The honest post. On the gap between who we want to be and what we actually feel.

Let’s start with something true.

You are a good person. You believe in women supporting women. You have said it, meant it, shown up for it in more ways than you can count. You have celebrated your friends’ promotions and their engagements and their book deals and their babies and the quiet victories that only the people closest to them will ever know about. You are, genuinely, someone who roots for the women in your life.

And sometimes — not always, not even often, but sometimes — when the good news arrives, something complicated moves through you before the congratulations come out.

Not cruelty. Not malice. Not anything you’d want anyone to see. Just… something. A flicker. A tightening somewhere in the chest. A half-second of a feeling you can’t name cleanly and so you cover it quickly with warmth and a heart emoji and move on.

This post is about that half-second. About what lives in it, why it shows up, and what it would mean to stop moving past it so fast.

“The congratulations was real. And so was the thing that came before it. Both of those things get to be true.”

The Feeling We Don’t Have a Name For

In Danish, there is a word — ”muligvis” — that doesn’t translate cleanly into English. In German, there is Schadenfreude, which most people know: pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. But what about the inverse? What about the particular discomfort of another person’s fortune?

The Japanese have a word for it: “meshiagari,” which roughly translates to the bittersweet feeling of watching someone else succeed at something you are still reaching for. The Dutch use “leedvermaak” for its cousin. And the ancient Greeks had phthonos — a word that encompassed both envy and a kind of pain at witnessing another’s good.

English doesn’t have a clean word for it. Which is interesting, because the experience is universal.

What we do have, instead, is a very efficient system for making sure no one admits to the feeling. We have been taught — thoroughly, from a young age, by culture and by the particular social rules that govern female friendship — that a good woman is happy for other women. Full stop. No asterisk. No complicated feelings allowed through the gate.

WHAT THIS COSTS USWhen we deny the complicated feeling, we don’t make it go away. We make it go underground. And feelings that go underground don’t dissolve — they calcify. They show up later as distance in a friendship, as a muted enthusiasm that the other person can sense but can’t name, as a subtle withdrawal that neither of you ever quite addresses.Psychologist Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and shame found that the emotions we are most ashamed of — the ones we most urgently hide — have the most power over our behavior. The feeling we refuse to name is the feeling that ends up running the room.

Here is what I want to offer instead of the shame: a name. Or rather, a recognition. The complicated feeling that precedes the congratulations is almost always one of three things, or some combination of all three. It is grief, for the version of your own life where you have already achieved what she just achieved. It is fear, that her success somehow narrows the space for yours. Or it is a mirror — her win holding up a reflection of a want in you that you haven’t given yourself permission to say out loud.

None of these are character flaws. All of them are information. And you cannot access that information if you are too busy performing uncomplicated joy to notice what you actually feel.

The Performance of Support vs. The Real Thing

There is a version of “women supporting women” that is, if we’re honest with each other, more performance than presence. It is the comment that says “you deserve this!” typed before the feeling behind it has fully arrived. It is the emoji reaction. The share. The public visibility of your support, which can exist entirely separately from the private felt reality of it.

I am not saying this to indict anyone. I am saying it because I have done it. We have all done it. And it has become so normalized that we have started to mistake the performance for the thing itself.

WHAT GENUINE CELEBRATION ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE — AND HOW TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCEPerformed support feels like relief. You said the right thing. You showed up. You can move on. There is a subtle sense of obligation discharged.Genuine celebration feels like expansion. Something in you actually gets bigger in the moment of her win. You feel warm in a way that doesn’t cost you anything — because you have already processed whatever came before it.The gap between those two experiences is not a gap in your character. It is a gap in your processing time. Genuine celebration is what becomes available when you’ve been honest with yourself about the complicated feeling first.

Researcher Sara Algoe at the University of North Carolina has studied what she calls “find, remind, and bind” — the way expressing genuine gratitude and celebrating others reinforces social bonds. Her work found something counterintuitive: the most meaningful expressions of support are not the most effusive ones. They are the most specific ones. The ones that say: I actually saw what you did. I noticed what it cost you. I understand why this matters.

That kind of seeing requires presence. And presence requires honesty about your own interior state first.

You cannot fully see another person when you are managing your own performance at the same time.

“Real celebration is not the absence of complicated feeling. It’s what becomes possible on the other side of it.”

What It Actually Feels Like to Genuinely Celebrate Another Woman

I want to try to describe this, because I think it is underwritten — the actual felt experience of it, when it’s real and not performed.

It feels like pride that lives in your body, not just in your head. Like something in your chest opening rather than tightening. It feels like the specific pleasure of watching someone you love be fully seen by the world in the way you have always seen them privately. There is warmth in it, yes — but there is also something fiercer. Something that wants to stand up and say: of course. Of course she did. I knew she would.

It does not feel like smallness. It does not feel like the muted, managed enthusiasm of someone performing happiness. It feels like having more room inside yourself, not less.

And here is the thing about that feeling: it is available to you. Not always immediately. Not without the work of honesty that precedes it. But it is genuinely available, and it is one of the great underrated pleasures of female friendship when you get all the way there.

A MOMENT I WANT TO SHAREA woman I love deeply got recognition for work she had been pouring herself into for years. Work that I knew the cost of. Work that had required her to believe in herself during long stretches when almost no one else did.When the news came, I felt it before I thought it. Not the complicated thing first this time. Just… her. The fullness of her. And something in me rose up to meet it.I called her instead of texting. I told her not that I was proud of her, but why — specifically, with the particular language of someone who had been paying attention. And in that phone call, something happened that I think is one of the most valuable things female friendship can offer: I felt her feel seen. And that felt like a gift to me too.

This is what I mean when I say genuine celebration feels like expansion rather than diminishment. It is not zero-sum. Her being fully seen does not take anything from you. It adds something. Something about the dignity of it — the confirmation that the women you love deserve all the room they take up — that lands somewhere in you as a quiet, affirming truth about yourself as well.

Why We Find It Hard — And Why That’s Not the Whole Story

I want to hold two things at the same time here, because I think the conversation about women and envy tends to collapse into one of two oversimplifications.

The first oversimplification is that complicated feelings at another woman’s success make you a bad feminist, a bad friend, a small person. This view treats the feeling as the problem and shaming it as the solution — which, as we’ve established, doesn’t work and makes things worse.

The second oversimplification is the opposite: that envy is just information, that we should simply honor all our feelings without examining them, that naming the feeling is the same as resolving it.

Neither of these is honest enough.

The honest version looks like this:

The complicated feeling is real and it deserves acknowledgment. It is not evidence of who you are at your worst — it is evidence of where you are right now. What you want, what you’re afraid of, where your sense of your own worth is still fragile enough to feel threatened by proximity to someone else’s shine.

And once you’ve acknowledged it — not performed acknowledging it, but actually sat with it for a minute — you have a choice. You can let it become the story you tell about her, or about yourself. Or you can let it be what it is: a temporary weather pattern, information about your own interior landscape, something that passed through on its way to the warmth that was always coming.

“The complicated feeling is not who you are. It’s where you are. And where you are is always changing.”

Psychologist Susan David, whose work on emotional agility has reshaped how many of us understand our own inner lives, writes that the goal is not to eliminate difficult emotions but to hold them lightly. To observe them without being hijacked by them. To let them pass through rather than setting up permanent residence.

This is the practice. Not the permanent elimination of complicated feelings at another woman’s good news. The ability to notice the feeling, name it privately, refuse to let it become a narrative, and then — and this is the part that matters most — actually show up for her anyway. Not as a performance. As a choice.

That kind of celebration — chosen, clear-eyed, arrived at through honesty rather than bypassing it — is not the same as the reflex. It is something harder and more valuable. It is what it actually means to root for someone.

Closing the Gap

You cannot close the gap between who you want to be and what you actually feel by pretending the gap doesn’t exist. You close it by walking through it honestly.

This looks like letting yourself feel the thing you feel without immediately overlaying it with shame. It looks like asking: what is this actually about? Not about her — but about me. What does this feeling tell me about what I want, or where I feel unseen, or what I’m afraid I’ll never get to have?

It looks like giving the feeling a moment — just a moment — and then letting it move.

And then it looks like picking up the phone. Writing the text that says something specific and true about what she did and why it matters. Showing up with your whole self, not the carefully managed version of it.

It looks, in other words, like love that has been honest about its own imperfections.

Which is the only kind of love that lasts.

❧  ❧  ❧

A few questions worth sitting with:

•  When was the last time you felt genuine, uncomplicated joy at another woman’s success? What was true about that moment — about her, about you, about the state of your own life — that made it land so cleanly?

•  Is there a friendship in your life right now where you’ve been performing support rather than feeling it? What is the feeling underneath that performance trying to tell you?

•  What would you want for yourself that you haven’t let yourself say out loud? And is there a woman in your life whose success is holding up a mirror to that want?

•  Who do you want to call today? Not to report on, not to process — just to say: I see you. I’m rooting for you. With your whole chest this time.