Why Jealousy Is a Terrible Thing to Have

This season Manulife is creating a movement of gratitude and paying it forward kindness during the Christmas season. We hope that by sharing our stories (as varied as they are) of #LifeAdvice and #gratitude we can amplify the conversation and encourage more people to think of sharing these types of kind gestures over the holidays.

Life advice sometimes comes to you in funny ways, and while some of our stories may seem a little strange, they all contain advice that we feel strongly about. BLUNTmoms is here to show that even on a bad day, there is something good that can occur, and that simple things sometimes make the biggest impact in your life

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We started working together about seven years ago. She was hired in my department shortly after I was, and I’ll get right to the point: She was gorgeous. Younger than me with her silky brown hair, twinkling blue eyes and a brilliant smile, her laugh would burst out from behind the cubical wall whenever someone offered her the smallest irony. She was a regular at a kick-boxing gym and a former competitive swimmer, so she sported all the muscle definition and the fitness needed to punch a heavy bag. 

And I was jealous.

I didn’t meet her right away, but instead collected details about her life through overheard conversations. She was married and had two kids. This did nothing to lessen my prejudice, because I really wanted children and was struggling to get pregnant. She seemed to have it all.

Then, one day, someone asked “Have you met Bridgette?”

“No. It’s nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. Her grip was firm and her smile was inviting. This was kind of nice, I thought.

Shortly after that, I lost track of her. I was moved to another department in the same building. Then, I got pregnant and had a baby. She got divorced. When I came back after maternity leave, I was busy with a newborn, and she was busy nurturing a new romance with a man who had a laugh just like my brother’s.

Every so often we would wind up in a big group together at a work happy hour where she savagely defended her favorite football teams, and I admired her sports lexicon. In the office, I saw her wedding pictures on her new husband’s desk and again felt a twinge of envy about how her life seemed to keep righting itself, perfectly.

Then, she got pregnant and had a big pot roast of a baby, who practically bubbled out of every picture on her desk when I stopped by to offer my congratulations.

“I can’t believe you have four boys,” I said. Her new life had brought two new sons – one through childbirth and another through remarriage.

“I know. It’s crazy,” she said. “But they all get along really well, so it’s not as insane as it seems.”

Then, she got cancer, and all those things I had been jealous of were taken away.

Her hair fell out and her skin became ashen and plastic-looking. Her throat raged with pain from the chemo. She cried endlessly from grief and the emotional roller coaster of treatments and drugs. And on top of all of that she felt guilty for robbing her new husband of the fun life they were supposed to be having in their 30s.

That’s right, she wasn’t even 40 yet.

I was shocked at the intensity of her suffering.

That fall, her cancer went into remission just long enough for her to grow a sweet, blond pixy hairstyle, cheer for her favorite football teams and hug her kids on Christmas morning. Then, her cancer came back more vicious than ever, attacking her bones and not just her breasts. It tore back through her life taking her energy and her last defenses, like her eyelashes. After losing the last tiny scraps of hair from her head to more chemo and more radiation, she joked that she had never given her eyelashes enough credit for the job that they do.

“I can’t tell you how many times I have ended up with Kleenex in my eye because I had no eyelashes to stop it from actually going in my eye,” she wrote in one of her last Caringbridge.com journal entries.

She died in July 2013.

I heard some good advice once: if you are going to be jealous of someone, then you must be jealous of everything about them. This means you can’t just covet Angelina Jolie’s lips, you also have to live with her reputation as a home wrecker and deal with Brad’s phobia of foot selfies. And you can’t just want Michelle Obama’s arms, you must also be trailed by the Secret Service and be married to someone who travels a lot.

I learned a really important lesson from her death, and it seems shallow to say that I’ve changed my mind; I’m not jealous of her now.

But I don’t want her Michelle Obama arms the way that I’m sure her 3-year-old son wants to feel them around him today. I don’t want her blue eyes the way her husband must want them before they closed each night. I don’t want her body, because it’s gone. And it was never mine to covet in the first place, just like her life.

My body and my life are my own to appreciate now more than I ever did before, simply because they are still here for me to use and not to objectify. To love and not to hate. To enjoy, but also to remember that they are not mine forever.

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Visit the Manulife blog for more details on what they are doing to share gratitude this month, or pop onto the #LifeAdvice hashtag on Twitter and start sharing the best life advice YOU have received! 

This post is sponsored by SPLASH Media Engagement on behalf of Manulife. 

@Manulife is asking you to spread some positive by thanking those in your life who have given you great #LifeAdvice. Take a moment to #PayItForward by thanking someone important to you.