By Maria Padhila
I’m so jealous of Amanda right now. Or maybe I’m envious. It’s a little confusing.
She’s at Burning Man, and I’d rather be there than working, as much as I’m happy to be out of the dust. Before she left, she gave me permission to quote from a short play on the topic of ‘envy’ that she co-wrote. The idea is that the man moves from a state of jealousy to one of envy as he learns more about the woman’s perspective on relationships:
MAN: Did you need to train when you began? Were you a limper?
WOMAN: Well … not a limper, but I wasn’t the fastest in the race. I had to go step by step. But I wanted to learn. I wanted this because it actually feels more solid, more real, much healthier than wallowing in insecurity. The focus is on abundance, not lack or fear of loss. Fear and insecurity undermine what love is. So, if jealousy pops up, we dive into it instead of avoiding it. We get to its root, which is always somewhere inside ourselves, and come out the other side. The other side is love.
I love that she’s having that experience, really. But am I envious or jealous? Many think the terms are interchangeable, but that’s not so.
To do the play, Amanda had to research the differences in definitions. So did I. Most define jealousy as a threat response, the fear that something will be taken away. Envy, on the other hand, is seen as acquisitive, a desire rather than a fear. You want something another person has. The other person can still have it, even; you just want one like it. The other person can even have five or six of it. You just want one too. Feeling jealousy means feeling fear; feeling envy means feeling desire.