Seven Tales

Envy's tale

And then we've come to the last of these fourteen beings. But definitely not the least. 

Envy is the youngest of the brothers, and he absolutely hates it. He feels like the others belittle him a lot, and he doesn't feel respected. But then again, as his name suggested, he always envies others. So he is never really satisfied with the things he does have. Because his brothers do respect him, but some less than others. Envy envies Pride the most, and he often gets in fights with him. Though it is usually one-sided, as Pride tries to ignore it or walk away from it.

Envy is rather short, around 5'6, and he has black hair and brown, mono-lid eyes. Again, Envy looked what humans would describe as Asian. 
He always looks irritated. He has a short temper, and it is evident on his face. The others love pushing his buttons so they can see him explode. I suppose that's just brotherly pestering. Except Envy doesn't see the fun in it. 

Envy was very well aware of what was going on when he came here. He could feel jealousy and evny around him, and it fuelled him. At first he needed to figure out why people felt that way, as he was pretty much a late-bloomer. His brothers understood their feelings and desires the moment they came to Earth, but Envy needed time to give his feelings a meaning. And once he did, he got to work.

He would have people feel envious of others, because someone got that job a person really wanted, or they looked better, or had more money. Envy would make them feel like they deserved all those things too. He wanted people to claim what was theirs. Often people would steal the things they wanted from others.

But as I watched, I noticed that something was off. Sure, Envy was just doing his job, but he seemed to be struggling. Call it an Angel intuition, but I knew I needed a talk with him. Not an intervention, like with Kindness, but just a talk. So I called him to me, and we chatted. He yelled at me a couple times, but eventually I understood what was wrong. Because when you feel like you never get what you deserve, you'll start to feel unhappy. And Envy wasn't struggling with his own feelings, but also with that of others. He told me that he would look at the world and see that rich people were spending millions on cars and houses they didn't need whilst in third-world countries people were starving. He thought it was unfair, and he couldn't help but feel envy for the poor people. Even if those people didn't feel envy themselves, Envy would feel it for them instead. He would look at the rich and think "Why are you getting all these things? You don't deserve it. These poor people do."

I figured that, because Envy already struggled with his feelings at the beginning, he might have never really learned how to separate his own desires from that from others. On top of that,  figured he was an empath. Because sure, the others can feel human's desires too, but they don't take it home with them at the end of the day. Envy did.

So at the end of the conversation I sent him back, and told him that he needed to take time to practice with understanding his feelings, and that he needed to learn to deal with them. He did practice, but he didn't get much better. However, I did see that he was finding ways to deal with it. For example, he now helps out the poor wherever he can. He will reverse envious feelings, by making the rich feel envious of the poor, causing them to donate their money to the poor. So in essence, Envy is doing good work instead of evil work, while still being a sin. Which is kind of the opposite of Kindness. Kind of funny when you think about it.

I think that Envy is the ultimate proof of the fact that evil isn't always evil. Evil is defined by your reasoning behind something.