Drifting in jealousy of imagined lives

On the version of me who made different (read: better) decisions

Sometimes I find myself drifting in jealousy, imaging the pure glamor of someone else’s life. (Almost always I do not know them well.) I daydream, I internet stalk, I scour embarrassing websites in an insatiable search for details about what their reality looks like and how it differs from my own.

Sometimes I find myself coming to after a particularly vicious wave of this thick envy, sputtering for air, and ask what the hell I’m doing.

I thought for a while that happiness was the antithesis of jealousy. I believed this in two ways:

1. The more I practiced being happy for other humans on our shared planet, the less likely I’d be to envy them. Jealous is a dirty, shameful word. Happy is better associated with the kind, approachable (likeable) woman I want to be. Down with zero-sum bias! Down with imagined competition! Can’t we hold hands on our collective way to the top?

2. If I was truly happy in my own life, there’d be no room left to wish myself into someone else’s.

I still think that sounds ni…