If we want to be honest, we have to confess our bad feelings

I have learned that bad feelings are inevitable; if we want to be honest with ourselves and others, we have to confess them. It’s a matter of discipline.

How? 
First of all, by forcing ourselves not to disguise them as the feelings of a fearless person who holds the truth paramount. Are we tormented by that good-natured female friend whom everyone likes, while we have to struggle for a crumb of affection? Fine: we shouldn’t react by telling everyone that her success is the result of some carefully orchestrated hypocrisy. Above all, we shouldn’t justify our slander by saying that it is a love of the truth that drives us: that makes us as much a hypocrite as she is.

Instead, make an effort. Let’s teach ourselves to think that her good nature is innate, and that to reduce it to a skilful exercise in hypocrisy is simply a sign of the envy we feel. This effort, of course, benefits no one: we remain envious, and we continue to suffer from it.
Surely we felt better when we were playing the role of the outspoken person, fighting against duplicity?

So then what to do? 
Well, we have to make another effort: find the proper tone in which to tell our friend that her success makes us suffer, that we envy her, that we’re ashamed of ourselves when, instead of admitting that she possesses qualities we don’t, we go around saying she’s a hypocrite. If we can do this, we will have taken two giant steps forward. First, we will have discovered that we protect the truth principally by telling the truth about ourselves. And, second, we will have gained something much more admirable than an innate good nature: the capacity for self-examination and self-control.

But what if our friend really is a hypocrite?
Never mind. It’s a dangerous game to play and she’ll soon be discovered; she’ll lose the reputation she’s gained and we’ll be glad. Yes, glad, and yet again we’ll have to reckon with a bad feeling: the malicious pleasure of witnessing the fall of successful people, the satisfaction of recording their dismay and despair after a happy period.

How shall we proceed? 
Will we feel ourselves in the right, will we triumphantly tell everyone that we were among the first to guess that our friend – now no longer our friend – was a hypocrite?
No: yet again, we’ll make an effort to be truthful with ourselves. 
We’ll admit that we enjoy the misfortunes of others, we’ll admit that they give us some relief. From St Augustine of Hippo onwards, speaking with fierce candour, not to others but to ourselves, sometimes absolutely saves us.



Elena Ferrante