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My sense of isolation intensified even further when my own envy erupted. Over the years in therapy, I confronted the enormous storm that envy has created in my life.
In fact, envy and its sibling greed have been the most forbidden emotions I’ve battled with throughout my life but much more so since I entered graduate school. There, my demands for excellence and insecurities regarding my own gifts compared with those of my fellow students intensified.
In these lethal comparisons, I came up wanting—the talents of my peers always outdistancing mine. The result was that stab in my chest then the slow burn at the pit of my stomach when I heard a poem or a success that I wished was mine. Envy certainly did not fit with my attempts to be a good and generous human being. It diminished me as a person and intense shame accompanied it. I hated the self-involvement and shallowness implied by it and realized that without discovering the feelings and experiences that give rise to it, envy would continue to darken my view and rob me of the pleasure that comes from making art.
Psychologically, envy begins in childhood and, for the most part, stems from sibling rivalry—the belief that siblings threaten our place in our parents’ hearts. If my mother and father have other children to love, they will love me less. The healthiest of us had parents who were sensitive to that vulnerability and reassured us that we were loved for ourselves, for our uniqueness. We did not have to duplicate our brother’s or sister’s talents to warrant love. But that is often not the case.
For us Cusack kids, in addition to three siblings, a far more formidable threat was posed by the sinless perfect child held up to us as the ideal of what our parents and God wanted. We knew we could never measure up. That sense of inadequacy and threat naturally spread into other areas of our lives—particularly ones that mattered most, like our art. And one plagued by envy is likely not to trust and value his or her own work.
Envy implies a hunger, an emptiness. And hunger requires feeding. As children, we look to our parents to tend to our needs for food and shelter, love, and self-worth. As adults, we transfer this reliance to ourselves. So too with the gifts of art. If we only rely on others to feed us and do not learn to feed ourselves, we will starve and our art will starve. The world can never feed us enough to make up for the lack of our own care. And the first step toward that self-feeding involves identifying our gift.
What is it that distinguishes my work from another’s? What can I love about what I do? For me, it was my intensive study of voice and learning to embrace my own, that introduced me to my gift, and it was that discovery that finally muted envy for me. (Not totally—these feelings seldom disappear completely—but significantly enough for me to feel its absence.) The relief was palpable, profound. But that didn’t happen until years after I finished graduate school. Until then, I burned with envy and the shame that accompanied it. It threatened to paralyze me. I became physically sick and depressed; I couldn’t write.
Next: Creative Writing & the Psyche: The Threat of Making Art V: A Mentor
