Hello Reader,

An email that changed everything

This week I received an email from a former client of mine. She is a superstar in her industry. I have her permission to share this anonymously. It read:

Alicia, I don't know how to explain what's happening except to say that I've achieved everything I said I wanted and I feel nothing. Not sad exactly. More like I'm watching my life from a slight distance, like a film I'm not sure I chose. I keep waiting to feel proud. My husband says I should be celebrating. I smile and agree. I don't know who to tell this to. I'm not sure I even know what I'm asking.

We have worked together over many years, on and off, usually during times she felt it was time to move forward. However, this email had a different tone. She was unsure, confused and I sensed a kind of grief behind her words.

This was my answer to her with an invitation to continue our conversation.

What you're describing has a name, though not one that gets used in boardrooms or at dinner parties. The mystics called it acedia — not depression, not burnout, but a particular hollowness that arrives specifically after you have done the thing, climbed the thing, become the thing. It tends to visit people of real interior depth. I don't mean this as consolation. It is, however, context that gives your feelings a name.

The distance you feel from your own life is not pathology. There is no illness to cure or a character flaw to fix. It may be the first honest signal your inner life has been able to send in years. Achievement is loud. It has a schedule. And for a long time — maybe a very long time — it drowned out something quieter that was trying to get your attention.

You say you don't know what you're asking. I want to sit with that for a moment rather than move past it, because I think you do know, and I think it frightens you. What you're asking is whether any of this was actually yours. The life, the definition of success, the shape of a good day. Whether there is a self underneath the accomplished self, and if so, what she wants, and whether it's too late, or too disruptive, or too ungrateful to find out.

It's none of those things. But I won't pretend it's comfortable either.

Here is what I'd ask you to do before you write to me again. Don't approach this as an intellectual exercise or task to accomplish. Instead, get curious and allow this new question to accompany you over several days. Don't answer it quickly. Use your journal to wander/wonder about the inquiry.

That place, that moment, whatever it is, is not the whole thing. It's a thread. We follow threads.

I'm glad you wrote.

Alicia

I'm sharing this, with her blessing because I doubt she's the only one reading who has felt it. The particular flatness that arrives after the goal is met. You can spend years being congratulated for a life you're no longer sure is yours. She hasn't written back yet. I don't know what she'll find when she does. But I've watched enough people stand at this exact place to know it isn't an ending. It's a question finally getting loud enough to hear.

Today's Threshold Question

When you set down the accomplished version of yourself, who is left in the room, and what does she want?

This is the work I do in Strategic Advisory. Not a program with a finish line, but a sustained conversation for people who have arrived at the thing and now need to ask what's underneath it. I take on only a few of these engagements at a time. If the letter above read like your own handwriting, you can write to me the way she did. Reply here and tell me where you are. That's how it starts.

With care,

P.S. If you read her letter twice, the second read is usually the honest one. You don't have to know what you're asking to write to me. She didn't either.

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