I have just published my fifth book, and this one has frightened me more than the others. Perfectly Imperfect is my first collection of poetry, and poetry feels different from my other writing because there is considerably less to hide behind. In an essay, I can point to the research, occupy myself with an argument or disappear for a while into the architecture of an idea. A poem is rather less accommodating. At some point I have to admit: these words are mine; this mattered to me; here you go. Publishing it has occasionally felt like running naked through the streets.
One person I know responded almost exactly as my own fear might have predicted. How could I expose myself like that? Let people know that much about me? He could never do it. Another friend responded completely differently. She was proud of me. She understood what it had taken to put something so personal into the world and wanted to celebrate it. Same book. Same exposure. Same me. Two very different ways of standing beside somebody who has done something that mattered to them. It made me wonder how good we really are at clapping for one another.
The half-second before congratulations
Think about the last time somebody close to you told you something wonderful had happened to them. Not somebody famous or sufficiently distant that their life has very little relationship to yours. Someone close enough for comparison to be possible. Perhaps your sister lost weight. Your colleague got the promotion. Your friend published the book she had been talking about for years. The couple you know bought the house. Somebody announced the opportunity you secretly wanted for yourself.
What happened inside you in the half-second before you said, That’s fantastic? Perhaps it was uncomplicated delight. I hope so. There is something wonderful about being genuinely thrilled by another person’s good fortune, particularly when we know what it took to get there. But perhaps something else arrived too: a flicker of comparison, a little tightening somewhere in the body, an uninvited why them? or what about me? Nothing you would necessarily say aloud, just a tiny internal rearrangement before the socially acceptable response caught up.
If something less generous did flicker through you, that does not necessarily make you a terrible person. It may make you interesting. We often use jealousy and envy interchangeably, but there is a useful distinction between them. Jealousy generally involves the possibility of losing something we already have, often a valued relationship; envy arises when somebody else possesses something we desire. Which means that uncomfortable half-second may contain information.
If I have absolutely no desire to own a yacht, your yacht is unlikely to trouble me. If your book launch makes something twist inside me, perhaps I want to write. If your sabbatical irritates me disproportionately, perhaps I am exhausted. If your promotion gets under my skin, perhaps I am more ambitious than I have admitted. If your happy relationship provokes something I would rather not examine, perhaps there is loneliness or dissatisfaction asking for my attention.
Someone else’s success can become a mirror, and proximity seems to make the reflection sharper. I don’t spend much time worrying about the fact that Jeff Bezos has considerably more money than I do. The comparison is too ridiculous to be useful. But someone who went to school with me? A colleague who started at roughly the same level? A friend my age whose business suddenly takes off? Now we are close enough for their life to brush against mine.
The closer someone is to a life we might plausibly have lived, the easier it becomes to use them as a measuring stick. Their achievement says, Look what I did, but somewhere inside us we may hear something quite different: Look what you haven’t done. Perhaps that is why someone else’s happiness can occasionally feel like an accusation. They aren’t accusing us. Comparison is.
Their achievement may illuminate an unlived part of our own life. The friend who writes the book reminds us of the manuscript still sitting on our laptop. The person who changes careers makes us look again at the job we have complained about for five years. Someone else’s courage can expose the place where we have been frightened to move.
What happens next matters. We can think, I want something like that too. Or we can think, You shouldn’t have that. The first response might send us towards our own lives. The second sends us towards them with a knife.
The very small knife
Usually, thankfully, the knife is metaphorical. Sometimes it is obvious: we gossip, mock, criticise or undermine. Most of us, however, are far too sophisticated to behave that badly in public, so we reach for a much smaller knife. A qualification will do. She’s done well, but... He had a lot of help. They were lucky. She’s not actually that talented. It’s easier for them. We haven’t denied the achievement. Technically, we have acknowledged it. We’ve simply inserted a tiny pin and let a little air out. Somehow, making their success a little smaller can make the uncomfortable comparison easier to bear.
I know what the knife feels like from the other side. When I wrote I Love You, Send Money about my experience of romance fraud, I had made a deliberate decision to tell a story I found hugely humiliating. Part of the reason for telling it was as a public service announcement: if making my own experience public helped somebody else recognise the warning signs before suffering the same fate, the exposure would be worth it. When the book attracted attention globally, I made the mistake of reading some of the UK online commentary. One man decided I must be a “Dumbo” to have fallen for it and that I more or less deserved what had happened to me. I was gutted. I had already told the world about something that had made me feel foolish; now a stranger had taken that vulnerability and handed the humiliation straight back to me.
Perhaps you remember your own version. The outfit somebody laughed at when you had finally felt good wearing it. The creative thing you tentatively showed someone and they dismissed. The good news that was met with silence. The achievement immediately followed by yes, but... Or perhaps it is simply one sentence, said years ago, about something you were proud of that you can still quote almost word for word. Small knives can leave surprisingly durable cuts.
I have no idea what motivated that man, and not every knife is envy. But visibility does seem to provoke things in us: comparison, discomfort, judgement, perhaps sometimes the urge to restore somebody to the size at which we were more comfortable with them. The more interesting question is what we do with that response. Instead of interrogating their achievement, we can become curious about our response to it. Why did that affect me? What do I want? What have I been avoiding? What does their success seem to say about me, and is that actually true? Envy may be less interesting as a verdict on them than as information about us.
It does not mean every complicated response to another person’s success is envy. The reactions to my poetry book reminded me of something broader: we also have very different levels of comfort with another person’s willingness to be visible. Achievement can put us above the parapet. It asks us, sometimes quite explicitly, to say: Look. I made this. I did it. I am proud of myself. Even writing those words feels slightly provocative, which may tell us something.
Here in New Zealand, that provocation has an interesting cultural context. We value humility. There is something deeply appealing about the person who does extraordinary things without requiring everybody in the room to know about them. We tend to distrust excessive self-promotion and have a long cultural affection for people who don’t take themselves too seriously. There is something rather lovely in that.
There is also Tall Poppy Syndrome. The metaphor tells the story efficiently: a poppy grows higher than the rest of the field and attracts the urge to cut it back down.
A Māori whakataukī offers another beautiful image of humility: Kāore te kūmara e kōrero ana mō tōna ake reka. The kūmara does not say how sweet it is. It doesn’t need to advertise itself. Its sweetness can speak for itself. But the whakataukī does not instruct us to wander around the garden insisting that everybody else’s kūmara tastes terrible. Humility does not require humiliation.
There is a profound difference between reminding ourselves that achievement doesn’t make us better than everybody else and deciding that nobody should be seen to be particularly good at anything. Don’t think you’re better than everybody else is not the same instruction as don’t let anybody see that you’re good at something. And practising humility ourselves is very different from requiring it from everybody around us because their visibility makes us uncomfortable.
Having grown up in Canada and lived much of my adult life in New Zealand, I find the contrast in cultural instincts fascinating. Parts of North American culture can be considerably more comfortable with achievement being spoken aloud: I built this. I earned this. I’m proud of this. Ambition can be worn more visibly. That comes with its own peculiarities. Confidence can become performance, self-belief can become relentless self-promotion, and there are only so many declarations of being “humbled and honoured” that one LinkedIn feed can reasonably sustain.
There is something the two instincts could borrow from one another. What if I can be proud of what I have done without believing it makes me better than you? And what if you can celebrate what I have done without believing it makes you less than me?
Who gets to be visible?
I wonder whether this becomes particularly complicated for women, because many of us have inherited remarkably contradictory instructions about success and visibility. Be accomplished, but don’t be intimidating. Be confident, but don’t be full of yourself. Be ambitious, but remain likeable. Be visible, but preferably without appearing to want to be seen.
Think about how you announce your own good news. Do you simply say it, or do you instinctively make it smaller first? We can become so practised at these rules that nobody else needs to cut us down. We do it ourselves. We qualify the achievement before announcing it, attribute it quickly to luck, reassure everyone that it wasn’t really that difficult or that we had lots of help. Some of those things may be true. Almost nobody achieves anything entirely alone, luck exists, privilege matters and recognising other people’s contribution is a virtue. But there is also a peculiar dance in making ourselves smaller before anyone has had the opportunity to think we have become too big. Sometimes we cut our own poppies before anybody else gets the chance.
More uncomfortably, women can hold the scissors for one another. Perhaps we notice when another woman is getting a little too pleased with herself. We question whether she really deserves the opportunity, privately critique the photograph she posted to celebrate it, or find ourselves more comfortable with her success once she has wrapped it in sufficient self-deprecation.
Which raises a question that may be more uncomfortable than whether other people are prepared to clap for us: can we tolerate another woman being visible? Can she be proud without us interpreting pride as superiority? Can she tell us something wonderful without immediately having to diminish it? Can we let her have the promotion, the body, the business, the relationship, the book, the applause, without treating any of those things as evidence that there is now less available for us? Can she take up more space, earn more money, fall madly in love, write the bloody book and tell us she is delighted about it without our immediately needing to locate the qualification?
The mirror needs turning one more time. Can we tolerate our own visibility? Clapping for other people and receiving their applause may not be entirely separate capacities. Both require us to resist turning visibility into hierarchy. Your success does not have to mean you are better than me, and mine does not have to mean I think I am. There is room for both of us.
Clap for them
The next time somebody close to you tells you something wonderful, perhaps notice that half-second before the polished response arrives. Not so you can chastise yourself for an uncharitable thought or pretend you have transcended comparison, but because the little green-eyed creature may occasionally have something useful to tell you. Perhaps her success has illuminated something you want. Perhaps his courage has exposed something you have been avoiding. Perhaps their happiness has touched a place in you that isn’t very happy at all. Perhaps the person standing in front of you has simply provided evidence that something you thought impossible might actually be available.
Take the information. Just don’t hand it the knife. Let your friend tell you about the promotion without immediately explaining why the job wouldn’t suit you anyway. Let the entrepreneur celebrate the business, the graduate take the photograph and the athlete enjoy the medal. Let the woman who worked bloody hard for something say, without qualification or apology, I am proud of this. Her achievement is not evidence of your failure. Her visibility does not make you invisible, and her sweetness does not make yours less sweet.
There is room in the field for more than one tall poppy. Making somebody else smaller will not make our own unlived life any larger, and perhaps generosity becomes most meaningful precisely when another person’s joy brushes against something unfinished in us. We can let their achievement remain theirs, take responsibility for whatever it illuminates in us, and allow them the pleasure of being seen.
So clap for them. Properly. Generously. Even perhaps, when some small part of you wishes it were your turn. And when your turn comes, try not to cut yourself down before the rest of us get the chance to clap for you.
Dr Jordan Marijana Alexander is an executive advisor, human systems strategist and writer exploring how identity, place, culture and living systems shape participation in the modern world. She works alongside leaders, boards and organisations navigating complex questions of leadership, change and participation, and is the co-founder of RelateAble.Global. If this article has raised questions, sparked reflection or highlighted a decision you’re carrying, you’re invited to book a confidential conversation. You can follow DrJMA on LinkedIn and Engenesis for ongoing essays, reflections and research exploring leadership, identity, belonging and participation.