Congratulating someone when their success stings

Envy is not a disqualification from generosity, but it does show up in the prose.

Somebody you know has got the thing you wanted. The role, the house, the recognition, the child. You are pleased for them and you are also not, and both of these are true at once and neither is shameful. The difficulty is that envy has a very particular literary fingerprint. It shows in the qualifier (finally, at last, after everything), in the pivot to your own news halfway down, in praise aimed at their luck rather than their work, and in brevity that is not restraint but withholding.

The fix is not to pretend. It is to write about the effort you actually witnessed. You probably saw the years before this, the attempts that did not work, the unglamorous parts nobody is congratulating them for now. Name those. A letter that says I remember what this cost you is worth ten that say well deserved, and it has the advantage of being something only you could write. Specificity does the work that sincerity alone cannot.

Send it early, while the news is still new and the noise is loud. And accept that writing it may improve your own mood more than theirs, which is not a corrupt reason to write. Generosity practised on paper has a way of becoming generosity felt.