The song opens by acknowledging that love and pain can be destructive. It can cut you, drown you or leave you aching. In my high school love drama angst, I felt this to my core. However the true beauty of the song reframes love as a flower, and the individual as the seed. With the power of love, the song cautions us against self-protection from the pain. When we are afraid, we forget to take chances, we stop dancing, and we are so afraid of dying, we forget to live.

At the conclusion of the song, we are encouraged to keep going through the long dark night. The darkness that seeks to convince us that love is not for us, it’s only for the lucky and the strong. Under the cold snow, the seeds are planted for the rose to bloom with the sun’s love again in the spring.

I felt every lyric of this song and when I sang it out loud, whether in my music lesson or alone in front of my bedroom mirror, I imagined love that survived anything. Little did I know then that the person I needed to love was myself. It took until now, when I am digging into the corners of my life, to recognize what I deserve.

Through all the chapters and experiences in my life, the message in the song is part of my entire being. I have gone through the darkest nights. I have felt pain so deep that I thought I would break. Yet time and time again, I plant the seeds. I take something from the cold hard ground I am breaking. I look out at the clear sky every ceiling I smash. I wait for the sun to help me bloom, heal and regenerate. This is the rose to its heart. The queen of flowers, majestic and full of thorns. Beautiful, fierce and an alluring smell to capture its essence.

The other way Rose has shown up in my life is that captivating scent. I am drawn to the fragrance anywhere I can find it. Whether it’s in skincare products, candles, perfumes or the real flower in the garden. I instantly feel serenity. It’s almost a physical response. My entire nervous system calms. This has been the case since I was old enough to remember the intensity of the reaction.

Recently a coworker was traveling to Italy and had the chance to visit a custom perfumery. She texted my husband asking him to tell her what my scent profile was without letting me know. My amazing hubby took pictures of all my perfumes and scents, uploaded them to AI and asked it to build my scent profile. He sent the PDF to my colleague and she brought me home the most incredible scent. The base, of course, is Rose. A deeply juicy fresh-in-the-garden scent. My scent profile found that every fragrance I owned had a base of rose of some type. Even the ones that did not call out Rose in the name or description. I feel luxurious wearing the scent and my energy shifts immediately.

I wanted to know more about why this scent is so compelling to me. When it comes to sight, sound, and touch, they route through the thalamus first. That’s the part of your brain that sorts and interprets senses. Smell however goes straight from your nose to the emotional center of your brain, the amygdala. Meaning it hits your emotions first and the response can be instant and involuntary. A study showed that participants who were exposed to rose oil had a drop in breathing rate and blood pressure. Those people also rated themselves calmer and more relaxed than the control group.

The Rose is a signal to my brain and body to relax so I can blossom.

In order for me to tie my history with the rose, and the luxury of the flower, to the here and now, I will share a story. Since the start of this year I have been on a quest to do one new thing every week. I will be sharing these adventures on my Substack as well. One day, in a quest to try something new, I found a sound bath that featured the most beautiful gongs. Giant works of art.

The sound bath would also feature a guided meditation by a local practitioner and would be held in a beautiful clear-paneled dome. When I arrived, I learned it was a Rose ceremony and meditation followed by the sound bath. There were incredible roses all around the dome with a rose altar in the center of the room. We each would lie with our heads pointed to the rose altar.

The next two hours changed my life. Learning how the rose was the flower of Aphrodite and Venus. The goddesses of love and desire. To the ancient Romans and Greeks, the rose was the flower to indulge the senses. The flower of seduction. The meditation guided us through the power of the blooming, the releasing of the rose. How the petals open and the scent pulls you in. I could feel something inside me shifting. At the end of the experience, we were each given three rose thorns. These thorns are to be released where and when you are called. I named each of my thorns something deeply private. I knew immediately what I needed to release, and in return I welcomed in true deep self-care, compassion for myself and those around me, and permission to harness my power.

After this Rose ceremony I realized I am ready for this next chapter of my life. Look what I have already accomplished. I believed for a long time based on how I was raised that wealth was selfish. I was supposed to live frugally and stay under the radar. Taking time for myself or buying something for myself was irresponsible. Instead of running through my life, I now have the opportunity to capture my wealth. Both financially and psychologically. I have earned the ability to leverage my financial wealth for longevity. I have worked my ass off to get here and I know I will continue to raise my own bar. It’s time I make this work for me!

It has been cathartic to follow these pathways into who I am and what has created this woman. Instead of seeing non-traditional methods like meditation, plant healing and deep self care as negative, it has been so powerful to combine the mystical with the practical. How can I practice being more fluid, less rigid, less controlled?

One of the most powerful lessons I have learned recently is “both can be true.” I am not a singular being. I am a composite. Like the daisy. There are so many facets to who I am. I have fought so long and hard to stay who I was, to be this or that. I am tired of fighting. So how do I cultivate a more well-rounded, holistically wealthy version of myself?

I want to do new things every week to cultivate my curiosity. I want to let my creativity and experiences document themselves on a page. I want to write a Substack that maybe only 100 people read each time. Because the feeling I get when I get an email or text or a message from someone that I touched is fuel. The fuel to energize me to be curious, to share my thoughts, and to ultimately build a community.

This closes the Alice in Wonderland series. From here you can expect whimsical fancy mixed with laser-focused execution. Practical advice, new fun things I am doing and all the in between of my life as an SVP who is finally claiming her holistic wealth.

In the field of flowers we are in - we have learned about the Tiger Lily and how protective I had to be of my time and my space while I was traveling and raising my daughter. Violet held its ground through turmoil. Larkspur opened from that ground and rose toward the sun. Harnessing power, gathering strength. Where we left Larkspur was that line between owning the power I was cultivating and being damaged by its force.

This is when we move closer to practical application, tangible suggestions and the garden that I am cultivating as I enter the next chapter of my life. Blooming, becoming. The way to use the light to combat the dark. To cultivate the power for positive. But mostly to ensure to stay grounded with deep roots fed with self care and curiosity.

This brings us to Daisy. Daisy comes from the Old English dæges eage. Day’s eye. It is named for the fact that it opens at dawn and closes at dusk. It is one of the only flowers in the garden named for its relationship to time and light.

The flower itself is also perennial - meaning that it is everlasting. It can be mowed, walked on, trampled, sprayed. It comes back anyway.

But what makes the Daisy so resilient. Lets tie this flower back to the story of my life to this point. What can we learn from the Daisy?

The daisy grows below the blade of the mower.

The leaves of the daisy grow close to the ground and it shoots up a bloom. If the bloom is destroyed - the plant survives to bloom again. The lesson here was to keep growing when the bloom is cut down. The years I was gone for work, the network of roots was still spreading where nobody could see it.

It thrives in compacted soil.

The boys club, the hungover trips, the ground that seemed available to me was hard. The energy required to break through the ground and bloom anyway was consuming me. I was breaking. The roots I was building were growing but they were not strong on their own yet. The daisy makes surviving that ground look easy. It is not.

They call it a weed.

Too much. Never the one that is encouraged to grow. The thing they keep trying to remove from the lawn is the only thing in it that comes back every single year.

It closes on schedule, not in crisis.

I waited until the moment of absolute fatigue to consume me before I took care of myself. I had to be fiercely protective of the ground that I was growing in. To protect the space around me. To continue to shoot blooms towards the sky no matter what.

It will not open in the rain.

The lesson we learned in Violet was to embrace both sides of my being. How to sit in rooms where the energy was depleting me. Forcing my introvert self to just keep up. I could not grow there without an adaptation. How do I garner strength during the rain to replenish. Not a fake bloom, not putting on show. Learning about the term ambivert opened my eyes to the fact that my regrowth in the quiet moments was crucial to surviving anywhere.

The daisy is 100 small flowers in one bloom.

What looks like one flower is not one flower at all. The white petals are not petals. Each one is an entire flower, with its own petals fused flat into a single strap. And every tiny speck in the yellow center is another whole flower, its petals fused into a tube instead, which is why it reads as a dot. Together they look like one singular bloom.

This is the fun part of the daisy - which ties so well to the turning point for me. I navigated so many twists and turns along the path to where I am today. I cultivated different practices for navigating the journey. It was not a singular one thing. A culmination of years of getting cut down, going within to bloom even stronger. Small things I started to stack along the way.

In the last article Larkspur, I talked about the growing sense of power. The belief that I could and would rise to the sun. I shared the practical ways that I convinced myself that I could withstand grief. And here is the part that makes the daisy metaphor real. Evolution built the composite flower for a specific reason. Each floret on its own is far too small for a pollinator to notice. Alone, none of them get seen. The composite exists so it can be seen and continue to bloom.

Nothing rebuilt me in one move. There are a hundred small things doing their job. I am a composite. I am no longer a singular being, trying desperately to stay the same. Fighting against myself to rise to the sun. I am eager and excited to explore these new systems. To document them in the hopes that they help someone else. But more importantly so that I can ensure that I am listening to my own advice. I am still learning. I am still growing.

The Daisy opens at first light, follows the sun across the sky through the day, and folds its white petals at dusk. It waits for the light and then it moves with it all day long. It does not bloom once and hold the pose. It begins again, daily, on a rhythm.

In the coming weeks on my platform we will be talking about the practical things I am learning as I bloom into this new phase of life. Whether it is focused on my own health and well being, what I am discovering at work as an SVP of sales, or somewhere in between.

Starting this week with the one that changed the most. Circadian rhythms. The daisy’s entire way of being alive.

The practical piece is live now. Fresh as a Daisy: Circadian Rhythms.

The Weekly Practice

This week, count some of the little things that make you feel good. Take five minutes and write them down. Not the big ones. The small ones. The walk. The friend you call. The hour that is just for you. Then look at the list. That is not a list of coping. That is the bloom starting. And if the list looks short, that is ok! It tells you exactly where to plant more.

This week I wrote about the Daisy and the various small life practices that rebuilt me. This is the first of those small things. Circadian Rhythms.

Many years ago on a business trip - I was talking with a colleague about the fact that every week I was on a different time zone. Jet lag was normal and as a result, getting good sleep recovery was challenging. It was affecting my moods and energy. She told me that she had her young children on a circadian rhythm at home. She shared it had changed their lives.

As I learned more about circadian rhythm and how our bodies have run on it since the dawn of time, it all clicked for me.

Most of my life I did not realize that there are really two clocks that we need to pay attention to. The clock on the wall telling us the hour and minute. And…our body clock. There is a cluster of cells in your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, wired directly to your eyes. This nucleus runs sleep, body temperature, hormones, metabolism, immune function, focus, and stress response. Not just sleep.

That clock does not run on exactly 24 hours. In most adults it runs a little long as we delay our natural clock. Which means it drifts. Every single day it has to be reset, or you slide out of sync with the world. And the thing that resets it is light. Light hitting your eyes in the morning is the signal that tells your body the day has started. That signal sets a timer. Roughly fourteen to sixteen hours later, your body releases melatonin and you get sleepy. So the hour you get light in the morning is what decides the hour you can fall asleep at night. My mind was blown! It actually wasn’t just the time of night I went to bed but rather when and how light was reaching me in the morning.

I had been doing everything backward for years! Black out curtains, a “night cap” to make me tired, fighting my body to stay awake at night. Watching TV late at night or doom scrolling social media to try and fall asleep. I was focused on the wrong end of the day.

And then it clicked! Yet again I went back to my childhood to try to understand why sleep was so challenging for me as an adult. From childhood, I loved and craved natural light. I got headaches from the lights at school. I did not like loud noises at night or bright places after the sun had gone down. Most interestingly, I grew up without window shades on any windows in our house. We were too poor to afford them anyway. Growing up in the mountains, the early morning sun was glorious. But that golden glow in the evening was magical. I could not wait every evening to lay in my bedroom on the floor, in the warm light. I would read, journal, sing or just nap. It was where I was happiest. And I slept the best.

This was the informal way of practicing circadian rhythm. The practice is meant to keep your body clock locked to the 24 hour day instead of letting it drift. Bright light in the morning shuts off melatonin and starts the timer. Dim light in the evening lets melatonin arrive on schedule. Everything that clock controls runs off that timer. Your sleep, your body temperature, your hormone release, your metabolism, your alertness. When the pattern gets inverted, dark mornings and bright nights, the clock drifts and all of it drifts with it. Without knowing it, I had the pattern exactly right as a child. I had to rebuild it on purpose as an adult.

In the years since learning about this practice - I first made some small shifts:

• Removed window curtains from our bedroom (we have complete privacy) and for the rest of the house - installed remote controlled blinds that are open 90% of the time

• Changed all light bulbs in our house from bright white to soft white

• Put up small soft white string lights in our living room for even more soft ambiance

• I stopped watching TV in our bedroom during the week, which helped more than I expected. But I am terrible with my phone. The TV is the lesser offender. It sits across the room, and light falls off fast with distance. My phone is eight inches from my face and it is interactive and endless, which is a much stronger signal to stay awake. My melatonin shows up right on schedule and I scroll straight through it. I am still working on this one.

Then I started to notice my body craving that natural light, the warm afternoon/early evening glow. How much I loved the sunlight on my face first thing in the morning. That is when things really started to change for me. Here are some of the ways I incorporate circadian rhythms into my routine.

• Prioritize light in your eyes right when you wake up. For me this is due to not having window coverings in my room. Other ways to do this are to sit outside with your morning coffee, or step out on the porch for five minutes before you touch your phone. Get outside if you can. Glass weakens the signal, so an overcast morning outdoors still does far more for you than a sunny window. I prioritize a morning walk whenever I can.

• Set your sleep and wake schedule to be the same time every day. I am not perfect at this especially when I am on travel. I do my best. I love my Oura ring so that I can see my ideal bedtime range and other sleep metrics. If I cannot have a set bed time or wake up time I just try to get light as quickly and early as possible in the morning along with movement.

• If the golden hour is upon us and I am able to go outside for a walk. I always do. It’s not a long strenuous walk. It’s a short, easy, peaceful stroll through my neighborhood. Most days I sit on a sidewalk or the ground in a particularly golden spot. The walk home becomes more and more dim as the light fades.

• Dim the house after sunset. Some people go all the way and use no light at all once it is dark. For me, I dim the house slowly and keep lowering the lights until I am in bed ready for sleep.

• When you travel, get outside in local morning light the day you land. It does not erase jet lag but it cuts it way down. You stop enduring the time zone and set into it much sooner.

• When travel does not allow following the light, make small adjustments where you can. Some trips are back to back meetings in windowless rooms and dinners that run late. I book the dim, vibey restaurants instead of the bright loud ones. I skip the night clubs. I build in downtime wherever the schedule allows and I get to bed early when I can. None of it is perfect. It is enough to keep me from feeling totally depleted when I get home.

There are other tips that people find practical though I would say these are still very much a work in progress for me or ones that I do not follow now.

• Stop eating a couple of hours before bed. Food is a clock signal, and late food tells your body it is still daytime.

• Move during the day, not right before sleep. Daytime movement reinforces the day signal.

• Cut off caffeine by early afternoon. It stays in your system far longer than most of us want to believe.

Not one thing on these lists costs money.

Last year I landed at Heathrow at 10 in the morning. The old me would have gone straight to the hotel, closed the blinds and tried to force a few hours of sleep, desperate to be functional for a 9am meeting the next day. This time I dropped my bag off at the hotel and went outside. I walked that city for hours. Saw the sights, sat on park benches when I needed a break, and drank my electrolytes. I got an absurd number of steps and I was energized instead of wrecked. I ate dinner at 7 pm, took a warm bath and I was out like a light. I woke up ready for the meeting.

There have been so many ways this practice has changed my life. I sleep better, my travel is less disruptive and most of all, I absolutely love my house bathed in the golden hour. I feel recharged and ready to face the next morning especially on a Sunday night.

I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. These are just the things that have worked for me

The garden of flowers is where Alice makes her way after drowning in a pool of tears. The grief I experienced in my life opened up colors, experiences and curiosity in me. We have met the Tiger Lily and Violet so far. The tiger lily is fierce, bold and deeply protective, often misunderstood. The violet is quiet and underestimated but quietly builds its power through breaking the introvert mold.

These two flowers symbolize the growing of power, the deep reservoir of quiet determination that builds. As we have talked about before, however, we must cultivate multifaceted aspects of our being. We can be both things. In order for me to continue to grow, to leverage my quiet, harnessed power, I needed to open up, unfurl my petals. Create a life that features an open heart, positivity, the softness you let back in after grief.

The larkspur is named for the bird the lark. Larks sing up to the morning to greet the day. The flower is named literally for the bird that sings while it’s rising. The interesting thing about Larkspur is that it opens from the bottom. It blooms one floret at a time, the lowest blooms first while the top is still tight buds, and the opening travels slowly up the stalk over days. You don’t open a closed heart in a single moment. You open it from the floor, the foundation. Literally the floor in the worst of the moments. The warmth starts in the moments when you pick yourself up off the ground. When warm arms of a loved one wrap around you and pull you to your feet. It rises just like the larkspur towards the sun.

Rising out of grief and loss is never the same for anyone. I think back to the time where I found myself coming out of the fog, seeing the world through a new light. I was curious to consider what changed in me, how did I pull myself up?

There were a few key things I came to as I explored this.

1. I made survival non-negotiable again. I had survived so many experiences as a child that made the thought of escape palpable. This was the worst of it. I didn’t know how I was going to survive it. So I made it completely mandatory that I would. I told myself daily, this will not take me out.

2. This mental shift led me to come back to my routine. The things that I knew worked to keep my mind and body active previously that I had given up. I started in small doses. Instead of spiraling on the grief and obsession to keep my daughter alive, I went back to the tiger lily in me. Deeply protective of my time and space. Focusing on true self care no matter what.

3. I opened up to find community. Grief can be deeply isolating. I wanted to be alone and while needed, it was becoming debilitating. Leading me to depression and feelings of desperation for escape. I started telling people I trusted what was going on in my life. I shared openly with coworkers who I trusted. I quickly found I was not the only one and my circle of support grew.

4. I fell deeply in love with my partner. We had been together for about 7 years by the time my daughter needed us the most. She was not his biological child. But he flew miles around the country during Covid, participated fully in family therapy sessions. He held me for hours while I sobbed. He drove me for miles around the state because I couldn’t bear to be at home. Listened to me spiral at all hours of the night. Seeing him in this light cemented for me the deep true power of love.

5. I fought like hell. I worked hard to maintain my brain power, my fight. I channeled my energy into creating a work and home environment where my power was felt. This time, it wasn’t because I felt I needed to prove something. That I needed to combat imposter syndrome. I felt my power from deep within. The knowledge that I would survive this. That I could bring my true self forth to the people both in my home and work life, be authentic. And the skills and lessons I was learning through my grief and my rise back to the sun would fuel me in life. I knew it was not possible for me to give up or lose. That kind of power was exhilarating. Work wasn’t my escape, work was where I tested my power. Work was my experiment.

This leads into one of the most interesting facts about the Larkspur. They are poisonous as hell. As glorious as its rise to the sun, it keeps something hidden to keep itself safe. As much as my power was building and rising, keeping the poison reactions, the fight or flight reactions, was hard to navigate. It is still hard to navigate. That fine line between owning my power and being damaged by its force. I am still working on that line.

The next flower we will meet is the Daisy. This is the start of the opening, the new beginnings. We will explore how I am working on finding that line of owning this power, and having the ability to maintain a level of defense while being soft and open to new experiences.

This week I encourage you to put down something you have been carrying alone. That does not have to be to a person. Sometimes when I write something down, I feel a bit better. Don’t overthink or create anxiety about having to share it with someone else. That day may come. Once you write it down, or even simply say it out loud, the next step to sharing might not feel as scary.

The violet earned that reputation honestly, from how it sits. It grows low, right down against the ground, and it keeps its flowers tucked near the soil, half hidden under its own heart-shaped leaves. It likes shade and the quiet edges of things. With the sweet violet you often catch the scent before you ever spot the bloom, because the bloom is down there hiding. About two hundred years ago an English poet named Leigh Hunt looked at one sitting in the underbrush and called it a shrinking violet, and the picture stuck. Fifty years later people on this side of the Atlantic had borrowed it for the shy one in the corner, and we have been handing it to quiet people ever since. The Victorians even made the violet their symbol for modesty. But all of that came from the flower’s posture, not its nature. Low is not the same as timid.

Because here is what the violet actually does. It does not wait to be planted. It fires its own seed out of the pod when it splits open, throwing itself into ground. It grows a second kind of flower that never even opens, one that pollinates itself. It sends its roots sideways under the surface and comes up exactly where it decides to. And ask anyone with a tidy lawn what it takes to get rid of one. You can pull it, mow it, poison it. It comes back. It is one of the hardest things in the whole garden to kill.

I know that flower. I have been that flower.

I always believed I was an introvert. I labeled myself that way because of the immense shyness, the fear of big groups, of public speaking, of being the center of attention. No one believed me, because of the job I had, the way I presented on a stage, the way I carry myself. What they did not see was the obsessive practicing before every presentation. The feeling that I might throw up, right up until about two minutes in, when I finally settle. The way I rehearse every conversation in advance, then replay it after, snagging on the one wrong word, critiquing my own answer, wishing I had said it another way. How on a Friday I would want to crawl into a dark room and talk to no one.

Turns out there is a word for what I am. Not the introvert they did not believe, and not the extrovert they wanted. An ambivert. The one who sits in the middle and picks her setting, pulling energy from people and from quiet both, and flexing to whatever the room actually needs. And it truly was not until I learned that word, and started studying how to actually operate as one, that my life changed.

So let me tell you what operating as an ambivert actually looks like, because none of it came naturally and none of it is soft. It is a handful of rules I now run my life by.

The first one. My prep is not a flaw, it is the weapon. All those years of rehearsing a talk until I felt sick, running a conversation in my head before I walked in, I used to think that was the anxiety I needed to fix. It is not. It is the engine. The preparation is the exact thing that lets me walk into a room and meet it however it comes. I stopped fighting it. Now I feed it.

The second. I treat my energy like money, because it is. A high-stimulation day comes with a bill, so I pay it on both ends. I put quiet on either side of the big rooms, on purpose. That Friday where I want to disappear into a dark room is not weakness leaking out. It is the recovery my system was always going to need, so I schedule it now instead of apologizing for it.

The third. I win by reading the room, not filling it. The old story says you own a room by being the loudest thing in it. The truth is you own it by reading it. I ask, then I actually listen, and I let the quiet do work the noise never could.

The fourth. I pick my setting on purpose. I can turn it all the way up for the stage, however big, and all the way down to listen and close. I stopped asking which one is the real me. Both are. The whole skill is choosing.

And there is data underneath all of it that I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. The myth in my world is that sales belongs to the loud extrovert. In 2013 a Wharton professor named Adam Grant actually measured it and found the opposite. The ambiverts, the ones who can talk and also listen and read a room, brought in the most revenue. They outsold the strong extroverts and the strong introverts both. The quiet strategic one was never the long shot. The power was never in the volume. It was in knowing exactly when to bloom.

The hardest place I ever had to learn all of this was the boys club. School through most of my career. The golf courses, the bar nights, showing up hungover and trying to keep up. To keep up I gave away the things I fought hardest to hold onto at home. Eating well. Working out. Not drinking. Trip after trip I traded them away, and it wreaked havoc on my body and my energy.

And it was more than a pace. To keep up I made decisions I would never make on my own ground, choices that brought my guard down in rooms where I could not afford to have it down. And still, I was never the loud one. Never the drunk one. Never the one who fumbled. I was too afraid of the mistake for that. So instead of fumbling I fought. I fought my own body and my own energy to stay sharp while everyone around me loosened, and I held that line all night, in every one of those rooms. It was exhausting. Part of what kept me fighting was what I could see. I watched people I care about make terrible decisions in those rooms, the kind you do not get to walk back, and I was determined, all the way down, to never become that.

Here is the thing though. Those rooms were never the villain. People have a wonderful time in them, and so have I. The room was never the problem. The problem was that I did not yet know how to be in it as myself, so I kept someone else’s pace instead of my own. It took me until recently to say the honest thing out loud. I cannot keep up anymore. And more than that, I do not want to. That is not defeat. That is finally operating the way I was built to.

And the person who taught me how to actually live all of this was my daughter. I always thought I was the one teaching her, and some of it I was. Protect your energy, the Tiger Lily lesson from last week. But the how, so much of it came from watching her. She is a violet. She tends her boundaries, she says no when no is the honest answer, and she grows where she decides to, on her own terms. Learning from her is what made my struggles and stumbles feel less like guilt and more like I had finally found the power button. These days, I am the one taking notes.

She will not do a social thing unless it also brings her peace. So she builds her own, the kind of gathering that is connection and comfort in the same room, the self care and the friendship folded into one. She decides her ground, every time.

She is my Violet. And some days, I am hers.

The Weekly Practice

Find the one room this week that costs you the most energy. Before you walk in, do the ambivert thing. Prepare like it is the weapon it is, put a little quiet on both sides of it, and decide in advance that your job is to read the room, not fill it. Then notice how different it feels to be in there on your own terms instead of at someone else’s pace.

The Community Question

Where in your life are you spending energy to keep up with a room, when you could be spending it on becoming more you?

The next flowers in the garden are the ones that open. We will get to those. But first we had to meet the ones with thorns.

Source: Adam M. Grant, “Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage,” Psychological Science, 2013.

This is that garden.

Here’s the thing about it. It was never a reward waiting at the end. It was growing the entire time she was fighting to reach it. Every hard room, every wrong size, every tear in that pool, something was taking root on the other side. She just couldn’t see it yet.

That’s what this last stretch of Wonderland is. A walk through the garden. And every flower in it is something that bloomed out of the hardest parts of the climb. Some of them protect. Some of them open. One of them will carry us all the way out.

We start with the loudest one.

A Tiger Lily. Tall, dark, spotted, and thoroughly unbothered. It doesn’t blend. It doesn’t soften itself to make the other flowers comfortable. It takes up the exact amount of room it needs and not one inch less, and it does it in the boldest color in the garden. You notice it before you notice anything else, and it does not care whether you approve.

Here’s what I know about the Tiger Lily. People call a flower like that showy. Selfish, even. Too much.

But the Tiger Lily isn’t taking anything. It’s protecting something. It grows from a bulb that pulls everything it needs down into itself underground, stores it, guards it, and then blooms bigger for having done it. That deep color, that height, the way it holds its space, that’s not vanity. That’s a flower that learned to guard its own ground.

I know that flower. I’ve been that flower.

Raising my daughter and working and traveling created enormous demands on my time and energy. I did the one thing I knew how to do to keep myself sane. I intentionally carved out time for myself. Sometimes it was simply to get out of the house and away from the fighting with my ex husband. Other times it was to truly find space for myself. I found moments that were mine, and I fiercely protected them.

I was told I was selfish. You’re gone all the time, how can you leave again. Or, I’m here with your daughter while you travel the world, I guess you don’t care about her. Or the best one, do you know how much she cries when you’re gone?

I knew deep down that if I didn’t do things for myself, I would fully lose any light I had left to carry. For her, for me, for anyone.

So I did. And I stopped apologizing.

I explained to my daughter where I was going and what I was doing. When she was old enough, I took her with me. Yoga, the gym, walks, self care appointments. My self care became a thing we could do together.

And I had no idea where that would take either of us.

It led to her becoming a certified yoga instructor by the time she was 17. It led to her getting certified in various other modalities, including Pilates Reformer, by the time she was 21. She “selfishly” prioritizes her therapy appointments with the same therapist she has had since she was 11. She goes to acupuncture. She takes regular skin and body care time.

And then she took all of it and built something of her own. She launched a wellness company with her best friend, and today the two of them spread the joy of wellness and self care across her hometown community.

But what gets me the most happened not too long ago. This beautiful creature sat me down and thanked me. For showing her what true self care looked like when she was little. She told me, in her own words, how hard it was to understand back then why I was so fierce about it. And how it all makes sense to her now.

She is my Tiger Lily. Protector of her space. Guardian of her garden.

The Weekly Practice

Find one hour this week that belongs to no one but you. Put it on the calendar the way you’d put in a meeting you can’t move. Guard it like the Tiger Lily guards its ground. And when someone calls it selfish, don’t rush to explain it away. Protecting your light isn’t taking anything from anyone. It’s what keeps you able to give at all.

This is later.

Alice has been falling and climbing and talking her way through Wonderland this whole time, chasing a garden she saw through a door too small to fit through. Curious. Then brave. Then wrong, and brave again. She has grown and shrunk and grown, changing her whole size to get through each room the place put in front of her. That’s the story we’ve been telling. A girl who kept remaking herself to reach the next door.

And now she’s in a room she made herself too big for.

It’s a small room. A table, a key, a little door too small to fit through. She eats something to change her size, the way she always has, the way it always worked before. But this time she overshoots. She grows and grows until her head hits the ceiling and one arm is out the window, and the room that held her fine a moment ago cannot hold her at all.

The room didn’t change. She did.

And this is the thing nobody warns you about the climb. You build yourself bigger and bigger to survive each room, and it works, until the day you look up and the walls you fought your way into are walls you no longer fit. You can’t un-grow. You can’t shrink back into a place you’ve already outgrown. She is stuck at the ceiling of the exact room she worked so hard to get into.

So she cries.

And the water rising around her feet is hers. She made it. Big, real, unstoppable tears, the kind that come out of something that broke, and they pool and rise the same way everything else in her life rose. By her own hand. She didn’t fall into a sea. She flooded the room herself. The cost of the climb, finally collecting on the floor.

Then she shrinks. Small again. Small enough to slip. And she falls into the pool she made, up to her chin in her own grief, and for one confused second she thinks it’s the ocean. Something happening to her. It isn’t. It’s hers. All of it. Deep enough to drown in.

So she swims.

Badly, at first. Everything that got her up to that ceiling is worthless now. You can’t climb water. You can’t out-grow it or out-muscle it or hold yourself above it by being the biggest thing in the room. The pool doesn’t care how far she came. It just holds her at the chin and waits to see if she’ll move with it or go under.

So she moves with it.

And she is not the only one in the water. A mouse paddling near her. A bird, then another. A whole crowd who fell into the same pool, all of them wet, all of them swimming, none of them alone in it. Even here. Especially here.

They reach the bank. All of them. Shaking and alive.

And on the far side, past the water she had to cross and could not go around, is the garden. The little door. The green she’d been trying to reach this whole time.

It was never up. It was always across.

She just had to get through the water first.

After my divorce, my career continued to take off. I was traveling the world, closing big deals, earning a significant income. By the time my daughter was in middle school, I was a senior sales leader at a major tech company. My reputation was growing. The deals got bigger. The rooms got bigger. I was meeting with executives from every major enterprise in the Bay Area.

I can’t share her personal story. But the years between middle school and high school were deeply traumatic. School started to suffer. Her anxiety grew. Over time we were locked in a mother-daughter struggle. Constant push and pull. When Covid hit, everything got infinitely harder, and there was a situation that changed our lives forever.

Holding my daughters hand on one of the hardest nights of our lives in 2020

I couldn’t be dead inside any longer. I couldn’t be half in and half out. I needed to face my own trauma and grief. For her to heal and move forward, I needed to step all the way out of my own needs. If I didn’t change, I knew I would lose her. For over a year I was broken into a million pieces. Waffling between grief, guilt, loss, and deep, deep sorrow.

Being the tech sales leader, the bold one, the fierce one, was not needed right now. I couldn’t Olivia Pope my way through this. I cried. I broke every day. But I knew with every fiber of my body that I had to go through it. I didn’t have a choice, and neither did she.

It was also covid. And wildfires that had us evacuated for a week while our little community burned and loved ones lost their homes.

What I didn’t realize was the power of the people around me in those moments. The people who showed up for me. Who showed up for my daughter. I started to share my feelings. I started to let go of the notions I had about what life should have been for the two of us. I started to see her for who she was and what she was living through. I started to see the lights in both of us, the ones that connected us. I felt our bond come back. I watched her fight with every fiber of her being to persevere.

Just like Alice, I had to swim with it. I had to see the people in the same pool of tears. I wasn’t alone.

I made it to the other side. Just like Alice. But the most incredible part was seeing how much of an impact I had on her. How much she needed me to change. How she needed me to free myself so we could both move forward. And now I cry all the time - especially at sappy commercials. Guess I am not so dead inside anymore.

In the reflection I’ve done in the five years since, seeing what she has accomplished in her 23 years, I am blown away.

The three things we named in the Cheshire Cat post bloomed in this garden. But not the way I thought. Two of them I planted without knowing. Protect your energy. Rely on yourself. The third one I never planted at all. Keep your heart open anyway. That one grew on its own. In her, as a counterweight to my hardness. In me, only after I let myself break in this water. It was the last thing I learned, not the first thing I taught.

Now we come to this field of flowers. The one we had to almost drown to get to. In the final set of stories from Alice, we’ll walk through this garden and meet a few of them. Tiger Lily. Violet. Larkspur. Daisy. Each one a seed that bloomed on the far side of the water.

And then there’s the Rose.

The rose has followed me my whole life. Long before I could have told you why. I reach for it without thinking. The scent I pick up off a shelf without reading the label and only realize later. Rose. Again. It’s in the things I wear, the things I light, the things I keep near me. Some part of me has always known its way back to it.

The rose runs through Wonderland the same way. Start to finish, it’s there. It doesn’t arrive at the end. It was always in the story, waiting for Alice to be ready to see it.

That’s why the rose is the one I’m closing on. It’s the last flower in this garden, and it carries the most. A rose grows slow. It grows guarded, thorns and all, and then it opens anyway, in its own time, because that’s what it was always going to do. You protect yourself and you open anyway. You come through the water and you grow.

Not long ago I walked into a sound bath without knowing what it was. It turned out to be a rose ceremony. At the end they handed each of us three thorns and told us to carry them out into the world and release them somewhere in nature. Someday. When we were ready to let go of what they held.

I still have mine.

I’ve been carrying three thorns, waiting to be ready. And I think ready is close. So here’s what I’m going to do. The moment we reach the Rose, the last flower in this garden, I’m going to take those three thorns into the mountains and let them go.

The rose is the bloom that carries us out of the fantasy and into the life I have now. Out of Wonderland. Into the real garden, the one I’m still standing in, still tending. This is where you and I sit down together. Where we stop walking through the story and start talking, straight, about the things worth building a community around.

The rose was always here. So were you. We just had to get through the water first.

He is there, and then he is not. He shows up when he feels like it and leaves in the middle of a sentence. When Alice asks him which way she should go, he tells her it depends on where she wants to end up. It sounds like a cat playing games with a lost little girl. But it is the truest thing anyone tells her in the whole book. She just cannot use it yet, not until she knows where she is going.

Then he starts to disappear. Slowly. The tail first, then the rest of him, until there is nothing left but the grin hanging in the air with no one behind it.

He is barely in the story at all. And he is still the one who points her in the right direction.

When I was 25 I had my beautiful daughter.

Taken 15 years ago. This was one of my hardest years. I booked the shoot on purpose. I wanted proof that even then there was joy,

I spent years as the Cheshire Cat. There in flickers. The grin without the rest of me. And I had no idea if any of what I was trying to teach was actually reaching her.

My husband and I had been together since I was 17, when we met in college. I went down the checklist. Graduate. Get my dream sales job in tech. Get married. Buy a house. Have a baby. Check check check.

I ignored the early warnings. He still wanted to play baseball, pour his energy into his own career, and put little into building a family or a life. When things got hard, he yelled. Or got difficult enough that I learned to stop expecting. Anything. I was so focused on what I thought life was supposed to look like that I forged ahead anyway. Into the distance. Into the resentment building between us.

Even during my pregnancy, I was alone. When the pain got bad enough that I was rushed to the hospital, he was too busy with work to come right away. When I landed on six weeks of bed rest, it was my mother who showed up. Consistently. He was nowhere to be found.

After she was born, it was worse. Disappearing for hours. Hiding in his office. Working day and night even when he was home. Maternity leave was a blessing. I bonded so tightly with my daughter. It was also a curse, because I was alone ALL the time. My mother was working too. She did her best. But once again I was relying on myself. To care for me, and for this tiny amazing little being.

I was so wrapped up in all of it that I lost myself. I lost my light. By the time my leave ended I was desperate to go back to work. I loved her fiercely. And I needed adults. I needed support.

I went back to work and decided, once again, that I was not going to rely on anyone. I was going to focus on ME. And I thought that meant me AND my child. My intentions were pure. At 26 I believed I was looking out for us both. And for the most part, that was true.

But here is the other part. I HATED coming home. The house was always a disaster, there was constant turmoil and anger coming at me. I was fully and solely responsible for every aspect of our lives, down to making sure every step was accounted for and planned. My mother was the one raising my daughter while I was gone. First we hired a nanny. When she moved, my mom retired to take care of my daughter full time.

I felt incapable and guilty on one hand. And on the other, I was highly successful at work, and in my own mind I was the best mom in the world the minute I walked through the door. Both of those were living in me at the same time.

I told myself that when I was home, I was present. And I was. I went to all of it. I spent every minute with her I could. And then I was gone again two days later. To travel far and wide, working. And that was true. I was working. But I also made decisions to be gone when it was not necessary. Not really. Almost a million miles on United to date.

Of course a marriage of 17 years fell apart. We both made decisions that hurt each other on purpose. The angrier he got, the more I pulled away. The more I pulled away, the worse things got between us. Until I looked up one day and realized I was living my mother’s marriage all over again. And I knew, for my future and my daughter’s, that I had to leave.

That is a story for another day.

The Cheshire Cat has never left me since. Being there, being gone. Fading in and out. But the part that stops me now is the riddle. Alice asks which way she should go, and he tells her it depends on where she is going. The best advice she gets in the whole book, and she cannot unpack it until she has already arrived.

In the years after my divorce there were terrifying moments. Some of them I may share one day. Times I genuinely did not know if I would survive. I did not know which way to go. I only knew the direction had to be forward.

And here is the thing I could not see then.

I thought I was failing her. I thought a mother who was gone this much, whose marriage was coming apart, whose light had gone out, could not possibly be giving her daughter anything worth keeping.

But I was. I just could not see it yet.

She was watching. That is the part you forget when you are drowning. They are always watching.

She watched me protect my own energy, even when the people around me called it selfish. She watched me say no. She watched me leave the rooms that took more than they gave, and choose myself in a world that tells women choosing yourself is a sin.

She watched me rely on myself. Fiercely. She watched me build a life with my own two hands and never once sit waiting for someone to come save me. And she would be just fine, because she could always rely on herself.

And then there was the question of what to do with a heart. This one she did not learn by watching me. She learned it from what I could not do.

I was hard in those years. Bitter. And somehow my hardness grew a softness in her. Like she looked at the armor I lived in and decided to become the tender one. The one who reached when I could not.

That softness saved me. In my worst moments, the nights I did not know if I would survive, her open heart found me. She broke me down in the best way, and we bonded so beautifully in those cracks. My own child, teaching me to be soft years before I knew how to teach myself.

The armor did not come free. It cost her. She learned to go numb to her own pain, to hold it deep and quiet, with nowhere to set it down. That is the piece I still carry. And still, time and time again, I watched her trust people and keep her heart open, even when it cost her deeply.

Three things I didn’t know I was teaching her. Protect your energy. Rely on yourself. Keep your heart open anyway.

I did not know if the first two were landing. There was no proof. You do not get a receipt for the things you plant in a child while you are barely holding yourself together. You just keep planting. In the dark. On faith. The third one I did not plant at all. It grew anyway.

That is the Cheshire Cat’s riddle. He hands Alice the truest direction in the book, and she cannot use it until she is already where she was going. I was handing my daughter a map I would not be able to read myself for years. I was teaching her things I was not even sure were right at the time. And I could not have known, then, how much they would matter.

THE WEEKLY PRACTICE

This week, name one value you are passing on whether you mean to or not. The thing your kids, your team, your people are learning from how you actually live, not from what you say.

Then ask yourself the only question that matters. Is it the one you would choose?

THE COMMUNITY QUESTION

So tell me. What did someone teach you without being there? Something that reached you sideways, from a person who could not always show up, but who planted something in you anyway.

I could not see any of this while it was happening. I was too far inside the grin. It took me falling apart to finally look up.

That falling apart is the next story. The Pool of Tears. It is the hardest one I have written, and it is where everything I had been holding up finally came down.

And what comes after the tears is the part I have been waiting for. A garden.

The Field of Flowers is the next series here, and it is the one this whole story has been walking toward. It is where all three finally bloomed. Where I got to see what took root in her, and what she quietly planted in me. We will walk through it together, one flower at a time.

That is where all of this has been going. More soon.

Sculpture: “Expansion” by Paige Bradley

Alice followed a white rabbit down a hole and fell a long way down into a strange place called Wonderland. Nothing there works the way it should. She’s already had a wild day of it — she’s eaten things and drunk things that made her shoot up tall, then shrink down small, over and over, until she’s not even sure what size she’s supposed to be anymore.

That’s when she finds the Caterpillar. He’s sitting on top of a mushroom, smoking, completely unbothered by her. The first thing he says to her isn’t hello. It’s a demand.

“Who are you?”

And Alice — who has spent the whole day being changed, stretched, made small, made enormous — can’t give him a clean answer.

“I hardly know, sir, just at present. At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

He doesn’t like that. He keeps pressing. Explain yourself. Account for yourself. Who are you, really. He’s prickly about it, dismissive, like her not having a tidy answer is a personal failing. She almost walks away from him.

But before she does, he gives her the one thing that turns out to matter. He nods at the mushroom he’s sitting on and tells her:

“One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

One side of what, she asks.

“Of the mushroom,” he says. And then he’s gone.

Here’s the part nobody tells you about that mushroom. It doesn’t come labeled. Alice has no idea which side is which. She breaks off a piece from each, and she has to taste both to find out — too much of the one and she shoots up so tall she’s lost in the trees, too much of the other and her chin slams into her foot. The whole rest of Wonderland, she’s nibbling between them. A little from this side, a little from that one. That’s the only way she ever stays her right size.

This part of the story resonated with me so much as a kid and into my teens. Trust me — I read this book almost every year until high school.

I had dealt with so much pain and trauma from my father. I felt pulled in every direction. Stretched past my own mental maturity, then too young to do anything about it. Shattered by the lack of love from my dad. Overly protected by my mother. She tried her best, but she wasn’t raised here and had little to no parenting skills to handle even the normal teenage things.

Just when I felt like I could settle — something would change at home, dramatically. And I had no idea who I was anymore.

Just like Alice. Grilled about who she is. Made to account for herself. Eating from one side of the mushroom and then the other, never sure which was which, never quite the right size.

For years since, I held one belief like a shield: my past, the hurt, the pain — it would never define me. I know exactly what happened. I have held the grief. I leveraged the pain I felt to make a different choice with my own child. I made peace with my mother for the intolerable sacrifices she made to protect me, even when it cost her. My father is no longer able to hold presence in my life. I feel power in the choices I’ve made and the boundaries I’ve set. I firmly believe the ups and downs, the stretching and the shrinking, built who I am and gave me the life I have now.

But there are flaws in that thinking.

I see them now.

Because there’s a difference between that didn’t define me and I never have to feel it again. I had built my whole self on the first one. And I’d quietly turned it into the second.

Reading this as an adult, I see it plainly. I have been eating from one side of the mushroom. The fierce side. The bold side. The hold-my-shit-together-for-everyone side. The other side — the softness, the grace for myself, the forgiveness — has been sitting in a dark cupboard. Completely forgotten.

I had so much pride about it. That I’d overcome all of it. That I’d become this fierce, strong woman who could handle anything. Didn’t need to rely on anyone. Could take on any energy in the room and, like a chameleon, adjust me to the situation. Grow and shrink on command.

So I dismissed the angry outbursts. The ones where I’d rage and lose my temper, couldn’t stop the terrible words coming out of my mouth, listening to myself thinking WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SAYING.

I’d tell myself — well, I was pushed too far. I rarely get mad. Or, they needed me to get that angry before they’d listen.

I was hard and cold to the people I love more than anything, on the days I was really struggling. Loving one day, chilly the next. I couldn’t handle physical affection. And over time, in my family, it became a joke. Yeah, she’s just dead inside.

Re-reading this story made me emotional in a way I didn’t expect. Because I finally saw how much I’d been running on strength and sheer fortitude to get the life I earned — and how much I missed doing it. Years of softness. Grace. Forgiveness. Gone to the cupboard.

Here’s what I want you to take from this. In this wonderland of a life, we have to make room for one phrase: both can be true.

I can be fierce and fragile. Bold and slowly breaking on the inside. That is not a contradiction to fix. It’s two parts of one whole human.

I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m resilient. And I deserve the softness too. Not by going back and digging through the past — I’ve made my peace with what happened. By finally eating from the other side of the mushroom.

When I started actually living that — both can be true — my world shifted.

Take a real example. On the hard days at work, the stressed-out days, I used to take it out on my husband. All day I was the bold, strong woman holding it together. And the second I got home, any little thing he hadn’t done would set me off. I’d turn into a broken, fragile, hurt little girl repeating the generational tantrum. I wouldn’t tell him why. I wouldn’t open up.

Now I try to tell him about my day. What’s challenging me. I let him give me his thoughts, and I take them. It’s taken our relationship to another level. I actively reach for his support and his strength now — instead of armoring up and pretending I don’t need it.

I’m practicing gratitude for the people around me. Saying thank you. Finding ways to give myself grace. Forgiving myself when I make a mistake with the people I love. But not just absolving myself and moving on — I tell them where I wish I’d shown up better, and I ask for a chance to try again.

That’s the other side of the mushroom. I’m still learning to nibble it.

This week’s practice:

Catch yourself on a hard day. Not a good day — a hard one. The day where the jaw is clenched and the answer to everything is I’ve got it.

That’s the tall side. That’s the side I’ve been eating from for thirty years.

Notice it. Don’t fix it — just name it. Oh. There I go again. Strong side.

Then take one bite from the other side. Just one. The next time you’d normally armor up and handle it alone — tell someone the truth about your day instead. The cold shoulder, the I’m fine, the chameleon adjusting herself to fit the room — set it down for one conversation and say the actual thing.

That’s the soft side. Grace. Forgiveness. Letting someone hold a little of it with you.

You won’t get the size right the first time. Alice didn’t either. A little from one, a little from the other, and you keep nibbling until you land somewhere that feels like you. Both sides. That’s the practice.

When’s the last time you told someone the truth about your day instead of armoring up?

When I was little my dad was physically and mentally abusive toward my mother.

He was gone most of the time and when he was home he was violent, up and down, and made terrible — sometimes illegal — decisions. He had a volatile temper that would erupt without warning. In public. At home. Anywhere.

We lived in the mountains — 25 to 30 minutes from town — with no friends or family in this country. No support system. No one to call. The bus was often our only way to get anywhere because he would take the car. It took at least an hour when it didn’t break down on the windy mountain roads.

Early every morning my mom would leave for work and I was responsible for getting myself ready and walking 20 minutes each way to the bus stop. Most days after school my dad would forget to pick me up. I would have to go back to the school and the person in the office would wait with me until her bus came up the mountain and I could get on with her the rest of the way home.

On the nights the fighting was really bad I would hide and read. Books were my escape. A way to block out the noise. Or — in the quiet moments — a door into a completely different world.

That was one gift my dad gave me — he loved books. He would take me to the bookstore or the library near the bus station — places we both loved — and tell me to wait while he looked around. And then he would disappear. I would end up waiting for hours not sure when or if he was coming back. The panic would set in first. And then survival would take over. I would open a book and block it all out. Read until my mom’s face appeared in the doorway on her transfer between work and home.

Those places we both loved created such a divide. Magic and abandonment living in the same building.

I was left. Often.

But I always had a book.

I don’t remember exactly when I first read Alice in Wonderland. But I remember what it gave me.

For a few hours at a time I wasn’t trying to make sense of what was happening at home. I was just curious. About what came next. About where Alice was going.

In the story a bored Alice sees the White Rabbit run across her path — clearly distressed, muttering to himself, late for something. And instead of looking away she chooses to follow him. Chooses curiosity. What comes next is wonder, delight, chaos and adventure.

It was the first time I remember feeling that. Pure uncomplicated curiosity. No weight attached to it. Just — what happens next?

In Alice’s world — unlike mine — curiosity was safe. It didn’t lead to trouble or unpredictability or fear. It led somewhere. Somewhere exciting. Full of challenges she could actually navigate. Full of outcomes that were wild and strange but never truly dangerous.

For a little girl whose real world outcomes were anything but safe — that was everything.

Alice was a girl in a world that didn’t much care what she thought. She questioned everything anyway. She followed the White Rabbit into the complete unknown because she had a childlike curiosity she simply couldn’t suppress.

I got that. I really got that.

I was naturally curious as a kid. Always asking why. Always wanting to understand things. But somewhere between that little girl hiding with her books and high school — curiosity became less and less important.

It was more important to pretend I didn’t care. To fit in. It was not cool to ask questions — it was cool to just go with it. Whatever it was.

And so curiosity didn’t disappear. It got crowded out. Replaced. By pressure. By the noise of just trying to keep up. A slow drift away from the part of me that used to want to know what was around the corner.

There are so many versions of this story. So many reasons why curious children change. Whatever the reason — most of us reach a point where life fills in all the space that curiosity used to live in.

And we stop following the White Rabbit.

But here is what I’ve learned.

The White Rabbit is curiosity trying to grab your attention before time runs out. That small spark of interest that appears out of nowhere. The thing that pulls you toward something you can’t fully explain. The nudge to take a chance. To try something unfamiliar. To step toward the adventure even when you can’t see where it leads.

I had a really tough first year in college and had a decision to make — which I will talk about in another post. I ended up choosing the route that required me to find some kind of joy — or at least peace — with education and knowledge. I found my White Rabbit again in the Sonoma State Library. Quietly. Slowly.

My grades started climbing. My professors started noticing me. And I started realizing something I hadn’t felt in a long time. That behind every answer there was more context. More depth. More to understand. That knowledge wasn’t just a grade — it was a door. And the more I opened it the more people saw something in me that I had stopped seeing in myself.

The White Rabbit was back. In the margins of a textbook. In a professor’s eyes when I asked a question nobody else had thought to ask.

Curiosity was taking me somewhere. One question at a time.

And I thought — oh. This is what I’ve been missing.

Curiosity isn’t just a feeling. It’s a practice. Something you can lose and find and lose and find again. Something that compounds when you feed it. Something that opens doors you didn’t even know were there.

My entire life seems wondrous to me — like I imagine Alice’s journeys. Hard, exciting, boring, crazy and everything in between. But I am constantly in awe. Constantly in wonderment at what has occurred — and more so at what is still to come.

Curiosity isn’t just about your own growth. It’s about staying awake to the world. Choosing to find new adventures instead of waiting for them to find you.

But I know that being curious takes practice. It’s uncomfortable. It requires you to move toward the unfamiliar when every instinct says stay put. So at the beginning of this year I decided to make it simple. Every week I try one new thing and write it down in my planner. That’s it

Some weeks it’s genuinely small. A different coffee order. A new walking route. A podcast I’d been putting off.

Some weeks it surprises me in ways I didn’t see coming.

And this last week — the new thing I tried was launching Unceiled. Something I had been thinking about for a long time. Something that scared me. Something that required me to follow my own White Rabbit and trust that it would take me somewhere worth going.

It always does.

This is the first post in a series. It’s my origin story — told through the lens of Alice in Wonderland. Not because it’s a clever metaphor. Because that book was genuinely there for me when not much else was. And the things Alice goes through — the curiosity, the jump, the falling, the awakening — they map to my life in ways I’m still unpacking.

Over the coming weeks I’ll move from this beginning into the specific chapters of Alice’s journey and my own. Drawing the connections. Sharing the lessons. Getting into the real stuff.

But I want to leave you with this.

This week — try one new thing. Write it down somewhere. Your planner, your notes app, a Post-it on your fridge. Just capture it. Write down as little or as much as you want.

And then try again next week. Pretty sure you may find yourself seeking out new adventures in no time.

— Monisha