The Professional Jealousy I Was Too Ashamed to Name

I had been working in communications at a policy organisation in Washington DC for three years when the jealousy arrived in a form I could not dismiss or reframe. A peer who had joined six months after me was promoted before me.

The promotion was deserved - she was excellent at her work and the decision was fair by any assessment I could honestly make. What I felt when I heard the news was not the mild competitive sting I had experienced in the past and that I found manageable.

It was sharper than that and more personal and it lasted longer than I thought it should, and I spent two weeks not looking at it directly because looking at it directly would have required me to admit to something I did not want to admit to.

I had been managing my relationship with her success for the previous several months in a way I recognised, when I finally examined it, as a consistent pattern of subtle diminishment - finding explanations for her achievements that located them in luck or visibility or access rather than capability, identifying the weaknesses in her work with a precision and a relish that I had never applied to my own.

I was building a case against her to protect myself from the information that she was succeeding and I was not, and I had been building it without quite knowing I was doing it. The honest examination, which I undertook in a journal over about a week, produced several uncomfortable recognitions.

The jealousy was real and it was also information. It was telling me something about what I wanted - specifically that I cared about advancement and recognition more than my self-presentation as someone who cared primarily about the work had acknowledged.

It was also telling me something about where my self-worth was located - in external comparison rather than internal standards, which meant that anyone else's success was experienced as diminishment of my own.

Addressing the jealousy required addressing both of those things: being more honest with myself and my manager about what I actually wanted professionally, and doing the work of locating my sense of my own value somewhere more stable than comparison. The jealousy reduced substantially when it no longer had the work to do.