Make/Believe with Alyssa Faye

Make/Believe is where we start over - not from scratch, but from truth. This is where we remember what we actually want and learn to trust the part of us that always knew. Lets stop tolerating our life & start making the one that always should have been.

We Don't Admire Work That Doesn't Lead Us Back To Our Own.

You don't need anyone else's ideas or talents. You just need your own.

Alyssa Faye

Mar 16, 2026

“I wish that was me.”

“I wish I was that good.”

“#goals”

“That’s exactly how I wish my work looked/sounded”
We’ve all had these thoughts. These reactions to people, to works of art, to skillsets we admire.

Seeing who we wish we were, show up in someone else, is actually the applied demonstration of our potential…..but I didn’t always see it that way.

It’s taken many tears, years of time and courage on repeat to arrive at this perspective.

When those thoughts would surface, I took it as proof of my inadequacy. At how far I was from reaching a level in my work that I was proud to call mine. That could sit on the same elevated pedestal I sat the work of those I admired on.

And that If I was to have any chance at success with my work, I had to become exactly like them.

So I’d study their sentence structures. Try to find different ways of expressing similar thoughts, their humor, try to emulate brush strokes or shapes and styles of putting paint on a canvas. I’d come as close as possible to copying their work, without actually copying them, as I could get.

And then when my work flopped, was so far from the result I wanted, I took that as confirmation of my fear that I just didn’t have what it took.

That I’d never measure up or have a real chance of success building a business around my creativity, because why would someone pay me, when people so much better existed?

I didn’t just admire them. I wished I was them and beat myself up because I wasn’t.

That’s what we’ve been taught to do in the zero sum world we live in….that someone else’s genius or expertise means there is less room for us. That if a market is saturated, there’s really no opportunity for anyone else to play….that the sidewalks of entry are rolled up and the gates locked forever.

The “Zero Sum Game” is one of the biggest lies we’ve been taught.

But it keeps being perpetuated because if you’re on the right side of it, it’s the ultimate ego boost. And it keeps your competition at bay. More and more for you.

We all long for something to prove our worth back to us. To confirm that we are where we’re supposed to be and that we are indeed special.

And up to now, it’s a confirmation that holds no weight unless it comes from outside of us, because we’ve been beaten senseless by the club of self-doubt as a virtue.

We’re allowed to want our work to resonate. External validation isn’t the enemy. But needing it more than trusting our own opinion….that’s how we stay stuck on hamster wheels of work that never feels like our own.

I long for the day when the tables turn and the default is getting those answers first from our internal voices more often than from exterior opinions.

Our longing, our desire - - what it ACTUALLY tells us, is that we have every capacity to reach the level of work that we admire in others.

I don’t think we admire work that doesn’t lead us back to our own.

Back to places we need to explore or depths that need surfacing.

Envy is actually just information we can use to uncover hidden parts of ourselves that are tired of hiding.

The parts of us that are uncopyable. The hand that offers us the missing key to the locked gate of saturated spaces that we were told couldn’t hold us, but was waiting for us all along.

The ache was never about other people. Never about our actual talent or ability.

It’s always been our intuition guiding us home. Demanding to be heard.

You found me. Not everyone does.

I’m Alyssa, founder of Wild Little Words.

My work started when I found myself standing at the edge of adulthood with no map, no direction, trying to figure out who I was and how to build a life from that — not survive one.

The answers showed up, sitting seductively, at the intersection of intuitive identity work, marketing strategy, and creative practice, ( The Universal Triad), not in the expert opinions of others telling me what I should do.

This is the framework that’s dismantling every ‘supposed to’ I’ve ever swallowed.

Founders who can’t explain their own businesses, Creatives who’ve lost their through-line, and Humans who don’t recognize themselves anymore have all found my work helpful. The work is rigorous, but rewarding. The person doing it refuses to be boring.

I’m also a painter, poet, music lover and devoted host of dinners where real things get said.

Come find out what’s possible when you finally know who you are and how to talk about it.