How to Make Envy Work For You

At it’s core, envy is secret admiration — an abrupt emotion that cracks us open and reveals things we truly value or wish for. But is envy good or bad?

All through my childhood and adolescence, I felt this invisible pressure to shape my career a certain way. I was born into a family of educators and doctors. My parents and the society-at-large had fairly specific ideas about what a “suitable” career looked like. There was a sense that I needed to indulge them before my own curiosities. In India, if you are a reasonably good student, pursuing medicine or engineering is preordained.

I liked technology but being an engineer wasn’t really my calling. I was far more interested in theater and making movies, even though rehearsals and practice didn’t fit into my intense study schedule. To add to the stress, convincing my parents seemed like a nightmare. They worked in different cities and had sacrificed a lot to ensure that my brother and I went to good schools. Acting just didn’t seem like a viable option. So I put a pause on my passion to focus on the engineering entrance examinations.

When the results came out, I had done well. With the anxieties of my parents partly allayed, the first thing I did was to enroll myself into a theater workshop the summer before college started. Now was my time to do what I wanted to do all along.

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