The Green-Eyed Monster, Recovery, and The Obnoxious Merry-go-Round
Why am I Always the One Left Out?
I feel the shame of being envious of another person who seems to have gotten everything in life, after all, envy is a deadly sin. I can acknowledge that and yet I am left to wonder: why does she get it all? I feel badly though because there’s no reason why she shouldn’t, but she has always treated me like I’m very much inferior to her, and perhaps she’s right, because after all, she had a good gig, and I’m still just stuck.
I’m not mad that she’s had an easier life, or that she’s doing well. In fact I’m glad that she has found something that looks at least on the surface to be fulfilling for her. She defintely sold her soul to accomplish it, but she also has a more extroverted personality, has money to purchase whatever she needs to do her job, and she knows a lot of people.
Her current work is something I didn’t see coming because she had to essentially go against what she herself believed in order to get it up and running. She’s got a cult of personality and everything goes so well for her. I wouldn’t want to specialize in the same thing, but her work is connected to something I’m interested in, and I had supported her work in the past.
The Green-Eyed Monster is here, he shows up when something cool happens to her, or to several other writers I know about. I wish them all well, but I also wish I had the same opportunities and had been given the same chances. I feel like I’ll forever flounder when people who have kind of cruised through life get everything they want, and I’m struggling for the things I need.
I’ve been told she’s a unicorn, along with some others I know of. Ten years ago when there were several of us all in the same demographic writing the same kinds of things with similar skills, they got book contracts and I got to sit by and cheer them on while also crying for myself.
I don’t want any of them to lose what they have. I just want some too, and yet I feel ashamed of it and I know intellectually at least, that envy is wrong. It’s one of those things that I’m going to have to work through in steps 1–3 in recovery yet again. I have to do it every time it comes up. I seem to be on a constant merry-go-round with the first three steps.
I’m not using, but I also feel like I’m not making any progress. I’m kind of suspended in time, in the park with the obnoxious, two-storey, metal rocketship painted in bright primary colors, burning my feet to climb it in the Queensland heat. The merry-go-round with the wooden platform and the metal bars in the middle, again with those obnoxiously bright paint colors. It was considered really cool in the 90’s.
That fucking merry-go-round always made me sick, mostly because it went round in circles, but I tended to get on it anyway. These things are a fabulous vintage piece of equipment from childhood days long gone. Childhood days I don’t miss whatsoever, but everyone is nostalgic about childhood shit and so I should probably find something to pretend to miss also. I think it’s what normal people do.
That particular merry-go-round isn’t allowed in parks anymore. I think it probably has to do with the fact that they are not at all safe, and holding on to metal when it’s about 100 degrees outside is impossible. What that means is that as the merry-go-round picks up speed from whoever is pushing it, it starts throwing children off onto the ground in a random manner.
None of the park equipment was safe in the 80’s and the 90’s, but it sure was fun. In the end the damn merry-go-round was never worth it. Not only did it make me incredibly sick, but I also managed to get hurt when it threw me off, and yet every time we went to that park, I’d climb on that merry-go-round again, perhaps hoping it would be different this time. It was never different.
In those stupid birthday party or youth group games where they would put a blindfold on us and spin us around three times to disorient us, people thought it was fucking hilarious because of course even being spun around three times made me incredibly sick, but I was never allowed to refuse to play the games. I learned that adults thought I was a liar, and just wanted to get out of playing games.
It wasn’t my fault the games sucked, but when it made me throw up, they always claimed I did it on purpose, because that was an easier narrative to believe. So anyway, I keep doing those first three steps as if I’m on the merry-go-round, get thrown off, and climb right back on because I can’t bear the thought of the mockery that will happen if I don’t get up and get right back on that dangerous piece of shit.
One of the things I learned in that park and at the Sunday School picnic was that nobody gave a damn about how I felt, or that the games made me sick. I would play the games because I was told to play the games, and they were the adult so they were in authority, and if I wanted to cry over games they could give me something else to cry about. When the choice is to feel sick and throw up or be spanked for not playing, it’s actually a difficult choice to make.
I was always jealous of the kids whose parents didn’t force them to play, the kids who could play on the park equipment in all it’s red, yellow, and blue chipped paint on wood and metal glory without getting sick. The adults said I was just a sook, and when I threw up I was in trouble anyway because they said I did it on purpose to try to get out of more games.
I keep getting on the merry-go-round though, because that’s what all the cool kids do. It’s how they show off how great they are. None of us wore shoes despite the scorching heat, because that’s just not what children growing up in small-town Queensland did in the 90’s. The merry-go-round worked for a lot of the other kids, and they had fun in the park. I’m glad they had fun, they were children and they deserved it.
I never got to have much fun, though. All the other kids had a good time, they didn’t get sick. Were they lucky, or was I just unlucky? Even my own sisters were able to play and have fun. It wasn’t their fault they could play and not get sick, but I too wanted to just be able to play and not get sick. I never understood why I had to be sick in the first place.
I didn’t want to deny them their fun, I just wanted to have fun too. It just so happened that what was fun for everyone else was miserable for me. I feel like it’s almost the same thing with sobriety and with wanting to do well in writing. I want others to do well, it’s just that I want the same things for me, and well, for some reason, that’s never been within my reach.
I’m always left behind, on the merry-go-round, spewing up my guts, long after everyone else has left the park.
