When Jealousy Paid Me a Visit, I Decided to Ask What’s on Her Mind

Calm conversations with our feelings may help us look beyond our fears

Recently, I saw a Linkedin update urging me to congratulate an acquaintance of mine for his new job. My natural response should have been to, well, congratulate him by commenting on the post or simply acknowledging his feat in my mind. Instead, I noticed an unpleasant feeling, a little poke in my heart.

I could have simply continued my day without paying attention to that little poke. Pushed it into the closet of my heart without further introspection and quickly closed the door. However, in the past year I have been practicing how to feel feelings. That may seem silly, but most of the time I don’t find it very easy, especially when encountering unpleasant emotions. And I have an entire closet full of them by now, so I’m trying not to accumulate any more. Otherwise, I will soon need to buy more storage space.

So, there I was, staring at my laptop screen on a regular Monday morning feeling that unnerving sting in my heart. I think I was able to catch myself before I shoved it into the closet, because I had always liked this person and thought highly of him: I wasn’t supposed to be feeling any negative emotions towards him. Yet, the job update wasn’t about just any job. It was about the kind of job I would have been expected to find based on my degree. That’s when I realized what I was feeling was jealousy. (Now it looks like I sat there for ten minutes, but in reality, this all took place in milliseconds.)

After noticing I felt jealousy, I decided to go even deeper. What was the origin of this feeling? Was it trying to tell me something?

Over the past year, I have had lots of conversations about career paths with my friends. Ok, let’s be real. We have only recently graduated from university and some of us are still in it, so perhaps we will just call them jobs. So, over the past year, I have had lots of conversations about jobs with my friends.

One of my friends worked abroad for a year, but quickly noticed this particular line of work was not for her. After coming back to Finland, she was confused. She knew what she didn’t want to do for a job — or at least she had one more bullet point on her “This is what I don’t want to do” list. Yet, she didn’t exactly know what she wanted to do. All she knew was that she wanted to do something interesting and something that does not destroy our world (ughhh, those millennials!).

Several months and dozens of job applications later, she was offered two different jobs. One at a tech company and another in a small Finnish family business which wasn’t particularly known for its branding. I remember her agony when she weighed the two options. The tech job would pay better and, well, look better on Linkedin. But the job in the family business felt more meaningful to her. Only, she was concerned her former peers would frown upon her for working in such a firm. After all, she had graduated from one of the most acclaimed international programs in her field.

Another friend of mine was quite clear about what she wanted to do next. She had identified an industry she was passionate about and decided to apply for various positions within it. Eventually, she received an entry-level job in the field and couldn’t have been more excited.

One night, she told me that when she initially accepted the job, few people applauded her. A professor in her department told her that this wasn’t exactly the career path he wished for a student in her field. When telling her peers about it, few people remembered to even congratulate her for getting a job in the first place. One of the students in her program even went so far as to put her down about accepting the job.

So, what am I trying to get at with these stories? I think many of have dreams and then we have Dreams. There is an important distinction between dreams that we have inherited or been taught to want and the dreams that we actually wish to pursue with all our hearts.

The key lies in distinguishing dreams from Dreams. And that is definitely not an easy job. Since we cannot always trust the people around us — or the opinions and wishes we project upon them — to have our backs when following our dreams, I believe it is important that we can have honest discussions with ourselves.

When I saw that job update on Linkedin, I decided to have a conversation with my jealousy. I asked jealousy why she had decided to pay me a visit. And jealousy spoke.

She told me that part of me was curious for the career this acquaintance was embarking upon. Perhaps this would also be something for me.

But jealousy also told me something less straightforward. Something uglier. I found out that jealousy was accusing me of making the wrong types of choices: “A YouTube channel? This is how you want to spend your free time? Filming and editing videos? You recently graduated with a master’s degree. You could definitely use your education (and tax payers’ money) in better ways. You should be using this time to work on your professional portfolio!” Ouch.

I do believe we should be on our toes when we are trying something new. Like starting to film videos for a YouTube channel at 26 years old or accepting a job at a small family firm. But we should also be careful as not to talk ourselves out of something due to fear. The fear of looking silly. The fear of not meeting expectations. The fear of wasting our education. Sometimes those fears come true. Other times, they don’t.

I also believe that calm conversations with our feelings can help us look beyond our fears. As opposed to being insulted by our feelings, could we approach them with a sense of playfulness? To let them speak their mind however painful it may be. Talking with our feelings can help us peel back a few layers of conditioned thinking and get closer to our true selves.

Unfortunately, the desires of our true self might not be cool. They might not be consistent with our past. They might upset the people close to us. The question is, who you do you want to listen to? And who will you regret not having listened to in ten years?