Gwenda: I hear you! It’s snowing right now. I’m deeply envious of all my friends back home where it is emphatically not snowing. Lucky bastards!

So indeed it feels like you aren’t speaking the same language, because what is being expressed is a concept that you can’t conceive, because you are one of those extremely fortunate people for whom this concept doesn’t make sense. Sad to say, not everybody is so fortunate. I am quite capable of feeling let down when someone I love gets something I wanted, even though like you I am also happy for them.

This is definitely a character flaw, and one on which I am actively working. But hopefully it doesn’t make me an awful person, any more than dissing people who don’t grok cricket makes you an awful person.

:’)

And awards are exactly like chook raffles!

Lauren: I like to hang with people who are better than me.

Wow, that narrows the number of people you can hang out with considerably! Given how fabulous you are.

Lili: it’s a big pond. we can be a dynasty!

That’s exactly how I feel! I mean if it can be a dynasty of people who aren’t all related to each other. I’m so proud every time one of my friends achieves something cool. Like Cecil’s new graphic novel series and Holly winning the Norton last year and all of Scott’s sucesses and my sister’s work on so many different big movies. And I can’t wait for Scatterheart to come out and start wowing everyone. None of those successes takes away from anyone else’s.

my mum is an award winning children’s author, and i am totally unbelievably excited when she wins things, or when she gets reviewed in The Times or whatever. as a fledgling author, i want all that too. i want more! but that doesn’t mean i don’t want my mum to have it. it’s a big pond. we can be a dynasty!

ambition is great (and you’ll get nowhere without it), but after a point it does more damage than good. it’s a fine line. it’s like we need to push ourselves to succeed, but not so hard that we push away others.

I would have said, because siblings do this all the time on the small scale, and everyone assumes that siblings are best friends (even the siblings themselves), even when they don’t act like friends at all.

One of the enlightenments of my early 20s was discovering that “friend” (and presumably, similarly “spouse”) is a category of choice, and that I could be a friend to my mother and my sister in addition to being their family.

Yeah, the healthy part comes in when it spurs you to work harder. You know “healthy competition” and all that. Even if it competition the other person doesn’t know about. I’m in constant competition with L.M. Montgomery to write character-specific dialogue as well as she does, and she’s dead.

And then sometimes there are the situations where you THINK you are friends with someone, but really, you are just keeping tabs on them, and that’s not healthy and I try to steer clear of that.

For my part though, I’m glad my partner ain’t writing. This apartment is only big enough for one writerly neurosis.

This is so true! My best friend’s a writer and we were recently up against each other for a YA award here in Canada. I said if I had to lose, I would never mind losing to her. And it was true! She did win, and I was so happy for her, but at the same time disappointed for myself.

Guess for me, though, I have to be careful that I don’t deny my negative feelings altogether (as I sometimes do) as they come back to bite me as back pain.

It’s one thing to have different levels of success; that’s just life, and pretty much inevitable. It’s another to see your partner succeeding, while you fail, and fail, and fail again at the work that matters most to you. I think that would be very hard to take, even if you *were* happy for your partner.

(but it must be said that sometimes it is easier than others! i have had one or two times in my life that i am *not* proud of, i hope in every case i concealed it totally & finally worked through the horrible feeling of envy, but it is about the most unpleasant thing i can imagine because of the way that you’re ashamed of yourself as well as feeling horrible!)

the great novel of this is lionel shriver’s “double fault,” well worth reading if you haven’t–she has said in interviews that though it’s about a pair of professional tennis pairs who are also married to each other [justine, you would really like it, there's lots of good sport stuff in there] it was really based on a relationship she was in with another writer that was producing in her a corrosive envy of his success and her own lack thereof.

also good on this topic: kathryn chetkovich’s essay “envy,” about her relationship with jonathan franzen:

http://www.granta.com/extracts/2015

Not exactly sure that this feeling is totally healthy, mind you, since I mostly sit around being envious and don’t practice so I get better at writing and hence closer to Green’s level of goodness.

As an example, I am currently writing a play for a province-wide playwriting contest, and so are several of my friends. Two of the winning plays will be produced as part of a festival in the summer. If I win, it is definitely at my friends’ expense — there’s no other paying place for their plays to go, locally. In fact, I will be competing directly with the woman whose excellent plays inspired me to get involved with local theatre — and something about that makes me uneasy, because I want to see her play too, if she writes one, and if I win, then that’s one fewer slot for her. But I’d still rather win than not.

It’s a pretty specific situation, all around, but I think it goes to show that feelings of competition between close friends, however unhealthy they might be, are unavoidable in cases where there is actual scarcity.

Yeah, I think that’s actually exactly what some people want to hear…

I dunno, like you I don’t get it… I think it comes down to how you see the world… whether you see other people as other people.. that is, people just like you, or whether you just see them as forces acting on you…

I have never understood why people can’t understand the beautiful duality of the human heart.

I love when my friends do well, am overjoyed when they win, and am devastated when they fail. And I know they (you!) feel the same about me.

I also believe quite strongly that everyone takes turns in the ups and downs, so i just root for us all all the time.

*shakes pom poms*

there was some essay i read for some class about a woman who met this other really successful guy at some retreat thing and then they wrote letters back and forth, and finally moved in together, and that’s about all i remember, except that she left him because she was jealous of his success and couldn’t deal with it. and most of the time i was wondering how she could love him and be so jealous of him at the same time.