I don’t feel envy very often and that isn’t because I don’t know anyone who is worthy of it. The people in my life are nothing short of brilliant. My friends and family are talented writers whose books and magazines I display proudly on my shelves. They are erudite psychologists, driven designers, artists and poets whose work moves me deeply. It is easy to celebrate their most recent successes, to which I say, “Mashallah.”
Being raised Muslim, mashallah is an Arabic phrase that I use often, if not daily. Most commonly spelt as mashallah or mashaAllah, the most accurate way of representing the phrase in transliteration is ma sha Allah, which means, “What God has willed has happened.” In many cultures it is believed that saying mashallah protects a person against the evil-eye. Another way of looking at it is that it shifts the focus from potential envy to admiration, gratitude and respect.
“Language and emotion are intrinsically linked,” explains psychologist Dr Emma Hepburn. “There is evidence that having more finely tuned emotion words to describe our feelings is beneficial to us. The language we use, to both ourselves and others, both verbally and written, can impact how we feel. Kind words can calm and regulate us, while harsh words can create a threat response.”
Perhaps in saying a phrase that actively seeks to protect the recipient from the threat of envy, I have been inadvertently protecting myself from allowing envy to get the better of me.
One of my earliest memories of feeling intensely envious of someone was during the winter when I was about eight years old. My best friend came to school wearing the most amazing cardigan I had ever seen. It was chunky and had little appliqué sheep and cows on the front, wool spun into green tufts for trees, and towards the shoulders were cream-coloured quilted clouds. Meanwhile, I had on the same thing I wore every day: a thin black acrylic jumper that no longer reached the knuckles of my bony wrists. I imagined how magnificent I’d feel enveloped in something as fabulous as a farm cardigan. I also imagined how it would feel to see my best friend accidently spill the powder paints we were mixing together that day all over it. I imagined accidentally on purpose spilling the paint on to the cardigan myself, and for a moment that thought felt good. And then I remembered how she was the only person who bothered to make friends with me after weeks spent orbiting the perimeter of the playground on my own. Hot shame coloured my cheeks red as I stirred my paint, because that is the colour of shame – the colour of blood.
The colour of envy is green. The green-eyed monster. The grass is always greener. Envy is considered a dark emotion. Not as sexy as anger can be made out to be, while melancholy and sadness can be fashioned towards suggesting a depth of character. Envy, however, is something to be hidden within the shadow of ourselves. I think of the viral meme of Kermit the Frog standing opposite his doppelganger cloaked in a hooded black robe. We are presented with the binary forces of good vs evil with the understanding that shadow Kermit represents all of our darkest thoughts and impulses, a mirror to regular Kermit’s positive aspect. That the dialogue within these memes presents conflict emphasises this polarity. In my meme, the text above regular Kermit would read, “But she’s my best friend.” The text above Shadow Kermit would read, “Fuck friendship, spill the paint.” And Kermit, like my envy was back then, is the most vivid green. If anything had happened to the farm cardigan that day, I’d have felt personally responsible.
Navigating envy was far simpler in the pre-digital world of my childhood and adolescence. By the time I became a mother at 24, my peers were building their careers and grabbing life by the horns, all of which made me quit Facebook as quickly as I joined it. It was simply easier not to see the panoply of nights out, promotions and holidays that I was missing out on while I stayed home changing nappies. Filtered through the lens of my sleep-deprived, new-mother hormonal perspective, I knew I would have found it too much to bear seeing things that I wanted for myself, but, in that moment, had no way of having; too difficult not to feel a type of envy that would have winded me had I stayed online and gazed upon all of it.
The eye icon on my Instagram stories clocks up a tally of views whenever I post, reminding how the emergence of social media has added a real-time vector to our culture of hyperawareness. We are more aware than ever of seeing and being seen. Our eyes are pulled towards announcements, holiday snaps and successes like magpies drawn to shiny things so not only do we bear witness to the lives of those we physically interact with, we’re now able to cast a figurative gaze upon the lives of those we have never met.
When I left Facebook as a new mother, I told people that it was because I am a private person. I’m too much of an introvert. I don’t have time, what with the baby and everything. I couldn’t say that it was because logging on made me nauseous with envy. Jungian analyst Gail Collins-Webb tells me that, “Envy is one of the hardest emotions to talk about within analysis because it’s closely associated with the emotion of shame, and shame goes to the heart of human suffering.” She suggests that when experiencing envy, we should lean into it and allow it to instruct us: “Define what you’re envious of. It’s telling you something. For example, an introverted person may be very jealous of an extrovert’s capacity to have lots of friends and create a network in a way that they’re just not able to. When you’re feeling envy towards somebody, what you’re doing is projecting on to that person that they have this wonderful thing you want. And it’s worth questioning, isn’t it?”
Recently a close friend achieved something I count as one of my own personal goals. She is talented and hardworking and deserving of her success. For this reason, I find it easy to be happy for her without envy. “Mashallah, I am so happy for you,” I said when she told me her good news, knowing that I too would love to achieve something like that one day. A while back, however, another friend achieved something that I had yet to, didn’t even have on my radar, and while I congratulated them, something about it bothered me. I had to admit that within the symphony of emotions I was experiencing, envy was the base note. I have never looked at this friend with envy before, yet this particular achievement brought up negative feelings. Collins-Webb tells me, “If you can follow your envy it can tell you what you want and it also tells you what your shadow is because you project it out.”
When she says “shadow”, she is referring to the darker aspects of our personality, which Carl Jung defined as our “shadow selves”. He explains in his 1951 book, Aion, that, “To become conscious of [the shadow]… involves recognising the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” “Shadow work”, then, is about acknowledging and learning from the unconscious, and the darker aspects of ourselves that we typically ignore and repress. It is about figuring out where they come from, because sitting with those feelings may teach us something about what we desire, or what we wish to change in our own lives.
When I interrogated my envy, I was able to trace it back to desire and a sense of injustice. I could recognise that the opportunity this friend had was the result of privilege and nepotism, so the feelings of envy began to dissipate. I also learned that I desired something like my friend had for myself, and not because they had it, but because I truly wanted it. Following my envy, then, led me towards a desire I didn’t know I had and as a result set about working towards achieving what I wanted.
Clinical psychologist Dr Sabinah Janally says: “Words possess the power to crush or transform one’s sense of self and perceived reality.” I don’t feel envy very often, but I realise that a large part of that comes from not avoiding it. To me, saying “mashallah” doesn’t negate envy, it acknowledges that envy may well be present alongside acclaim and if I do find it sitting beside my praise and admiration, I encourage my gaze to turn inwards in order to see what it may be trying to show me.
