Follow Your Jealousy

Joseph Campbell tells us to follow our bliss. I believe in that--but sometimes I also believe you should follow your jealousy. If someone is doing something that makes you crazy with jealousy, with longing, that makes you agitated and restless and like you need to go running or DO SOMETHING!@#$#@! then maybe, just maybe, you should be doing more of that yourself.

I like my life. I do. I am grateful for so much.

But occasionally pricks of other realities come poking through and I have a glimpse of roads not taken, things not done, passions not pursued, lives not lived. An alternate Hilary universe.

This week it happened twice, and it was most uncomfortable.

First, my brother and his family went to Naples, Italy, where we lived when we were young. After a lifetime living in a villa on the Bay of Naples, our godparents (I claim them as mine, but really they are only godparents to my two siblings) will most likely leave their home (and our fantasy escape) forever and move to New Zealand. All three of us are filled with memories of Naples so deep and evocative that you can see that Italian influence laced through all three of our lives in different ways. Me, I live in a home that looks Italian on a hillside looking out on another hillside full of twinkling lights like a Neapolitan cliffside. The neighborhood is even slightly chaotic and dilapidated, like the Naples I knew as a child. At night, the smells are similar to a Neapolitan evening, and the herbs and plants and lizards that grow here are like the Italian city that seduced me for good when I was young, and left me searching for them ever since.

I am so happy for my brother, that he took his family to our beloved place. That his girls danced and explored and played hide and seek and pretended to be Roman statues just as we did. I love knowing that the taste of Neapolitan pizza and Italian gelato and Pompeian adventures is now stuck in their heads, too. When I saw his girls playing where we had played I was so happy it is hard to convey. I want that for my boys, too. I want them to eat zucchini pasta on Capri and to climb the Phoenecian steps. I want them to skip and run over Roman ruins and to see vespas with handsome men, beautiful women clinging to their waists, screaming up cobbled streets. I want them to look at Vesuvius looming over the Bay and to know what a real Neapolitan pizza tastes like.

Then, last night, Jonathan invited over a BBC correspondent and his new wife. They had moved here from Thailand, where he was a correspondent, and she was some sort of diplomat. They were wonderful, smart, worldly, curious and well-traveled. I guess they are what I was once--and what I thought I would be. And they still delighted me. I felt the jealousy surge--wasn't my life supposed to be like this? Full of tales of Thailand and Libya and celebrity and adventure?

I lived that life for awhile. Then stopped.

And here I am.

I can still go to Italy, and I will take my boys. I hope they will fall in love with Italy the way my brother's girls have. But the life of a foreign correspondent is dead to me--an option that has been truly shut down and put to sleep. I may travel again, and live abroad, but my former profession is dying and I would not put myself in danger with kids.

I love my choices. I love my screenwriter husband, my Hollywood life, my boys. I love California, the national parks, the sound of Spanish in this my unlikely, but adopted home of Los Angeles. I love our charter school and the life we have created here.

Still, for one week, as I approach my 45th birthday (eek!) I felt the surge of not-quite-regret, but of some slivers of dreams lost, choices made, options closed. Not forever. I can break them down and try to pick out the parts I want. But I guess it is a part of middle age that you come to terms with where you are, you do not lie, or fool yourself with promises of what can be. You look with cold hard eyes at what you have. Then you thank the world for all the things you have (and I have so much!) and figure out the essence of those things you wish you had, the source of those pricks of jealousy.

And you take them, and work towards them, to make them happen, before you die!