Poison Envy

The brainworm of social media that stokes misery and failure

Sep 19, 2025

Image Credit: francescoch. Licensed from iStock.

Pop your head above the parapet and people will start shooting. Stand out, and they’ll want to knock you back into line. Being judged and critiqued by strangers is hard to withstand.

Especially if you’re someone who has been abused, attacked, and violated by miserable people who don’t want to see someone else having fun, or money or the limelight.

Especially if you’re a woman.

Because women get a LOT more shit for stepping out of the kitchen. So much so, that high-profile women like Megan Markle and Kamala Harris, on being attacked, make a public display of getting back into it.

I’m not cooking for anyone. I cooked daily for my kids for fifteen years, and sick of the fact that all I ever got when I served up was moans because someone didn’t like this or that about it, I went on strike. Said to my teen boys, Make your own food then (I’d taught them to cook first. One became a chef.) Put my husband (with his consent) on a cooking course. Up to that point, he was a reheater of “orange food”: nuggets, beans, oven chips. The height of his skills was a fishfinger sandwich. Turns out, the man can cook like a restaurateur. So, yep. I’m not getting back in the kitchen.

Play to your strengths, I say. And for me, that’s words, not enchiladas.

A few months ago, on a wave of popularity that followed a viral note, I was repeatedly attacked by a fledgling writer. Exhausted by his fury, I fought back with this humour post. Amazingly, it worked. He popped up one final time in my feed, to tell me the truth behind his anger, then deleted it and vanished.

When I wrote about his antics, Jennie O'Connor used the phrase “hurt shadow artists,” and that got me thinking about envy.

Envy’s place as a deadly sin is more obvious to me now that I’m translating sin as what keeps us from living in our power. When we are in a state of connection and love, we envy no one: we feel the fullness of who we are, and have no urge to bitch about, or hurt, those living the life we aspire to.

But which of us doesn’t seethe with envy from time to time? For creatives, how hard is it to see someone excel in our art form? Or worse, to see them gain recognition and accolades for skills we class as mediocre? They get the awards, the parties, the media coverage: we get a compensatory bowl of cereal and moan on the phone to the last person who can still tolerate our negativity.

This has been happening for centuries.

Keats, without the benefits of nobility and social connections, was enraged by the success of Byron, complaining on reading a favourable review, “You see what it is to be six foot tall and a lord!”1

Virginia Woolf was envious of Katherine Mansfield.

Sylvia Plath confessed to her diary, "Jealous one I am, green-eyed, spite-seething. Read the six women poets in the 'new poets of England and America.' Dull, turgid."

And what was she envying here? "Secret sin: I envy, covet, lust – wander lost, red-heeled, red-gloved, black-flowing-coated, catching my image in shop windows, car windows, a stranger, sharper-visaged stranger than I knew."

It reminds me of a time, a quarter century ago, when I was envious of anyone who was having sex, which at the time seemed to be everyone. The point is, you can be envious of any perceived success in others. Love life, income, you name it. It’s very easy to look at others and compare ourselves unfavourably.

Those of us on social media surely feel this more keenly than ever, as the number of lives we can compare to our own becomes infinite, and there are always so many that in one sense or another seem shinier than ours. Who isn’t envious, while commuting through bleak weather to the job you hate, of she who posts from the balcony of her second home in Tuscany?

But envy, indulged, robs us of our power. It heightens our misery and, by doing so, separates us from the very thing that might feed our own success. By which I mean you. The innate value of you, a soul entirely unique and on a journey of its own.

We get what we focus on, whether we want it or not. And where envy guides our eyes is the gap between where we are and where we want to be. As we focus on the gap, it starts to widen. Envy sticks us where we are, while others, more at peace with themselves, keep moving ahead. Eventually, the gap is a chasm we are staring into, which seems impossible to breach. Perhaps we can’t even believe we’ll ever make the other side.

Instead of appreciating what we have, we see only what we don’t. This is the reverse formula for the one that took me from suicidal misery to contentment: it has the power to draw you right back in the opposite direction. Because envy has toxicity, and as it grows, it leaks. We subtly broadcast our thoughts with little awareness: through the look on our face, our tone of voice, our gestures. And even more subtly, through a kind of ‘vibe’. Have you met a person who is envious of you? You can tell. And they’re someone you, weirdly, don’t feel like helping. You can sense the animosity.

I write this as someone who spends time on both sides of this sin. Who is sometimes envied and sometimes envious, and would like, very much, to be free of the latter. I have no control over the way perceived success triggers others. But I know that I must, if I ever want another book deal, stop being annoyed by everyone else’s. It has been a bumpy few years for me, as the publishing industry has run scared into massive celebrity advances and away from the art form. But I mustn’t let that poison my heart.

Or, indeed, my art.

“Like” this post to say “I woz here.” It helps me WAY more than you realise.

I’m writing about the Seven Deadly Sins. Previously:

Paid subscribers can join the Seven Deadly Sins Writing Challenge: a therapeutic practice to rid yourself of your baggage through the art of spewing words onto the page.

I’m looking for someone to work with me one-on-one to clear some envy on a live video call, using EFT tapping. Game? Get in touch!

And there’s an extra for my paid subscribers this week.

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Your bonus entry: what happened when the subject of my fiery feminist humour piece read the essay I wrote about him. Click below for access!