Green-Eyed Monster

I should have dressed as Envy for Halloween. I threw away my colored contacts earlier this week because they’d dried out. (They’d only been worn once, by Marvin, the day we decided to cross dress.) But it’s okay. Look inside me and you’ll see: I’m as green as they get.¹

I recently hosted someone who was interviewing at Sinai. When she emailed me, I noticed that her Google+ profile said “Writer”—her publisher came up whenever my cursor hovered over her name. When I looked her up on Facebook, the first hit was her public page. Writer. 1,144 like this. I wondered whether 1,144 people even knew my name. I watched one of her interviews on YouTube. While I was studying for SATs, she was meeting with literary agents. While I was stressing over my senior thesis, she’d just completed the third book of her sci-fi trilogy. Her first two books have 4.5 stars on Amazon. (But only 3.8 stars on Goodreads, I told myself. That’s, like, a C.)

It was the first of many things I said to make myself feel better.

Wikipedia—because, let’s face it, who uses Merriam-Webster anymore?—defines envy as “an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it.” There were many, many things that I desired which she had, and just as many things that I told myself she lacked. She didn’t go to Yale. She hasn’t gotten into med school (yet). She probably can’t do front splits. Or make cucumber turtles. None of those things should have mattered, but I repeated them over and over like a mantra, as if I by doing so I could insulate myself from the sheer fact of her existence. When I talked to her, I tried so hard. I tried to make myself smarter, more articulate, more knowledgeable about medicine, more experienced at writing. Instead of getting to know her as a person, all I could think about was how to make myself look better, how to keep her from bruising my ego, from shattering all my ideas about who I was. I was a writer, too—except that I haven’t published a thing. I was a real, live med student (with all of two months’ experience). I was special, too. If only she knew that, then maybe I wouldn’t feel like shit.

I never said any of those thoughts out loud, but I’ve never been more thankful that mind-reading doesn’t exist. When the conversation ended, I retreated to my bedroom and breathed a sigh of relief, snug behind my laptop screen where no one could see me cry. Why did I think all of those ugly thoughts? Why did I have to pick her apart? I hated myself.

She was really just a nice woman. Nothing going on in my head could have changed that.

When I talked to her, it struck me that in many ways, we are similar. We both majored in English but wanted to go into medicine. Our parents are immigrants; after moving to the U.S. our mothers continued practicing medicine while our fathers went into research. We grew up in the suburbs. When we were kids, we wanted to be published at 14. “That was my dream,” she said, smiling at her interviewer who was sitting off-screen. I wondered if she was somehow living the life I could have had.

I dreamed of being an author before I dreamed of being anything else. I wrote poems throughout elementary school, started writing a fantasy series in middle school, finally completed a 70-page novella when I was sophomore in high school. That summer, I mailed query letters to dozens of agents and even a full manuscript to one publisher. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything so badly than to see my name on the spine of a book, tucked away in a library or a Barnes and Noble. I saved all of my rejection letters—because I read on the internet that an author I liked had done the same—but I must have destroyed them when I moved after high school. I didn’t want my parents to find out.

I asked my interviewee whether her parents were supportive of her career as a sci-fi writer. “My dad always loved reading, so he was really supportive. And, of course, they’re very happy for me.” I thought of the day I told my father, manuscript in hand, that I wanted to publish my book. I’d stood outside his bedroom door for minutes, trying to gather the courage, practicing the lines over and over.

“Dad, I wrote a book!” I tried to smile. Oh crap, now he knows everything. Of course he’s going to say “No.” But there was still a chance. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I’d thought.

“What’s it about?” He might have been trying not to frown, but it didn’t work.

“Myself. Well, not exactly myself, but a bunch of characters, like me. I did all the research; I even looked up publishers and everything.” I bit my lip. You’re such an idiot. You should’ve lied, just told him it was all fiction.

“Give it to me. Do not send it to anyone. Let me read it, see what things you are ‘writing’ about.”

But I couldn’t. I don’t know how I managed, but I snatched the manuscript out of his hands as he warned me for the umpteenth that writing was all fun and games and looks good on college applications but should never, ever, be taken seriously. (“What, you want to write books for the rest of your life?”) I don’t remember if I said “yes,” but I do remember swearing to myself that I would never talk to him about writing again.

Back to the person sitting in my living room, waiting for me to respond, wondering why I’m staring off into the distance. She told me about the MFA program at her university, and I got distracted again, thinking of my friends in the Writing Concentration. I said that one of my friends was trying to publish her own young adult novel—I had heard her read it at the Concentrator’s Ball last April—did my honored guest have any tips? (Answer: find books similar to the ones you wrote, and try to find out which agents represented those authors. They’ve usually been Thanked in the back of the book.)

I started outsourcing my jealousy, as if I could somehow be jealous on behalf of others, as if that would justify all my feelings. Why did she deserve to have her name decorating bookshelves when my friends in the Writing Concentration are just as talented and no less deserving? I firmly believe that some of my colleagues will become award-winning writers someday, and I would bet that ten, twenty years from now, their voices will be heard and remembered. But that’s a long ways away, and there’s so much work and sweat and unpaid bills before that day arrives. Why haven’t they been rewarded with three-book publishing contracts, fan mail, and Facebook pages with a thousand likes? Why does this one person get to have it all?

An hour later, I find myself sniffling my way through a handful of tissues in the privacy of my bedroom. I typed to David some of the thoughts running through my head:

I feel really inadequate, and I hate myself for being jealous… It just seems like there were all these forks and somehow she went down all the right ones.

But David had a comeback. I wonder when Anne [Fadiman] published her first book. Was it as early as your interviewee did? Does that make her any less talented? Hardly.

He was right. Anne told us once, during class, that when Joyce Maynard published in the New York Times during her freshman year at Yale (while Anne was a student at Harvard), “Every female, college-aged writer in America was jealous.” The idea of Anne Fadiman being jealous of anyone was hilarious to me. But she assured us that it was true. David was spot on. Anne didn’t have all her success at age 22. And just because the girl next door had her big break already doesn’t change who I am or where my path will lead.

I wouldn’t even say that the thing I want most in life is to publish a book. (Write some essays, sure. Have my words read and appreciated by people I’ve never met? Totally. But publishing contracts and book signings and promotional tours? Eh. We’ll see.) And I wonder if that’s because the 16-year-old Sue died the day she stood in her father’s doorway, leaving sweaty fingerprints on the only copy of the only book she’d ever written. Or if it’s because I’ve found things I’m more passionate about—things like sexual health and reproductive rights and martial arts. My 8th grade creative writing teacher told me that writing would always be a part of my life. I am sure it will. But I’d be damn disappointed if it were the only thing.