Member-only story
Sense of Humour
And envy about it
Once upon a time, I sat in a group with my recently acquired friend, Jenny, a single mother with a young boy. Her marriage broke down. We never learned why or how. Has she told me or has she told me a story I instinctively knew was not true, hence dismissed it and did not remember...
Or has her story irked me, provoked something in me that I didn’t want to know about in myself? This is always a good question to ask, I feel — for sometimes we remain unaware of one or two blind spots in the self, not wanting to fully own for now at least.
Jenny was on internet dating, she tells the group. Today she has a particular issue with the fact that so many contenders seem to claim they have a ‘sense of humour’. She goes from grey to dirty red as she tells us this. Sense of humour irks her so much — I imagine she’s been told she did not have one. She looks at me — a steel-kill in her look, dimmed — she is trying not to flare it out at me too openly. I feel it fully, though and it’s clear to everyone as I have just made the group laugh. And we are friends no longer. Oh dear.
Envy, I find, is equal to the pain of not having what we imagine life seems to be giving to others. But so often we can be very mistaken about it.
And I could be so mistaken by what I thought this was. It wasn’t her envy that…
