What My Frenemy Taught Me About Being Free

For more than ten years, there was a company that copied my fashion designs.

Not inspired by them. Copied them.

They would take my best sellers, make them for less, and sell them back to national retailers for half the price. We were producing in New York City, with real quality and integrity behind every piece. We could not compete with their costs, and frankly, we didn’t want to.

But it still made me furious.

My team would try to make me feel better.

“When they stop copying you, that’s when you should worry.”

“You’ll always be one season ahead.”

“Copying is flattering.”

Sometimes that helped. Mostly, it didn’t.

What helped was a prayer I used to say with my girls and still say when life feels frightening and uncertain: “We have enough. We will always have more than enough. All is well.”

I didn’t say it to convince myself everything was perfect. I said it because I needed to release the fear underneath the anger.

Years later, after I had moved to California, a buyer friend told me she wanted to introduce me to someone in fashion.

It was the woman who had spent years copying my work.

Of course it was.

We met for lunch in the very retailer where I had once seen racks of Sally Fakes.

I remember thinking this was a good test from the Universe. Had I really let go of the anger?

Could I sit across from her and stay open, curious, and grounded in who I had become?

I was actually looking forward to finding out.

She walked in warm, open, and honest. She told me she had copied my work for years. She had since left that company, burned out and mistreated herself.

And something unexpected happened.

I wasn’t angry anymore.

By the end of lunch, I told her she was my first Frenemy. We laughed, and we have been good friends ever since.

This Fourth of July, she invited me to her celebration. It made me think about freedom in a

whole new way.

I believe anger has a purpose. It leads us to where our deepest fear lives. But if we hold onto it for too long, it starts to imprison us.

It tells us it's keeping us safe, when really it's keeping us stuck.

Letting go is not pretending something didn’t hurt. It is deciding that what hurt you no longer gets to run your life.

That is freedom.

Just imagine what kind of world we could live in if more of us felt that kind of liberation from within.

This is one of the most unexpected stories in Trust Yourself Anyway, Designing a Life That Fits, and it changed how I think about forgiveness, freedom, and letting go.

FRENEMIES

Sally’s Weekly Reminder

“Freedom begins the moment we let go”