Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.

I heard this song recently, "Go Ask Alice," written by Grace Slick, which, according to the internet, is a riff on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. A childhood story I'm sure you're familiar with.

It's the one with a little girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a world with no map, no timeline, and no clear way through. A perpetually grinning Cheshire Cat. Flamingo golf clubs. A white rabbit always late for something. A hookah-smoking caterpillar with questions she can't answer. And scattered throughout....bottles and bites with labels that essentially say:

Drink this. Eat that. And you will be exactly what the moment requires.

Alice did not hesitate. She couldn't see how long this was going to take or what it was going to ask of her. The bottle was right there. It promised to help.

We understand the impulse completely. When something promises to change everything, we reach for it.

“ It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. — Alice

From My Chair to Yours

I want to tell you about a pattern I lived inside for years without ever seeing it clearly.

I left, as my late father called them, "perfectly good jobs."

Not bad jobs. Not toxic environments or impossible managers (well maybe just the one). Good jobs, with good people, doing work that was reasonably meaningful. I left them the way someone might leave a party when nothing wrong has happened, but rather a quiet certainty exists that the right party was somewhere else, and that when I found it, I would finally feel the way I was supposed to feel.

I told myself stories about trajectory. About growth. About not settling. All of which contained enough truth to be convincing.

And then after a 7 year run at leaving 'perfectly good jobs', one day I paid three thousand dollars to try to make my career history look acceptable on paper. To smooth the narrative. To make the instability and searching look like a well formed strategy.

I sat with that receipt for a long time.

Because that was the moment I could not explain away. I had not invested three thousand dollars in a skill or a calling or something I loved. I had invested it in the appearance of coherence. In the story. To be understood. In the next version of the pill.

If I can just get to the right place, everything will shift.

I had been drinking from the bottle my whole career. I just called it ambition or strength of not settling.....or, or or.

Because you are still here. Which means something in you is still asking.

That asking is not a problem. It is not restlessness or ingratitude or a character flaw.

It is the thing that brought you to this newsletter. And I think it deserves to be treated with more respect than another quick fix.

The Lens

There is a name for the kind of person who keeps asking even when the asking is inconvenient.

I call it divine discontent.

It is not misery. It is not chronic dissatisfaction. It is the particular ache of someone who has glimpsed something true about themselves and cannot unknow it. And that ache creates a market. The culture obliges with an endless supply of things that promise to close the distance, each one dressed in the language of transformation, most delivering something closer to relief.

Relief is not the same thing as fulfillment.

Here is what I think is really happening when we reach for the pill, even after we have already done real work. The messy middle arrives. Nothing feels certain. The finish line is nowhere in sight. And we reach for something external anyway.

Not because we gave up. Because nobody told us how long we had to hold it.

I used to ask my personal trainer that question constantly. He would hand me something impossible to hold for a human being and before I could talk myself out of it I would ask: how long do I have to hold this? If he said a minute, something in me relaxed. Oh. Well. I can do that.

The messy middle doesn't come with a timer. So we go looking outside for something to carry us through, when the resolve and capacity we need are usually already inside us. That interior knowing, the place where you stop asking how long and simply decide to hold it, is what I call Sustained Resolve. It is not found in the next job, program or the next pill. It is what the passage on the journey from Depletion to Fulfillment was building in you all along.

Fulfillment arrives through passage. The continuing to stay on the path. The pill promises to skip it. That's the whole problem.

Reflection

• Where has the pill shown up in your life? What name did you give it so it looked like something else?
• What would it mean to stop waiting for the right external circumstance to make the interior work feel safer?
• And what if the discomfort you have been trying to fix is not the problem, but the beginning of the passage?

Until we see each other again, I hope you have a powerful day.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight

P.S. I'm aware some of you found your way to this newsletter through the Enneagram. I see you, and I have been thinking about you. I'll have updated Enneagram news in August when I will be launching a dedicated Enneagram newsletter and Enneatype specific workbooks. Thank you for your patience and understanding.