Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash
Friendship and Competition
In my eyes friendships can be just as complicated and go through nearly as many peaks and troughs as romantic relationships, difference being, as an unwritten rule we’re not allowed to get overly emotional about the ‘let-downs’. Like, it’s unlikely you’ll mention how hurt you are about your bestie not noticing your amazing new hair slay. You might write them off as a hater, you might even have a good bitch to your work colleagues, but you won’t mention how hurt you are. Your boyfriend now? Oh he’ll definitely hear about it!
In a strange way it’s like we’re more sensitive to our friends’ feelings than our significant others, which could be why we tend to hide how we feel when they’ve hurt us. We’re more able to express our grievances to our partners than our friends. My theory is, it’s because we’ve decided that it’s our partner’s job to make us happy, but it’s or friends’ job to entertain us and keep our secrets. What I’ve noticed however, is that as we get older it seems like our oldest friendships can become our competitors. Sometimes this is nothing more than a bit of fleeting comparison, sometimes it’s a lot more emotionally aggressive, and I notice it comes out the most surrounding 1 of 2 areas; career or relationship status.
I’m going to focus more on career but I think this post can apply to both.
In an ideal world being happy for our friends’ accomplishments should be 2nd nature, but what if your goals are similar? What if you find yourself becoming a hater instead?
You see envy can be a very subtle emotion and doesn’t reveal itself so openly. It hides behind irritability, conceals itself in ‘wanting to be distant’, and I’m here to tell you it’s not such a bad thing to identify or use!
So I have a really good friend who I consider more of a soul mate; we’ve more or less gone through the same experiences during the same times, we’re into the same things, and at one stage I thought we wanted the same things. Now this is all good and well except she was actually doing it while I was always ‘planning to’ and watching her achieve the things I thought I wanted evoked something strange in me. Now don’t get me wrong I was genuinely happy for her…but I suddenly became lost in my own ambition.
I started becoming anxious about where my own life was going. ‘Should I be following the same tactics?’, ‘Do I even want what I think I want?’, ‘Do I look like a failure compared to her?’.
Every picture posted on Insta I felt worse and worse, and after weeks of agonising and beating myself up over feeling the way I did I decided to distance myself. Not as a friend, but as a ‘fan’ and a ‘follower’. Although if I’m honest social media in general was stunting me at the time so in true Mimi Yeboah fashion deleted the app.
Now admittedly this was a dramatic move but it turns out it was the best one for me. It resulted in me becoming focussed on whatever I was doing instead of what everybody else was doing, and I noticed my ambition returning. Not because she was no longer in my life, but because I had stopped comparing mine to hers. What’s crazy is, it actually made me realise that we don’t want the same things at all and that where the magic is. Understanding that we don’t all want the same thing we just want the same results…success!
So, here are my top tips for dealing with jealousy and competition within friendships. Prepare to be envy free!
1. Be very clear with yourself about what you want to achieve in life.
Are your ambitions your own or have you just adopted someone else’s dreams? Be honest with yourself.
2. If your dreams are similar to your friends’, put them on mute;
This will obviously make you seem like a hater (and lets face, you are), but that’s fine. This is more for creative preservation than anything else, because it is virtually impossible to think creatively while comparing your creativity to another’s.
3. Keep most of your conversations limited to life;
Your friends are not your fans, they’re your friends. This means emotional support, mental stimulation and good times. And the same goes for you.
This was a hard pill for me to swallow initially, so a few months ago I decided to have a reading demanding to know exactly what was holding me back (because apparently the daily readings I was giving myself wasn’t enough for me to see but that’s another post).
I was told that I had no uncertainty when I came to my future, I had only ego. And that shit hit me like a mutha!
You see by that point in my life I’d become too aware of how people saw me. I’d hyped up all the things I was going to do and started to become a prisoner of my own words.
I became obsessed with whether I came across as a failure which, had actually become the catalyst causing failure.
I say all this for you to ask yourself again, what are you doing this for? To stunt on your friends? For the glory? Money?
And if it is to stunt, expect friendships failures to follow. There is a difference between sharing and bragging. There is a difference between needing encouragement and wanting exultation. There is also a difference between wanting your friends to be proud of you and wanting them to be jealous of you. Be honest with yourself about whether you or your friends are unknowingly just wanting to stunt.
4. Your friend probably feels the same;
If you’re feeling a type of way about the relationship with your friend its likely they’ve either picked up on it or feeling the same way, and there’s one thing I’ll advise if anything gets brought up; be honest.
If your friend is truly your friend there should be no issues with you admitting that you’re feeling a little insecure about life right now and just need some time to reprioritise. We all go through it every now and again and you’re allowed to too. Ask to be given some time.
5. Heavy is the Crown;
One of the things we fail to realise when our friends are experiencing ‘success’, is that success can be very isolating. It can be very lonely. This is another reason why wanting your friends to be fans will ultimately lead to problems. Who is real and who is fake? Who just wants to be around for a bit of clout? Who’s got my back? These are the thoughts probably going through your friends’ minds depending on their level of success. The pressures are real, and so is the paranoia
Now don’ get me wrong, i’m not saying you shouldn’t support your friends’ endeavors or they shouldn’t support yours, I’m not saying that at all. What i’m saying is your relationship shouldn’t be based on whether or not you bought their latest product. Let me know if you understand what i’m saying, I’m happy to go into it more in another post.
Have a good week!
Mimi…