I Won’t Envy is a new podcast series by Vivek Shraya co-produced with Buddies in Bad Times. Episode two, “Your Projection is Not My Reality,” featuring Alok, drops January 29.
Listen to the podcast trailer and episodes here, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Read on for cheeky excerpts from Vivek and Alok’s conversation. They touch on jealousy and scarcity, creative antidotes to jealousy, destigmatizing shame, queer aging, and more. Plus, the multi-hyphenate artists unpack some of the feelings of jealousy that they’ve had toward one another.
The text below has been edited for brevity.
About Alok
Vivek Shraya: I Won’t Envy is a podcast about professional jealousy in creative fields. In my own career, I’ve had to confront the fact that jealousy is a byproduct of being an artist, and that no amount of repressing or denying it can make it go away. In fact, my most successful strategy to manage my professional jealousy has been to name it.
Alok is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor. Their dynamic presence has captivated audiences in over 40 countries, with sold out shows at venues including Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and headlining numerous Just for Laughs festivals. They’ve been honoured with the ACLU of Southern California Bill of Rights Award, Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment Trailblazer Award, and were selected as the inaugural LGBTQ Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
They are the subject of the docu-short Alok, executive produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Alex Hedison, which made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024. I wanted to talk to Alok because they’re an artist I’m hugely inspired by, partly because of how candid they are about the hard truths and feelings that comprise being a human.
Jealousy and Economic Scarcity in Creative Fields
Alok: First of all, I was so excited that you were inaugurating this conversation because I think it’s something that so many of me and my peers have been mired in for a very long time. But to your point, there’s not really vocabulary around it. And often when we don’t have vocabulary around situations, I feel like we default into shame and that’s counterproductive to everything.
Vivek: Totally.
Alok: One of the things that I’ve noticed is, because the economic conditions make it so that artists have to compete with each other. I’m talking here about, like, applying for the same grants or trying to get the same publisher. As much as we can have these sort of vast, expansive ideas of abundance and, like kind of infinity, we’re confronted with economic decisions made by state and corporate actors that actually gut and excise our funding and resource infrastructure.
So we are kind of pitted up against each other. And I think that’s why this conversation is so important, because what I find often happens is that people’s frustrations with structures, then become very easily attributable to individuals. And yet and that keeps us in this kind of back and forth without actually zooming out to be like, I’m feeling this jealousy not because I’m a bad person, but because I’ve been set up in a system that requires me to feel this jealousy for an individual, rather than attend to these larger economic forces.
Alok On Jealousy as a Teacher
Vivek: So would you say that you, as an artist, have experienced that about another artist or about other artists and, and you talk about how you manage that, but I’m just curious if you feel like it’s something that you’ve experienced.
Alok: I think actually it’s part of the creative practice to experience jealousy. I want to destigmatize jealousy because in my life, jealousy has actually been a primary vehicle in understanding where I want to go next.
Vivek: Oh shoot.
Alok: If find myself feeling jealous of someone, that’s an invitation for me to be like, okay, something that I’m doing right now is insufficient or inadequate. I need to grow somewhere. So jealousy is an amazing teacher that has constantly told me, oh, you have ambitions that you’re not allowing yourself to need. You have dreams that you’re not allowing yourself to utter.
How cool is that? That this is an opportunity to level up. But I differentiate jealousy from envy. Envy is about having resentment and bitterness towards the other person. It’s much more caustic and abrasive. Whereas I find jealousy can actually be more abundant, more curious, more whimsical even.
Vivek: So, in those moments where you’ve experienced jealousy, like, how did you get to that place? Because what you’re saying to me is, like, quite profound, right? This idea that jealousy can be a teacher, that like in that moment, it’s actually revealing something to you about what you haven’t articulated to yourself before. But have you always been able to reach that plane? How did you get from, you know, the feeling of jealousy to being able to be like, “I’m I’m going to learn from this moment.”
Alok: I want to thank my therapist and because there’s no way I would understand that if I wasn’t really working on my mental health. I think early on in my career, I felt a sense of self-righteousness around jealousy of like, oh, other people have things that I want. It’s unfair.
But then through therapy, through my own healing practice, I began to actually realize deeper longings within myself that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel. There is this idea that always would came up for me, like, what if I was someone who is like, or what if I was a girl who was like, it’s always just like, what if?
And then I always had a sort of limiting belief in there that said that I can’t be someone who is like, and that’s on me. No, like that’s my responsibility to ask myself, why can’t I be someone who’s like, and why do I need to be someone else in order to get access to what I want to be?
Jealousy, Performance, and Constructions of Beauty
And so it’s that sort of cliche refrain we hear in therapy often times, “we’re not responsible for our trauma, but we are responsible for our healing,” that sort of sense of being more proactive or involved in actually shifting my own behavior, I think, only came when I started to work on my mental health, where I began to see jealousy.
And I’ll be concrete with an example. For a long time I felt like people like me could only exist on a stage. That the only place that was comfortable for us in popular culture was as entertainers on a stage, because of the history of drag. Where people could conceive what I was doing is like episodic, ephemeral.
You come and see it, I change, we all go back to normal.
Vivek: It’s something you can laugh at.
Alok: Yeah, totally. And for a long time I would glorify that as like, I just want to be a stage performer. Like, I have no ambitions to act. I have no ambitions to be in TV and film, I don’t need to do that.
I just want to tell my own story on the stage. But then I began to experience jealousy for a lot of my peers who were acting, a lot of my peers who were directing or writing screenplays or engaging in a more fictional or abstract realm than just sort of memoir. And at first, I would have judgment. I would say things like, oh, like you’re not making real art that’s aligned with your purpose.
Oh, you are more concerned about commercial viability than expressing your creative impulse. But then when I zoom in on what those feelings actually were behind that judgment, that judgment was armour or protection from a more vulnerable to truth in me, which is I want this too, but I’m afraid that I’m not good enough, or I’m afraid that I lack the skills, or that I lack the beauty in order to do it.
And that’s a much more painful place to go. And so I went to envy because that was an easier touchstone.
Alok and Vivek Shraya on Ambition and Visibility as Marginalized Queer Creators
Vivek: I mean, one of the things that is coming up for me as I listen to you is that there’s something else, and I’m curious if this is something you’ve experienced as like a marginalized person. But I think another thing we’re not allowed to feel is ambition.
Alok: I think you’re totally right. For a long time, I felt like the only way that I could show up in the world was to minimize myself, because that was my family dynamic. That was the dynamic that I grew up with in culture and society. Like, diminish yourself, dim your light, mute yourself. Really try to sculpt and conform yourself into what other people need you to be.
And I tried to emancipate myself from that by joining queer communities. But then I noticed that we did the exact same practice, but we would use other justifications. It all ultimately boiled down to “make yourself small so that I can be more comfortable,” and reenacted and recreated so many of our fundamental family dynamics just on a larger scale.
But it was more murky and confusing for me to navigate that, because the words were different, but actually the destination was the exact same, and it really began to hit me when I began to look at what the conservative right wing is trying to do around trans people is to fundamentally make it impossible for us to exist in public space, and to quite possibly try to erase us.
When I look at the right and I look at some strands of the left, there’s a similar agenda here. Even if it takes different forms or different articulations, its end goal is still the same, which is “be small so I don’t have to see or confront you.” And so I think part of what being an artist actually has to do is, you have to be able to say “your projection is not my reality.”
Something I have to say here is important, in the scheme of the world. Even if I’m a speck of dust, what that speck of dust has to say is important. And I think that leads me to a different kind of metric of change and progress. And maybe even love. I firmly believe that every single person should be able to express the deepest and fullest extent of their artistry.
There isn’t just a class of artists over here who get to do that work. I think everyone should be an artist. And in fact, I think someone else being ambitious and pursuing the fullest version of themself creates the conditions for me to do the exact same thing. I don’t actually think that it detracts. It creates the infrastructure.
So I’ve had to rewire my brain because I think for a long time I was made to feel like if someone else is creatively aligned and creating work in the world, that’s somehow taking away from my ability to do that. And now I’m like, no, that’s a paradigm I want to abolish.
Jealousy Triggers and Working Through Jealousy as An Artist
Vivek: So going back to your own experiences of jealousy, would you say that there are specific triggers that cause your jealousy?
Alok: It’s social media, mental health performance. It’s more like, wow, how are all these other artists happy? Wow. How are all these other artists, like functional? So then you sort of create a narrative of, like, everyone else has hacked, this whole mental thing, everyone else has hacked, this whole joy, resilience, bounce back thing.
And I haven’t. And I think that then what I try to do is I look at what I’m posting, I look at how I’m performing myself, and I’m like, oh, am I really being clear about my own doubts, insecurities, skepticism, contradictions, ambivalences? Totally not, because the algorithm irons those out. So I am being marketed an image of someone else’s life, and I’m marketing someone else’s life.
And this is not real. What is real is pen to paper. And I think that’s what I keep returning to. In all this conversation, the way that I work through jealousy is through practice. Jealousy is part of every other ecosystem of procrastination in my life. Because it’s another means to not actually do the thing. And doing the thing is so much harder than thinking about the thing, analyzing the thing, politicizing the thing, coming on podcast and talking about the thing.
To actually sit and write and sit and make art is so hard that I spend so much time doing all these other things that think that they’re going to get me there, but are actually not. What’s going to get me there is just actually excising myself and creating a ritual or practice around creation. That’s been the hardest work for me as an artist — how do I continue to return to the page?
How do I continue to return to the page even when I’m feeling scared, lonely, desperate, nervous, anxious, jealous? I return to the page and I write about feeling jealous. That’s the secret about art is that these things that feel impenetrable, fortresses that seem looming and scary, we can make art about them, and then they become more containable, or at least more fathomable. And smaller in that way.
Alok on The Artist’s Way, Skillsharing, and Destigmatizing Shame
Vivek: I really like this connection between jealousy and returning to the page. Do you do you feel like you’re in a place now — because of your therapist — where when you feel jealousy, you’re like, okay, it’s writing time. Are you able to jump all the way there? Or is it more about spending time with it, thinking about it?
Alok: I would say, it’s not just my therapist now, I would say, it began with my therapist. But then I started to build relationships with other artists where I could talk about this and sort of resource it or skillshare it. I started to do, and I feel so cliche in doing this, but I’m all about leaning into the cringe in 2024, I love it. I started to do Julia Cameron’s program, The Artist’s Way. I’m on my sort of second rotation of it, and I do it each time with a different group of artists.
Part of the practice in The Artist’s Way is what’s called Morning Pages. Every day you just write a page. And a lot of what Julia Cameron talks about in this book is how jealousy is a distraction from the writing practice. So that also it was a gift that that kind of method gave to me is, one of the things that she helped me realize is if you don’t express the creative urge inside of you, then it’s going to go and find someone else.
So a lot of the times that I was feeling jealous, it was because I didn’t have the courage. I didn’t have the conviction to do the thing. And then I saw someone who did, and it was easier to be jealous of them than it was to be like “I felt weak.” And I think that’s a deeper point behind jealousy is we have also not created a space, not just where we can talk about jealousy, but where we can also still talk about shame and insecurity.
I think especially in queer communities, compulsory pride and resilience has meant that we have to be all-knowing sage, prophet, poetess, perfect, pure. And so then we end up performing a more healed version than we actually are without actually being able to create spaces to say I still harbour and fester and insecurity and self-hatred. I’m still working through my own shame, and this is showing up.
So I think if we actually destigmatize being able to be public about our shame, that would do a lot to heal jealousy.
Committing to Hard Conversations Around Jealousy
Alok: When we have these conversations [about jealousy], they can often feel like, okay, we’ve identified the problem, but what does the solution actually look like? And I think it’s helpful to land it in an example. So one of my best friends in the world who I’m so close with, and I had to contend with professional jealousy between us, where essentially, they named to me that they were extremely jealous that I was able to live a creative life when they couldn’t.
And that it was extremely triggering for them to watch me wait until the last minute to write a speech, or meet a deadline and be able to do it because they were like, I can’t do that. So I’m not able to celebrate you because I’m sitting here being like, I wish I could do what you did. And so what they said to me is, I think I need to take some space away from you in order to heal my own relationship with my creativity, because I’m not able to show up as a friend for you right now.
Vivek: Wow.
Alok: And I felt so much vulnerability and and kind of consternation about telling me that. But I felt so graceful, like so I felt so much love for this person. I felt like, oh, this is a relationship I’m gonna have for the rest of my life, because that’s what this requires us to actually say:
I’m doing this thing and I’ve worked on it. And actually, this has more to do with me than it has to do with you. And for both of our betterment, I might need clean space to work on it. That model was so unfamiliar to me, I think especially growing up in a Desi household, it’s like other people’s shame was my fundamental responsibility.
So if someone was having an issue with themselves, it was my job, especially as a child, to come in and rescue and finesse it. So to actually have that sort of adult ability to actually say this is my shit was so beautiful. And now I started to template that and practice that with my peers. I started to actually say out loud like, hey, I’m really so happy and proud of you.
I need some healing here around me. So I’m going to loop back and work on that before I can come back. Hey, you’re asking me for advice on this thing. I don’t know if I’m impartial right now because you’re asking for advice and something that I’m still trying to grow into, and I feel like any advice I give might have that sense of being tinted with envy.
So maybe I’m not the best person for this. And what I found is every time I articulate that language, people are so grateful because when we don’t, that’s where the resentment festers and builds.
Vivek: That anecdote that you shared is so beautiful, because I think it takes a lot of vulnerability to be able to not only articulate that to a friend, but also to be able to to know that it’s your own issues.
I’d love to ask, have you two come back together and like, how has it been since you’ve found each other again?
Alok: Yes we have. And that came after space. And that space was actually so generative for both of us, because in our own silos, we were able to actually heal parts of ourselves. Because what I also said is when they were expressing jealousy around certain things, I started to name my own jealousy.
And that’s what I also realized is that each one of us is jealous of each other. That’s also why this is such a farce, because we think, optics wise — and I think the internet has really fuelled this myth making — someone who’s successful looks like this, someone who’s not successful looks like this, but actually even quote unquote conventionally successful people are so jealous of other people.
Jealousy and Creative Flow
Alok: Actually writing [a show] — and especially now speaking to you on the side of writing a show — like, writing is exhilarating. Once you finally get there, when you’re doing all the other stuff it’s awful — but when you’re in flow state, it’s like jealousy, I don’t know her. So I guess another alternative to jealousy is creative flow. The more you’re able to be in creative flow and actually trust your creative process and be like, I can do this, the less you’re fixated on what other people are doing, because what’s most important is your relationship with that connectivity.
Vivek: No, absolutely. I find that when I’m very locked in to the thing that I’m making to the work, when I’m locked into the work, that all the noise doesn’t matter. It’s only when I’m like, you know, waffling around and I’m not sure or I’m procrastinating, as you said, like that’s when I’m so susceptible to leaning into these, these forms of, as you said, like self-mutilation.
Alok and Vivek Shraya on Their Relationship to Jealousy and Each Other
Vivek: Do you have any like, last thoughts, quotes, things that you want to share about jealousy or what you’ve learned from jealousy?
Alok: I want to land it between us. When I was young, like I’m talking about early 20s, and I first discovered your art, I was so jealous of you because I was like, oh, my god, this person is so hot, so cool, so alt, has like so much of this corpus of work. This was early in your career, but you were still a few years older than me. I had this sense of like, I’m never going to be able to do what this person is doing.
And then when I finally met you, I think that was like ten years ago, I was like, I built up all of this architecture that’s not manifest and [it was] so, so helpful to develop a relationship with you and be like, you have your own insecurities, your own doubts, your own hesitations, you’re not just your own CV. And I was wondering like, have you ever experienced intimate jealousy for me?
Vivek Shraya on Being Jealous of Alok and Aging as a Queer Creative
Vivek: I think some of the work that I’ve had to do, and not just related to you, is [work through] what it means to to age as an artist. And this is something that I am really looking to my mid-career peers for. We don’t really talk about what it means to be part of wanting to make the world a better place for younger artists, and then suddenly seeing a world — from our perspective as people who are somewhat older — in terms of opportunities that exist, you know, access that sort of thing to see those things exist in a way that didn’t exist before, and to not go to a place of like, man, I wish I had that, you know? And so I think a lot of my work, like with you personally, has been like less about you.
You’ve been such a profound example for me that the idea of younger and older doesn’t actually matter, because like I said, I feel like I’ve learned so much from you and I feel like I get to be who I am in the world because of you.
But I do think the work that I’ve had to do, whether I have felt jealous of you, is less about you and more about having to mourn time, you know, time and whatever my ideas are of time. Because of course, what you experience as an artist, I’m sure you encounter all kinds of barriers, all kinds of frustrations that I will never know.
So it’s easy for me to project and be like, wow, like if I was only born five years, ten years younger, like, I might be able to be, you know, like the language that you have, the way that you’re able to articulate yourself, all of those things, like I didn’t, you know, I didn’t come into my transness until I was 35, you know, like, I didn’t like 35, 36.
So again, I think in those more moments, for me, my work has been about like, I think that grief and the morning of time is actually something that queer trans people have, no matter what age you are, because we’re never born at the right time. In a sense. Right. So I think for me, that’s what I’ve had to do.
I think the other challenge with you and other like South Asian queer people is that we are pitted against each other, you know, like I literally, you know, was like at a movie theatre and, you know, a brown girl came up to me and was like, oh my God, I love your work. Thank you. So much. “Oh thank you, Alok.” And I was like, “oh, I’m so sorry. I’m not Alok.”
Alok: I’m just gonna say that you have permission to say that you’re me.
Vivek: (Laughs). Oh, please. But like, it’s hard because I think some again, like, you know, now that we’re, we’re in this space like I think for me some of my work too has been around disposability.
We don’t have to have the same voice. We can have different narratives, we can have different artistry. But in those moments where people confuse me for you or another South Asian trans person, it’s hard not to go to that place and be like, yeah, I am disposable. I am just this random South Asian trans being in the world.
So I think to to loop it all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, I think you’re so right in that like part of it is also acknowledging that jealousy is something that’s like outside of us and that’s put into us, or put onto us right in that moment that actually was had nothing to do with me.
But in that moment, I’m, I’m being caused now to have a feeling about you that’s actually not about you either. Right.
Alok: That’s so beautiful. And I think that that work that you just demonstrated as being able to feel because the thing is, what I would do, and maybe I should have said this earlier, is rather than allowing myself to say jealous, I’d be like, I’m too smart to be jealous, right?
So I’d spiritually bypass myself. But I would use political vernacular to be like, this is about scarcity thinking under economic conditions. But that would be in my head, not in my heart. And so I wouldn’t allow myself to say I’m feeling jealous. And then I don’t actually work through the emotion. So actually, the braver act to get to this zooming out that you modeled is not to tell yourself, I shouldn’t be feeling this, but rather to say I am feeling this.
Let me get curious about why I’m feeling this. Let me feel the pain actually here. And then actually witnessing that pain hopefully allows us to move to this more expansive framework of why it’s there that’s not villainizing an individual
Vivek: 100%, 100%. And I think going back to what you were saying about meeting me for the first time, like, I think for me, like having a relationship with you as a human, like knowing you outside of social media, even if we don’t like spend a lot of time together.
But just note knowing that like we can DM each other and say nice things to each other every so often. Like that to me, is also been so useful because it’s like at all times there, you know, it’s easy to create a narrative of who Alok is, but by having actually a link to you as the real human, I’m able to pivot easier to in those feelings to like, oh, like, whatever I’m feeling right now is about this, Alok.
Which isn’t real as opposed to the real Alok who actually love and admire and respect and have so much like. Yeah, like appreciation for in the world. Right. So I think for me, one of the things that I feel is so important moving forward is like, how do we maintain more connections with artists and each other as peers so that we’re not so siloed and invent false narratives around each other?
Alok: I tell myself, I have .01% of the information. There’s a zillion things going on in that person’s life that I have no idea what’s happening. So how dare I make a narrative when I don’t have that information, and instead I’m going to surrender to complexity. I allow them to just be.
Hear more of Vivek’s conversation with Denim and Pythia here, wherever you get your podcasts!
I Won’t Envy is sponsored by the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at University of Toronto.