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Anne T. Donahue Quotes

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Famous Anne T. Donahue Quotes

“Being jealous does nothing. It turns you into a person who’s unable to feel genuine happiness, and tarnishes every accomplishment when it’s used to measure your sense of worth on a made-up scale. You hear about a friend’s promotion (in an industry that probably isn’t yours) and feel like you will never venture past your existing achievements. You hear someone from high school is getting married and assume that you never will. You discover the guy you worked retail with in 2006 has a new apartment, and you sit wherever you happen to live and actively resent the space you loved five minutes ago. And feelings like will always come up; it’s just up to you to say “fuck off.” So, while I’d like to say you should just decide not to be jealous, and that we’re all in this together so let’s remember that and be best friends, I know that isn’t realistic because jealousy is immune to reason and logic…If I feel myself slipping into a jealousy wormhole when I see someone else shining, I remember that to gauge my self-worth based on someone else’s accomplishments is a one-way ticket to bitterness.”

“Keep your eyes on your own paper. It’s hard when so-and-so is doing the thing you want to do. And it’s worse when you realize you are rooting for them to fail because you’re jealous. Jealousy is a terrible feeling. Jealousy is how we morph into the worst, most petty versions of ourselves (and inevitably why we end up owing a few apologies). Never have I gone down the rabbit hole of creeping on somebody’s work or life or Instagram and come away feeling good…But it happens, and we’re human, and it’s easy to think that if you can chart out someone else’s trajectory to the top, you’ll learn what it takes to be them – or beat them. Every time I’ve acted out of jealousy, I’ve told myself it was an act of control or reclamation. And every time after the fact, I’ve felt spectacularly unhinged and out of control.”