How to tackle the green-eyed monster
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I am all J over the way my ex-GF is making out with another guy and burning up with rage from weeks. Cant think of anything else. Help. — A teenager.
I am going to make a scalpel out of my pen and harsh as it may seem, do a surgical incision. J kills. Yup. But you know that already and you seem to want exactly that — to be drowned in such a stupor that you begin to die slowly inside. You get so obsessed that you secretly want all vestiges of compassion and camaraderie to get snuffed out of existence. As emotions go jealousy is among the more jealous of emotions. It leaves no room for any other mood to exist. Sure it satisfies you in certain obscure ways, just as a cigarette satisfies the smoker — in some obscure way.
Ask a smoker exactly what pleasure he derives and he will be at a loss to explain — same with jealousy. You can’t explain why at every moment your mind drifts towards morbid fantasies but you sure do get a grim satisfaction from the addiction. Make no mistake, once it takes its grip like a python coiling around a rat — it suffocates the life breath of goodness and smothers you to a horrible heart-death. You become a shell of a person with no warmth, no humour, no happiness left. Are you sure you want to get cured? Had enough?
Then stop feeling so self-important, stop feeling you are the centre of the universe around whom everyone should revolve. Change the fulcrum of your existence. Rise into a protecting nurturing wisdom. Grant people the right to love others, to make love to others. Grant people the right to see through you, to get fed up with you, to walk out on you.
Truly nobody is your own in this world. Wow. That was very harsh, yes, and I need to say it again with a smile. Nobody is your own in this world. Just because society said the two of you are a couple doesn’t take away from the other the right to think otherwise. Your real option is to free the other and set yourself free in the process.
You have arrived at a crossroad and two paths lie before you. The first is the smooth well traveled highway of jealous burning. If you don’t take the harder road of forgiveness now, someday when the juices run dry and you shrivel up inside into a brittle twig of your former self, the truth will hit you in the face. You will understand that it was far better to have become humble, accepted your insignificance and walked away a free person than to have burnt into black toast with the raging fires of envy.
The smart guy knows when to fume and rage and when to shrug and walk away. The intelligent guy knows when to let pride flow into him and when to let pride flow away from him. This soft skill of handling jealousy is critical and life saving, friend. Learn it well and live to love another day.
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