Jealousy

Jealousy is the word I shall start with. And jealousy will be how I end.

We are the stressed collective.

Survivalists.

Adult colouring books will not save our souls.

Living on diets of socially acceptable wines and gins and internet memes.

We are grazing in the peaks and troughs of the managerial farmyard. A diet of heavily sugared carbohydrates. Buy two for the price of three – complete three reports in the time it should take to do two.

But aren’t you jealous every day? It floods into me during car journeys on the bumpy highway between the frying pan and the fire.

I am in a coffee shop but I don’t drink coffee anymore. I only drink strong tea now I’m a social worker. Caffeine is the gateway drug to a panic attack and should be heavily regulated. When I order my strong tea I am jealous. The elderly barista is a rosy cheeked ballerina to me. Pirouetting from the fridge, to the hot water container to the corrugated cups. She dances as hard as she can and it doesn’t look easy. But there is choreography and order. There is a preordained schedule to her day. She knows how to make the drinks. She knows when the day gets busy. She knows when her lunch break is. She knows when her day finishes. She isn’t receiving e-mails from other professionals in the service industry, asking about how the coffee is getting on, or if you have made the referral for family support to meet the coffee’s needs. She won’t receive a phone call asking why she isn’t in court. She won’t have to tell the coffee why they can’t see their parents. She won’t have to go home and write a report about the coffee until midnight, repeating the same information over and over but in different text boxes. She won’t have to sit in a court room and have solicitors and barristers and judges tell her that she hasn’t safeguarded the coffee appropriately and she should have been a better barista, except that they don’t know that she is also trying to safeguard twenty five other coffees that all have their own individual problems and their own court judges who are also annoyed about the fact that the elderly barista hasn’t done everything she said she would do, before she knew there would be so many more things to do, because she is not able to predict the behaviour of all coffee, because nobody in the world can predict the behaviour of coffee, because it is coffee and it just sloshes about all over the place in a totally random way and sometimes spills on the floor, but sometimes stays in the cup and sometimes it burns people, but sometimes it’s the perfect temperature, but sometimes it’s fucking ice coffee which is totally different and sometimes it is strong tea and sometimes it is a panic attack.

I am jealous of the elderly barista.

I am jealous of all teachers. I know teachers. They struggle and struggle and work hard and deserve their holidays but so do so many humans. So do I. So do you. They have timetables and terms and starts and finishes. There are cards and presents at the end of school term and there is time for meaningful relationships and they get to know their students. And they are stressed to high heaven. And I am jealous.

I am jealous of the teacher.

I am jealous of my retired mother.

I am jealous of the ignorant bliss of my brother-in-law’s dogs.

I am jealous of the alcohol in the bottle.

I am jealous of the flow of water.

I am jealous of everyone else’s holiday pictures.

I am jealous of the moth that bounces against the streetlight when I finish work late at the witching hour.

I am jealous of the grass that is greener on the other side.

I am jealous of the thirteen year old me. Delivering newspapers on his bike in a morning before the workers rise and in the evening before they get home. Listening to his favourite music and pedalling and getting tips at Christmas. So I worry. What if that was the fucking peak of my career? As good as it gets. Competing with a thirteen year old boy for the rest of my life.

I am jealous of the paperboy.

I have started obsessing over television stars and famous musicians. I can’t watch and listen in the same way. The wonderful lives they must be living. Doing the job they always wanted. The massage of the ego. How important they must feel, because being thin and famous is the goal of our age. And we – the flabby carb munchers of the farmyard – watch on. Jealous and entertained. With poor circulation.

I am jealous of everyone who is happy with their job.

I am jealous of a future me. An alternate reality. Or a possible one. If I leap into the colouring book, which page will I land? If I sail down a cocktail of wine and gin, where will I dock? If I keep pedalling will I end up somewhere nice? Am I brave enough to digest the risk and make the jump? I am jealous of the people who are.

Most importantly of all, I am jealous of the people who don’t have to feel jealousy.