I have written about my own struggles with envy. I do everything I can to be sane, to tell myself things like: “you can’t envy a part of somebody’s life, without taking on all their problems and pain”.
But this week for the first time in a while, I was reminded of what happens when I am the envied person. When something I have done does not generate joy among my colleagues, but instead, gets me ambivalent support, watery kudos, not-so-real happiness for what I have accomplished.
And oddest of all, the people I got this from were central to my project. More central than I am!
Here’s the short version. I worked on a video about sexual assault on college campuses. It is not in my playwriting wheelhouse, but it is important to me. All of my educational videos matter to me, because they are on difficult topics that need to be aired: Violence against women, rape, corrupted elections – you name it, we have tried to spread the word and change the situation!
So we showed the video to a huge crowd of excited college students who loved it! We had gotten everything right – meaning that in our tale of woe about the amount of sexual assault on US campuses (1 in 5 women will be assaulted in college!!) we did not say all men are monsters. We showed young men who were as outraged by sexual assault as we are!
It is easy to think of college men as a big, undefined group of puking-drunk frat guys. Insensitive creeps. What fun to hate them. But the truth is, a lot of young men are adamantly against what’s going on on their campus. They were willing to speak out, to say the truth – “real men don’t rape women”! We were thrilled to find these men and to put them on screen with so many brave women who have been assaulted and are now speaking out.
Together, the women and the men, make a powerful force for change. This video rocks!!
In the auditorium where we showed the video, was an old friend of mine who had been in the Department of Education of the US government. She loved the video so much she asked for a copy to give to the President of the United States.
I was on top of the world. Not only did I fantasize Mr. Obama calling me to personally thank me and say how great I am (yes, I said “fantasize”!), I was also genuinely thrilled that this might give our video nation wide exposure.
So I called some friends to share the news.
I got the right words from them, but behind the luke-warm congratulations, there was something else. Maybe I was just tired, maybe I was looking for a kind of response that people were too busy to give me. Or maybe, sometimes, friends and colleagues hear about something a person has accomplished that they really can’t be happy about.
A great woman, the first African American Congressperson in Ohio, said in a speech – “You walk your path, and along your way, there will be people who will surprise you. Some people will give you amazing support, when all you expected was a smile. And some people who you thought would back your play, do not. Never mind any of that, stay on your path!”