Home envy: Learning to love the home you have

One of my earliest known stabs of pure, unbridled envy was when I was about 10 and discovered that my best friend Kate was getting her own television in her bedroom. I could barely breathe, the envy was so crushing. My parents would not only never let me have a television in my room (unfair!), but we weren’t even allowed to eat our dinner in front of the one in the lounge room because dinner was “family time”. And damn it, all I ever wanted was to eat one of those glamorous-sounding American “TV dinners” in front of Captain Planet. It was not to be, and here are two things that I know to be true: sometimes it’s impossible not to be envious of what other people have in their homes – their stuff and the house rules that are different to your own – and eating your dinner in front of the telly is one of life’s great pleasures, but should be done only occasionally.

As a kid the kinds of things you wish your home had – an indoor waterslide! a private cinema! a moat! – are far-fetched and dreamy enough to be fairly harmless. It’s kind of like how at age seven you promise your adult self that you’re going to buy Coco Pops for breakfast and eat ice-cream for dinner because when you’re an adult you can break all of the rules. But then adulthood arrives and you realise that the rules get tighter (including, one imagines, the permits involved in a private indoor waterslide). As for that envy? That longing for the stuff other people have can morph into something more insidious. The kind of envy that can sometimes twist into bitterness when it meets the chipped-at expectations, lack of fulfilment and assorted other disappointments that growing up can bring about.

It’s called keeping up with the Joneses. Or, maybe it’s better described as spending an inordinate time in a Pinterest vortex madly pinning minimalist kitchens, geometric tiles and metallic wallpapers until suddenly nothing about your own home seems “right” or “good enough”. Or maybe it’s brought on after attending your friend’s housewarming and subsequent step up on a property ladder that, for you, remains a distant dream, and so you squash churlish feelings of jealousy with a bottle of fizz and a “huge congrats!”. Maybe you walk down your street and crane your neck to see into other people’s homes that look like something straight from an interiors magazine and you’ve wondered why they don’t have any piles of laundry or chipped paint or tight-lipped fights about the cost of replacing the dishwasher.

The thing about envying what other people have is that it makes you push aside the good things in your own life and forget about them. It’s also a guaranteed life buzz kill.

When I was green with envy about Kate’s TV it turned out the cure was remembering how much I loved my own bedroom. That the window opened out onto the roof, making for an excellent and private – if slightly fraught – sunbathing spot. A room that I could slather with posters of Hanson and the Spice Girls (it was the late ’90s, after all) and read book after book. Most importantly, it was all mine and I didn’t have to share it with my brother. It was to be the sanctuary that I escaped too all through my teenage years, a place where I could dramatically fling myself onto the bed because nobody knew heartbreak like I did, or quietly study and work on all of those big dreams I had, or stare out the window and wonder whether Zac Hanson was ever going to marry me.

And that’s the fairly simple secret to overcoming home envy or Pinterest-inflicted misery pangs. It’s remembering that you love that scratchy rug you bought on holidays, or how the sunlight dapples your kitchen benchtop, or the squeaky fourth step. It’s taking delight in the space that you have created for yourself, stamping it with your unique taste – whether it’s Instagram-worthy or not – and the memories that you have picked up along the way. You know the thing that other people’s houses aren’t? Your home. And that’s way better than having your own private moat anyway.