Fragments of jealousy

I remember the first time I've felt jealous — I saw my crush with another person, and my chest hurt, I've felt so angry that I couldn't even think straight… And yet, I've kept the feeling all to myself because I knew the other person never gave a single thought about being with me… I was just a friend and nothing more.

I also remember the first time I've showed someone I was jealous — the person thought it was cute and started to provoke me alongside his friends… Until I tried to punch one of his friends — I've turned into the “creepy person” for a while, even though I never attacked another person after that, I've just started to swallow my jealousy again… But then he decided he was jealous, and thought it “was okay” because he had all the right, right? Of course not! He was scary in a way I never was: I could manage to make an ugly face, take a deep breath and calm myself. He turned into a cold person when jealous — the one you don't know if it's really trying to calm down or will burst into an uncontrollable rage in two seconds and smash your face. And then he kept provoking me because “it still cute to see a jealous little girl”, and then I've stopped to demonstrate it because I was the one getting hurt while he had his fun…

A few years later, we broke up. Now I'm disgusted when someone asks if I'm jealous because some people think it's funny, some people think I'm “too possessive” — it looks like, to them, anyone can just flip a switch and control it… And I'm the one that never learned how to control it, but I've learned how to conceal it. And this feeling makes me disgusted of myself, this feeling makes me feel like I don't deserve to be with someone, and they'll feel disgusted too when they know about it. This time it happened when I've started to feel something to another person, and saw him kissing a girl. My chest was hurting again, and that feeling was overwhelming me… But I can't feel this way to someone that doesn't see me as nothing more than a friend, or I can? I'm still trying to deal with my guilt, saying to myself that I have no right to feel that way, that people are beings on their own, and I can't expect they will stay with me or accept every single part of me — and then the cycle repeats, while I feel disgusted with myself once again.

I've heard a lot about how to control my own feelings, how there are a lot of magic formulas to do it. I've heard a lot of distortions on the idea that you're responsible for your own feelings — most of them trying to impose that you can't control it because you don't want to, like other people doesn't really affect you — but the truth is: feelings are like a weed — you can't control when they appear and if you decide to ignore it, it'll just eventually grow and take all the space in the garden. And just like a weed, some feelings can't just disappear because you don't want people hurting you, and believe me, they will try — they'll use it against you, whether to feed it and then picture you as a “crazy person” or just to point their fingers at you and say you're wrong and can't feel that way because you don't fit their idea of how people need to behave. It doesn't matter what they think, it matters how you deal with it, and my dear, I don't know how to deal with it anymore…