Jealousy

I believe in jealousy because it’s an emotion everyone experienced. Jealousy can bring out the worst behavior and the cruelest thoughts in people. Jealousy is the green-eyed monster our parents warn us about and tell us to avoid, but you can’t always avoid it or even ignore it.

When I lived in Bastrop, a small town outside of Austin, I had a best friend. She was Russian like me and we had similar backgrounds like we both had stepdads and both our moms met them in Russia. But we had polar personalities. My friend, Julia, was more American than I was, she had an easier time fitting in because she was more outgoing, friendlier, pretty much every I wasn’t. But we still got along. We were the best of friends for life, until one day she met another girl. She was Russian too, but she was adopted by an American couple. The girl, Lera, hated the couple, but she liked Julia and her mom and soon they were the best of friends. They did everything together: go the movie, go camping, hang out , in other words everything Julia and I used to do. Whenever I would call Julia, she was never home, instead she hanging with Lera. At first I was hurt, felt betrayed, and abandoned, I felt pain to the point of tears. But then I started to feel something different. I began to get upset at Lera, a girl I never met, but who stole my best friend. I soon started listing to myself all the qualities I possessed that I thought were better than Lera and the reason why Julia should be friends with me, until I realized that I was competing with a girl I never met and know anything about.

Eventually I met Lera and at first I like her, but soon she began to reveal her true self. She would complain about her adaptive parents saying how mean and rude they were. She would smoke all the time and she would constantly brush me off. Her and Julia always had inside jokes, laughed at the silliest things, and be practically attached at hip. Never in my life had I been more jealous of Lera than I had been at that moment. I felt left out, alone and abandoned. I could have blown up at them, scream at them for making me feel inadequate, but instead I took a step back. I took a deep look at myself and realized that I’ve been depended on one person to be one friend and that I had virtually no other friends.

Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it can make you look at yourself like you never had before. For me, jealousy forced me to expand my circle of friends and search for qualities that were buried deep down inside me.