THE OTHER WOMAN
Kate Spicer spent her life benchmarking her success against that of a younger woman. But when respect turned into obsession, she knew something had to change
Kate Spicer on her success nemesis: the woman she can’t stop comparing herself to
At first, we got on well. We lay by the pool drinking rosé during an organised work trip to Provence. We had so much in common, I told myself. We were the only single people there. She was in her late twenties, me early thirties; we both liked drinking and shouting and making people laugh. There were differences, of course – she wrote for a broadsheet newspaper and, despite being younger than me by a few years, was the far more serious writer. I, meanwhile, wrote for glossy magazines; with the occasional piece for a broadsheet being something to literally call home about. ‘Mum, great news: I’ve got a feature in The Times!’
Propped up on sun loungers with white five-star-hotel towels cooling our bums, I felt satisfied with life. The trip was all expenses paid. Waiters would continually saunter over to top up our frosty glasses of Domaines Ott. And I had found a new friend. This is nice, I thought. Sure, I’m less successful than her but… And that’s when
it happened; the internal benchmarking, my mind hungry for comparison. I listed all the ways her success trumped mine: better educated, better connected, more confident and probably brainier. But, and I cringe to write this, I reminded myself of how I’d just bought my first expensive bikini and arguably looked better than her. It was textbook hubris.
I can’t tell you the name of this woman because she doesn’t deserve to be dragged into my personal psychodrama. But what I can tell you is that she represents a type that – in my industry at least – you encounter a fair bit at the top. Women not especially different from me, but who went to the best girls’ schools, then to Oxford or Cambridge. I call them Melanie Oxbridge, and this is what I will call this woman, too.
While she had a far more enviable career (I wished I had cracked newspaper writing, which she so clearly had) there was also respect there, the mild envy so easily put to one side in such a jolly setting.
“SHE had BECOME MY SUCCESS NEMESIS : who REPRESENTED THE PERSON I COULD HAVE BEEN IF I WAS that BIT BETTER at WHAT I DO”
The trip was all rosé-tinted sunglasses, until we got to the subject of marriage. I said I’d like to get married someday and her reaction was severe. With what bordered on true disdain, she filled me in on the feminist wrongs of marriage. I tried to argue, but I wasn’t armed for debate.
From there on in, everything unravelled. She had caught me off guard. My fragile ego was shattered. The trip descended into a paranoid nightmare. The ruler of success had changed: her at 1O, me at zero. Melanie Oxbridge had become my success nemesis, the human barometer against whom I measured everything.
After that trip, I watched her career like a football fan follows a team, but with reverse delight. She got a column; I’d read it queasily every week. At first, I kept this obsession quiet but then it started to seep into conversations with close friends, many of whom were her friends, too. When she won a press award, I had something close to a meltdown. Soon just the thought of Melanie and her achievements made my heart hammer.
Her success seemed to shine a light on why I felt like such a failure. I always thought that if I had been more confident, smarter, a better writer, I could have had a career like hers. I didn’t want her life; I didn’t care about anything except the professional side of things. It’s horrible seeing it written down. The only reason I have allowed myself to go public with this is because I don’t think I’m alone. Many of us have a success nemesis: a figure who represents the person they could be if only they were that bit better at what they do. The success nemesis is formed in a mindset that mixes ambition and aspiration with, frankly, low self-esteem and psychological self harm.
Can we reposition the success nemesis as a positive entity, who spurs you on to greater things? I can’t think of a time when that happened with Melanie because watching her bylines like a hawk was utterly debilitating. But the success nemesis can sometimes start out as inspiration, like that picture you tore out of Bella Hadid and stuck on the fridge door to make you stop and think before getting stuck in to a toast-and-marmite-a-thon.
Such was my obsession with Melanie that she had become like a particularly sick mentor. I remember sitting in a private members’ club one night banging on about how she’d recently taken over a column I had been sacked from. Thinking back, I’m surprised I didn’t have some kind of fit. ‘Kate, you look weak. You need to stop obsessing about her,’ said the friend, seeing my rage gurgling inside. ‘If you keep talking like this, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.’
I did not admit that the prophecy was already fulfilled. She was like a razor blade I pulled out when I was having a crisis of confidence – which, frankly, seemed pretty constant at the time. As I sat and wrote, a crowing inner critic, the unrivalled expert at self-sabotage, would nag away, ‘I bet Melanie would have written this in 3O minutes, 25 even. How come you’re still bashing away six hours later? You useless, thick lump.’ Nemesis was the Greek goddess of divine retribution. In literature and film, the word describes both the moment when we are undone by our own weakness and also the person who causes it. Think Othello and Iago, Sherlock and Moriarty, and, more recently, Lena Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath and her old college friend and nemesis Tally Schifrin in Girls. Sitting in that private members’ club, humiliated and possessed, I had reached rock bottom.
I knew I had to focus on walking away from this mental obsession. I needed to stop talking about her as much as I needed to stop badmouthing myself. They say it’s good to talk – well, not in this case. Sometimes, in the spirit of a problem shared is a problem doubled, I’d sit with my friends who were similarly afflicted by success nemesis figures and have incredibly unhealthy bitching sessions about them in our minds. Then I’d leave feeling horrible.
In the end, Melanie represented a self-destructive mindset for me. Because the real agent of my undoing wasn’t Melanie at all. It was me: my jealousy, my lack of confidence, my endless whipping out of the brutal ruler of success, it was my ambition.
When you’ve let someone affect you as much as Melanie did me, it’s hard to be completely cured of a success nemesis habit. But I’m a more confident and healthier person now; they can’t lay me low in quite the same way. I make a point not to follow certain people and, if those thoughts overtake me, I know I’m probably feeling vulnerable, and I’ll think about why.
For a while I fixated on the brilliant literary writer Zadie Smith. Not just her fine writing but her whole demeanour, so elegant and serene. I whistled through her latest novel, every word burning in its ‘she’s so much better than you’ brilliance. (Around the same time, I read a Marlon James novel, arguably an even cleverer writer than Zadie, but where were the hooks that grabbed at my jealous eyes then?)
Of course, Melanie Oxbridge is not the person I’d built her up to be. We did a job together a couple of years ago and I was taken aback by how gentle she is, because the Melanie Oxbridge of my mind was a monster. The self-destructive parts of me had gone to work fleshing out a character befitting of Game Of Thrones who barely exists in real life.
My dad always said to me, ‘Be a fool with insight’, which probably isn’t going to become the next ‘Be your best self’ empowerment meme, but it works for me. At least now, I can see this veneration tainted with envy for what it is. None of this is real. What makes it real is the thinking, not the person. It is only the thoughts in your head that give that other person power.
In the end, love and hate are very close bedfellows, and investing that level of energy in another person is a compliment. I messaged Melanie not long after my book came out, and told her that. She didn’t get back to me. And do you know what? I can finally say, I don’t mind. Lost Dog: A Love Story by Kate Spicer is out now