Dear teaz
My good Friend Shifting Wind opened a door in his response to your inquiry that I had not revisited for quite some time. I've long realized that I'm not the jealous type; I just can't be bothered with that expenditure of emotion over someone who appears not to value what We share. Like devils wish, I do presume to be possessive, in that though I'm willing to share, it must be done with my permission and only with that portion or specific act that I'm willing to share (you make plenty of sense to me, dev!). But how did I get to be this way? In my case it goes back to my childhood, recalling my mother slecting which one of her three children she was going to awaken and invite to have breakfast with her. My mom never cared much for cooking, but on Saturdays she liked having croissants or sticky buns with eggs and bacon, and coffee. So one of us, usually my sister (she was the only girl?) would get to eat with her. My brother and I could come down later and have cereal. Jealous? Yeah, that made me jealous, because my sister got to enjoy not only the food but my mother's time, and boy I wanted to change that. Well, simply put, there was no changing I could do save for changing how I reacted. I learned that we don't treat everyone the same, no matter what familial words are wrapped around it; yes, parents have a favorite, and on any given day you may or may not be it. So wasting my time and energy on jealousy was just that, a waste. Many years later, by the time I learned that my fiance was being fucked by my married best friend, who happened to live in her same apartment building, it sealed the deal on my use for jealousy. I wanted to kill them both, and some of the things I did to each of them, individually, I'm not proud of to this day. Revenge can clear the psyche, though!
So we grow and learn from these experiences, we add to the satchel that each of us carries, and I sense that those of us with the least heavy satchel once we reach Judgement Day, will be rewarded, by and by. I trust those I'm in relationship with until they give me a reason not to. Then I act accordingly. By the way, I get along marvelously with my sister and brother to this day, what happened when we were children was not caused by them. And any choices I disagree with that my parents made are tempered by the knowledge that my son will have his own disagreements with my parenting skills. My goal is not to make the "mistakes" my parents made; I'm free to make my own.
Yes, the others who responded are correct, you can not talk about jealousy (nods to SW on his astute definitions!) without looking into the whole morass of your existence. Hell, I could touch upon my feelings of "jealousy" over my treatment as a Black man in America; versus how white people were treated. The upscale, professional opportunity I was denied in Minneapolis because the executive feared that I would date white girls (he had a college age daughter), the position in Indiannapolis I was denied because they had never had a black person in that role before. (sighs) But those days are behind us, we live in a country that has enthusiastically elected Barack Obama to the Presidency. You live and you can choose to learn. And I choose to limit the ways in which I will be jealous over anyone in both my professional and personal life.
Sir Ulrich
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