jealousy.

i have always had a jealousy issue. i don't know where it comes from but it's one of the things that make me who i am. or at least i suppose so (i won't be getting into that tho since the whole 'who am i' topic is already almost too big for a blog entry of its own).
now with me becoming the loneliest person to have ever existed within a year this shifted, or well intensified in some ways.
i only have one person i would consider a friend, and that's an online friend. he's super kind and we talk a lot. usually he's just as lonely as i am, but every two months he hangs out with someone. i immediately feel extremely jealous and such 'incidents' can ruin multiple days for me. but honestly also just someone else commenting positively on his posts can trigger that. i don't say anything of course, rationally i know i'm not supposed to be jealous, he's just an online mutual and people are allowed to have friends apart from me and even like them better than they like me. so yes, it'd be silly to act jealous even if i am.
emotions are weird like that. they don't really care whether they're morally justified. they just show up and then it's your job to decide whether they deserve a voice. feeling something and acting on it have always seemed like two completely different things to me.
now before anyone says 'you're just insecure blah blah', i know that. i know my jealousy and need for a person who is just as lonely as i am is simply me not feeling like there's any reason to stay with me apart from having no one else. maybe that's what jealousy really is though. not wanting what someone else has, but wanting to matter as much as they do. i don't envy people's lives nearly as much as i envy the certainty that someone would notice if they disappeared for a week. also yes, i know i have to fix that for any genuine relationships to happen. i simply don't know how.
that's the strange thing about wanting connection. the harder you try to hold onto someone, the more obvious it becomes that you can't actually control whether they stay. every relationship is basically built on two people choosing each other over and over again, and no amount of worrying can make someone choose you tomorrow.
me fearing people leaving me usually gets me to be too clingy, too attached and giving too much effort, which pushes them further away. if i don't act like that it's mostly because i don't care about the other person and gets me to give too little effort (or no effort at all). i don't seem to be able to find the right balance.
maybe i'm just a bad person.
as i said already, i always used to have jealousy issues, it always affected my relationships but i still also always had relationships, until a year ago. i lost all my friends and was completely alone. now even tho this might have fuelled my jealousy issues it also gave me a new perspective on the whole thing.
with finally gaining a person that is willing to talk to me again i also noticed it's pretty privileged to find a person that means so much to you that you want them to stay with you and only you. of course it's still something i need to fix but before i start changing the whole reality of how i think about myself and how i think others see me i'll just tell myself that it's proof that i'm full of love.
people always say jealousy is possessive, but i don't think that's entirely true. i don't want to own anyone. if anything i want to know that i'd still be chosen even if there were other options. maybe jealousy isn't a desire for control but a fear of comparison. the moment someone spends time with someone else, you're suddenly forced to imagine yourself being measured against them. and because you only have access to your own flaws, you automatically assume you'll lose.
i also think jealousy is one of those emotions that people misunderstand because they only look at what it does instead of where it comes from. it's easy to judge a jealous person because jealousy often becomes ugly. it becomes manipulation, guilt tripping, possessiveness. but the emotion itself isn't any of those things. as i said, it's just fear.
maybe that's why it feels so shameful. sadness gets sympathy. loneliness gets sympathy. even anger gets understanding sometimes.
emotions aren't moral. they don't decide who you are. all they do is reveal what matters to you and in that case, what you're afraid of losing.
maybe every emotion, not just jealousy, is just a different answer to the same question: what do i value? grief tells you what you loved. fear tells you what you want to protect. jealousy tells you what you're terrified isn't really yours in the first place. maybe that's why it hurts so much. not because someone else has something i don't, but because it forces me to confront how little i believe i can be enough.
and that's also the strange thing about relationships. they're one of the few things in life that become less real the more tightly you try to hold onto them. you can't convince someone to choose you. the moment you have to convince them, they've already stopped choosing freely. love only means something because it can leave. if it couldn't, it wouldn't be love anymore. it'd just be ownership.
i don't know if my jealousy ever will completely disappear. maybe it isn't supposed to. maybe it just changes shape. maybe growing up isn't learning not to be jealous, but learning that love and uncertainty were never meant to be separated. every person who matters to you is, in some sense, a leap of faith. and i've never been particularly good at jumping.
this all doesn't make any sense really and i repeated myself many times and i've come to no real conclusion but i think it's better to share dumb, messy thoughts than to just keep everything inside. (also: in my defence: it's like 02:30 as i'm writing this, so not exactly a time to have smart thoughts at.)
until the next entry :P