Jealousy is all about seeing what other people have and wanting to make it your own, whereas envy is more typical of seeing what other people have, wanting to make it you own via either taking it from that person or wanting to have it in such a way that no body else can have the thing you now have. Envy, is for my intents and purposes bad, as it is a destructive force, for the most part, if acted upon. Jealousy is, if utilized 'properly', a constructive emotion when harnessed as motivation to better your own well being when you see a standard of someone else and want to pull yourself up to that level(orhigher!) and nobody else gets hurt in the between time.
Here's where all this comes in to play. I'm jealous.
I said it. I meant it. I intend to do all in my power to make it so I have no reason to be.
If anyone has actually followed this blog, which, given our sporadic[read: non-existant] posting after graduation, and really for the better part of senior year when some serious shit was going down, is unlikely, you may have realized that we don't post often. And as of lately, we don't even talk as much as I would like to.
A good part of this, is that I have nothing important to say, I have work, and Jessie has work, and now school and possibly subbing work beginning soon, and life has just happened and I found myself going, hey wait. Where'd my friend go?
The answer? Exactly where I left her.
She didn't go anywhere, she's still there, on facebook, on twitter if I really wanted to find her in all her interweb spaces; still lives in the same house in the same city in most of the same places. So why did I feel like she had disappeared all of a sudden?
Because our friendship had boiled down on my side to being nothing but a place for me to vent about my relationship and the random things that happen during the day. Granted it was also talking with her about both good and bad things, but I felt like I had nothing interesting to say, so I left the little good things out and just kept them to myself and only realized after looking back that a lot of what made our friendship great was the understanding we had between each other that we could post random videos or pictures of penguins and bunnies etc and no further explanation was needed. AND we could also come to each other for important advice and life decisions and know we were supported and safe from being judged(too harshly, we're human okay?).
My problem is that the person I am spending most of my days with now requires that explanation, because we've only known each other for about two years or so now, whereas I've now know Jessie for a little over five. That's double the time plus a little, and we lived together or in very close proximity for a while so we got to know the other person's likes, dislikes and habits and quirks pretty quickly. And even though I am no living with my significant other, it's taken me this six months of cohabitation to realize that I still have outside friends that get me, and will accept my weirdness a little more readily, because they are a little more used to it and understand that even though i may say things that initially come off as racist or misogynist or just plain terrible, I typically say them in comic hyperbole and I am not someone whose actions back up those words. This person is just a little more sensitive to society's norms of what you "can and cannot" say or do, which is funny, given the fact that we're in an inter-racial lesbian relationship. Go figure.
Anyway, I digress. The whole point of this, is that I am jealous, because I see my best friend, being best friends with someone else on facebook. Please don't take that in a bad way, I am a firm believer that people can have more than one best friend. That there are certain friends you can count on for certain situations of activities and that the other friends in your life may be included or excluded ( not in a mean way ) based on their preferences and how they interact with your other friends. And I realized that I am jealous not because they are being friends or posting back and forth, but because we are not being best friends anymore and I miss that.
So here again is where the jealousy versus envy thing comes into play. I am challenging myself to be that better friend. To find things to inspire friendship, to be cheesy, to, in a sense, rekindle the spark of our friendship before I got bogged down in my relationship. A big, yet separate part is to work on making sure my relationship is healthy and where I need it to be.
So this is where is starts. This is where I try and just be more present in our friendship.
Jessie, will you be my best friend?
[_]yes
[_]no
love,
Calli
