, consumed by comparison, and depleted.
In recognizing how you ultimately want to feel and giving yourself a bit of time to work towards that goal each day, you get to practice feeling that way. It’s exciting! You build momentum and start getting positive feedback that continuously pushes you in the right direction.
I heard something recently that talked about how to co-opt the part of us that is fixated on what others think. Instead of getting trapped in imagining people talking shit about you or thinking what you are doing is cringe, imagine people speaking positively about you behind your back like “holy shit have you seen what Charlotte has been up to lately that is so cool I want to do that” or “wow they seem really happy, vibrant, alive, present” or “damn yeah she is such a good listener I feel great after spending time with her.”
We’re often told to not give any weight to what other people think about us and I agree in principle. But I also think there’s an empathetic part of our brain that does care how we make other people feel so instead of fully trying to shut it off, what if we can use it to our benefit? Start manifesting the dream version of yourself by imagining other people raving about you. Speaking highly of you, singing your praises in the way you want them to be sung. Not from a place of ego but from a place of recognizing the truth of who you are. Spend more time with the people who you know would say those things already. And then also don’t forget to ask yourself every once in a while “am I an asshole?” just to make sure your self-awareness stays online.
We all know that comparison is the thief of joy. But jealousy can be a redirecting queue, taking you back to the first principle of calling anything new into your life… that is, how do you want to feel when you get there?
Start creating moments to feel that way each day. Start putting time on your calendar even if just 30 minutes to work towards whatever it is that you are wanting. And check off a box on your calendar each day that shows that you are taking your desires seriously. Feeding them, fueling them, giving life to them.
You already are the person that you want to be. The fact that you have this desire means that part is already within you. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t want it.
Don’t belittle the gift of clarity. There’s a part of you that remembers what it was like before you were fully aware of what you wanted. In that season of becoming, you felt stagnant, blocked, lifeless, unenthused, and stuck. All you wanted in that stage was an inkling of desire, a spark of inspiration, a clear calling.
You have that now. And you are frustrated because you recognize that you have more terrain to cover before you “get there fully” (whatever that means). But you are not stuck in bed waiting for clarity anymore. You know where it is that you are headed so let that frustration be transfused into motivation. Let it catapult you into finding the time in your day to do the things that you want to do.
Confidence breeds momentum and puts you back on your path.
And then it gets really fun. Then you are so in the stride of becoming that you forget you are even on a path and its only when you look back a few years later that you are struck by awe in how far you’ve progressed. You shed tears at how clearly a past version of you saw and felt where you were headed.
You read back on a letter you wrote to your future self or your future partner and are overcome with joy and awe at the clarity with which you predicted who you’d become. Like how the hell did I know that was going to happen? Because you felt it truly and purely. Because once you are in your stride, it will feel as though it was your natural path all along.
I listened to a podcast the other day that spoke to the differences between how men and women approach spirituality. Often times, men must lose themselves, overcome their ego, and shed layers in order to step into the best version of oneself. For women, it’s the opposite. Society has tried to make us small and stripped us of our true sense of self, our opinions, our importance since we came out of the womb. Our path towards becoming has way more to do with stepping into ourselves than it does stripping them away.
Regardless of your gender, there are feminine and masculine parts to us all and depending on who it is that you seek to become, you may explore whether your path requires overcoming parts of yourself or reclaiming them fully.
The bottom line is, you are way closer than you think. Stop comparing yourself to other people. Stop scrolling and fixating on the differences between all those that have been successful before you. And just start proving to yourself that you are the person that you want to become. You don’t have to stay in that state forever. You can lose the plot and come back to it again.
But just know that if the desire feels true and pure, if it connects you back to all the small and mysterious moments of clarity that you’ve had sprinkled through your life in the form of god winks, then you will become it. You already are because you want it bad enough to get to the end of this post.
That’s all for today!
Thank you for getting Caught Up in Char’s Web with me this week. I will catch you here soon!
Char’s Web Song of the Week
Xandra’s Curation Corner
Xandra Beverlin is an incredible art curator at Pace Gallery, co-founder of PULSE, and dear friend, who so generously pulls pieces for this newsletter each week. I text her a few short bullets about the main themes of Char’s Web and she replies with the most thoughtful articulations of the artists that come to mind. This is my favorite part of writing my newsletter. Do yourself the favor of reading her curator’s notes!
“This is such an interesting theme for this week — and quite honestly, there aren’t a lot of immediate connotations that come to mind, especially with jealousy directly between 2 friends / artists that come immediately to mind. That said, there are so many stories of how groups of artists / friends have influenced each other’s work for the better, either by similarity or drastic difference. The first that comes to mind is the renowned community in the 1960’s in New York’s Coenties Slip.
Frequented and populated by none other than Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist (as well as so many more), the Slip was a site of inspiration drawn from periods of both solitude and collaboration, in what is now known as NYC’s “Seaport”. Logistically, it offered an affordable workspace for these young artists, and grounds/materials for experimentation. Close friendships between the post-war abstract expressionists and even romantic relationships bloomed (Kelly and Indiana were known to have been lovers - Kelly created a work dedicated to him based on scraps from an orange the two shared). While there may be no existing lore of jealousy, it’s reasonable to assume that the work the artists produced were constantly evaluated by the group and pushing them all into different directions and scope. The same energy was likely at play - a fervent calling to pursue a dream, an experience of inescapable comparison, and a discernment of passion x skill. Though we can observe these ingredients interacting nearly 65 years ago, they are not dissimilar to the friendships of so many creatives today.”
— Xandra Beverlin
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
#43: the slobs I peeled off the street
#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
Bringing the heat!!! Thanks for sharing this, Charlotte!