my envy is not actual envy
This is the direction.
This is the compass.
This is the flavor I want in my life.
Today, I listened to a podcast interview featuring Alison Tartary, prodigy entrepreneur, mother, real estate investor, and so many other things that I would probably never be. It made want to write her a letter. I hope she’ll read it some day.
Alison ~
My “envy” of you isn’t envy at all.
It’s a compass.
A quiet pull toward a direction I haven’t taken yet — a flavor I recognize but haven’t fully allowed myself to taste.
I listened to your podcast interview today.
You, the prodigy entrepreneur, mother, real estate investor, and a dozen other things I have not yet given myself permission to become. You are ten years younger than me and you’ve already built ten times what I have managed in the past fifteen years.
As I listened, I felt admiration, ache, and confusion rise at the same time — a cocktail I can’t quite swallow because it holds so many contradictions.
Life has taught me that we only recognize in others what already lives inside us.
That thought gives me hope.
But it also confuses me when I look at what I’ve built and failed to build over the years.
I don’t want to be you, yet there are traits you embody that my soul aches to remember in myself.
My ache has layers.
But the deepest one is this:
The Good Girl in me versus the Sovereign Woman you represent.
The Good Girl — the one I’ve lived as for most of my life — stays small.
She doesn’t risk.
She doesn’t ask for help.
She doesn’t fail publicly.
She performs competence because dependency feels shameful.
She hides ignorance like it could ruin her.
I was raised and graded to be the smart one.
Mistakes were threats.
Not knowing was dangerous.
My worth was measured by what I could handle on my own.
So I grew into a woman who believed delegating was losing control, that asking for help was shameful, and that I “should” know everything.
And then there’s you — or rather, the part of you that woke something in me.
You don’t pretend to know everything.
You don’t expect yourself to.
You build with others because you understand that empires are not built through self-reliance, but through clarity.
You let yourself be a beginner — unapologetically, publicly.
As I listened, I realized it wasn’t your courage I admired.
It was your clarity.
Your confidence.
Your willingness to pursue your path without second-guessing every step.
I believe we all have courage.
But without clarity and confidence, courage has nowhere to go.
Listening to you made me realize that where I am in life isn’t failure.
It’s simply the outcome of a story I inherited without ever questioning it.
A conditioning that tried to keep me safe — and kept me small.
I understand that now.
This is my story.
And I get to own it, rewrite it, redirect it.
Thank you for being the mirror that reminded me of the woman I am becoming.
With so much admiration,
— C.P.N
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