The Second Deadly Sin

Envy

A feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by and in conjunction with desire for the possessions or qualities of another.

Oh. Envy. This is a hard one. The first thing that came to my mind when I thought about this was that I am envious of anyone and everyone that is NOT me. Is it any wonder that I felt for a while like I really had nowhere else to go with this post? Right now, for me, everyone and everything is better than me, and I can’t seem to find my way past that yet.
Envy is an interesting emotion. There is a point where envy fuels you to change yourself or what you are doing, but if you envy too much….it freezes you. When you envy someone or something too much, you begin to despise yourself. And envy separates you from the person you are envying too. Like a big huge road block. I know about this only too well. You want to be around this person, but you are so envious of whatever that you begin to avoid being around them. And eventually, there goes the friendship, and often the other person really has no idea why. And how the heck would you admit something so seemingly trite and petty, no matter how strong the feeling seems to you?
As I said, I have tons of envy right now. I sit here for HOURS racking my brains trying to figure out how in the wide blue hell people do what they do…HOW they manage it, WHERE they come up with the “whatever it is” to do it. And how the hell I missed that train. And where do I stand to catch the next one. And sometimes I hate them for having what I don’t feel like I have. Funny thing that. Like a good friend said, soon enough, envy and hate go hand in hand.
I am envious of the fact that Donovan has decided that the way he is going to handle all this stress is to have fall-down kick-ass 20-minute tantrums three or four times a day, no matter where we are or what we are doing. And the fact that he CAN. And the fact that I can’t join him, I just have to sit there and have everyone stare at me like I am the bad guy…while I am getting a headache, and playing referee so he doesn’t scratch the hell out of his face like he has been doing lately just because he is mad. I am envious of the fact that those people in the rental office who so blatantly insist that I will be held responsible for the unpaid rent in this apartment even though they know I have never been the one paying the rent and they know I don’t even have a job right now and they know that C has left and none of the bills have been paid in months will go happily home in their big fancy cars and not have a nightmare about becoming one of those bag ladies that picks their way through the garbage dumps in the apartment complex. I am envious of that couple walking by holding hands that paused just to smile into each other’s eyes. I am envious of people that can create awesome graphics at the drop of a hat.
My envy has frozen me. And until now, I feel like I have been trying to unthaw myself with a lighter. If only I had directions to the bonfire. No one told me I had to draw my own map.
Oh, and I guess I wasn’t really clear in my first post about this. I do NOT believe that ANY of these “sins” I am writing about are actually sins, or bad things, or things that we should never feel or never do. I think they are just a part of human nature, but that, like most things, if they are done to great excesses, this is where things can get questionable in regards to how they affect us and our personalites and our behaviors. And I only grouped them together here as the “Seven Deadly Sins” because I believe that most people are familiar with the term, and it made it easier to explain where I was going with this whole group of posts.