Jealousy is a powerful emotion. It’s often destructive — it contaminates your heart and soul and makes it impossible to enjoy anything in your life. In Othello, Shakespeare writes of jealousy:
“But jealous souls will not be answered so.
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.”
Jealousy summons a whole host of negative emotions in its wake. It hijacks your thoughts and carries them into dangerous places. It is as though a demon (Shakespeare’s “monster”) has perched on your shoulders and is guiding you deeper and deeper into hell.
Jealousy robs you of perspective. Your reality becomes flat — it loses its texture, its dimensions. You compare everything in your life to a single variable: “I can’t be happy until I have … money, love, fame, a good job, etc.”
It robs your relationships with other people, too. When clouded by jealousy, you can only see others as enemies to your self-image. You cannot see them as they are. Worst…
