Jealousy

I’ve learned that jealousy can take many forms. Sometimes it’s wanting the life someone else has. Sometimes it’s wanting the attention they get.

I’ve always found jealousy fascinating. It’s strange how easily people can become obsessed with things they don’t even know. I can usually recognize it when curiosity turns into criticism, when criticism turns into gossip, and when gossip turns into a story that somehow becomes more believable every time it’s repeated. Eventually, the words get twisted, the truth gets lost, and suddenly someone has an opinion about a person they barely know.

Maybe that’s what jealousy really does. It makes someone else’s value feel like a threat to your own. And when you don’t know how to deal with that feeling, it’s easier to tear someone else down than to figure out why their life bothers you so much.

The strange part is that when you’re the person on the other side of it, you don’t always know what’s happening. You just know people seem to know something about you that you don’t know yourself.

And that’s when things get interesting.

I think I learned this long before I knew the word for it. I couldn’t help but notice, even at a young age, how it affected the people around me.

I remember being in kindergarten and noticing the whispers. At school. At church. At the grocery store. It was strange to be that young and somehow already understand that people knew who I was.

I didn’t understand why. I didn’t even understand what there was to know. I was just a little girl going to school, going to church, following my mom through the grocery store. But somehow, wherever we went, there always seemed to be someone who knew my name.

And the people closest to me couldn’t help but notice it too.

Looking back now, I think that’s when I first realized that being noticed doesn’t always make people happy for you.

By middle school, I understood it a little better. I was still just a little girl, but by then I was beginning to understand that some people wanted to be noticed the way I was.

The funny thing about rumors is that they rarely do what you want them to do. The more people talked about me, the more people wanted to know who I was. Every story seemed to create another question, and every question seemed to lead to another person wanting to meet me for themselves.

The oddest part was that some of the people doing the most talking were the same people who were upset that they weren’t the ones being talked about. They were trying to make me less interesting but somehow they kept making me more interesting.

By high school, I had learned not to chase the attention. By then, I was actually trying to become less noticed. I knew that attention wasn’t something you could chase. In fact, I don’t think it’s something anyone can really get without someone else deciding that you’re worth watching.

By then, I thought I had it all figured out. I wasn’t a gossiper. I wasn’t a drama queen. I never talked about what I was going through, and somehow that seemed to bother people more than if I had.

What would it take to get her to snap? I imagine that was the question being asked.

The answer was simple: if something was said, you had to be there. I never repeated myself. I treated people the way I wished people would treat me. I was nice. I laughed a lot. I forgave people for the things they said and did.

Somehow, that still wasn’t what some people wanted.

And apparently, it gave them another reason to be jealous.

I was so excited to get away from it all. I was so excited for college. I will never forget choosing the place I thought would be the most fun. I was beyond ready for a fresh start.

When I moved in, I realized on the very first day that things weren’t going to be as different as I had hoped. I stepped onto campus, and the first person I tried to make friends with already knew my name.

I didn’t know what to think. It was strange, but somehow it was also familiar.

I was still excited. I was there to become a teacher, to make a difference, to build a life that belonged to me. At that point, I honestly didn’t care what anyone thought.

But somehow the gossip followed me. There was enough of it that eventually it made its way into professors’ ears.

Then I met one of my professors.

She knew where I lived. She knew who my old teachers were. She knew members of my family. She knew so much about me that I remember thinking, “Well, I guess I can skip the introduction.”

The funny part was that she had never actually taken the time to know me.

She had simply listened to the wrong person.

Apparently, the story had traveled a little further than I realized. Before long, misinformation about me was making its way to everyone who had a Dr. in front of their name.

I have to give credit where credit is due. That’s a lot of effort to put into stopping a career that hadn’t even started yet.

Someone had apparently added “prevent Shannon from becoming a teacher” to their list of things to accomplish.

Meanwhile, I was just trying to graduate.

By then I had learned something about gossip:

It can travel a lot farther than you can.

That’s when I started wondering if maybe jealousy wasn’t always about wanting the same things.

Maybe sometimes it was about wanting the same life.

Maybe it wasn’t about wearing the same shoes. Maybe it was about wanting to trade lives.

As crazy as that sounds, I never wanted to trade mine.

When I finally got the job, I was ready to make a difference.

It was one of those moments where you finally get to stand inside something you had imagined for years. I had wanted to be a teacher since I was a little girl, and now I was finally walking into my own classroom.

I thought maybe this would be different.

I had spent years trying to outrun the version of me other people had created. By then I had learned that I couldn’t control what people said, so I stopped trying. I figured if someone wanted to know me, they could simply come meet me.

Apparently, that was asking too much.

Somehow the stories had made their way to the people I was supposed to work with. Then to people I was supposed to teach. Then, somehow, to people who had never met me at all.

It was a strange feeling to finally become the person I had always wanted to be and realize that someone else was still trying to decide who that person was.

I don’t know what bothered me more—the things being said or how easily some people believed them.

I had spent my entire life being told that people were fascinated by me. I never realized how powerful it could be when someone decided to become fascinated by a version of me that didn’t exist.

Whatever they thought they wanted, I don’t think they ever understood what it took to become me.

For years I thought jealousy was about wanting what someone else had. By the time I became a teacher, I had started wondering if sometimes it was about something much stranger: wanting to control how everyone else saw them.

And that was something I was never going to be able to give them.

Because after twenty-seven years, I had finally learned something.

You can want the same shoes. You can borrow my stories. You can even tell people you know me. But you still can’t become me.