"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little," wrote Gore Vidal.
And it’s painfully true that others’ success can be the hardest thing to bear. We measure our status in the world against our friends’, and their spectacular elevation can be deeply unsettling—and doubly traumatic because we don’t want to resent them, but can’t quite manage not to.
They’ve made it, and you haven’t, and perhaps you never will ...