This was my fight with alcohol: The morning arithmetic. The promises. The fresh starts that never quite held. And underneath all of it, the relentless, exhausting verdict: something is wrong with me.

You may know something about that arithmetic. Maybe not around alcohol specifically — or maybe exactly around alcohol. But I'd be willing to bet you know the particular weight of an expectation you've failed to meet. The version of yourself you thought you'd be by now. The relationship that didn't survive. The dream that quietly stopped being possible. And the way, when something falls apart, part of you treats it as evidence. As proof. As a judgment about your character.

This month's newsletter is about that judgment. And about why I think it's wrong.

The river doesn't argue

It's the middle of June. The days are long, the social calendar is full, and if you're anything like I used to be, there's a particular kind of low hum that runs underneath all of it — the one that says maybe this summer will be different. Maybe I'll drink less at the pool party. Maybe I won't need the nightly glass to come down from the day. Maybe I'll wake up on Sunday mornings feeling like myself.

That hum is not a problem. It's actually something worth listening to. But I'm not here to tell you to put down your rosé at the Fourth of July celebration — that's not what this is about, and it's not how lasting change works anyway. What I want to offer you is something quieter than that. A different way of thinking, which you can carry through this summer without changing a single thing yet, if that's where you are.

It starts with an idea from Taoism — one of the oldest philosophical traditions on earth — called wu wei, first described in the Tao Te Ching around the 4th century BCE. Its central image is water.

Water doesn't fight the landscape it moves through. It doesn't grieve the path it didn't take. It finds the way through — and in doing so, it carves canyons, sustains ecosystems, shapes entire coastlines. The river is not passive. It is simply not at war with what is.

Wu wei teaches that "surrendering control is not equivalent to giving up, but rather to trusting the process." It invites us to detach from the need for recognition and focus instead on meaningful engagement — acting from alignment rather than force.

Medal Mind, "The Taoist Concept of Wu Wei," 2024

Here is what I've come to understand, both in my own life and in the work I do with people who are changing their relationship with alcohol: most of our suffering is not about the failure itself. It's about the resistance to it. It's the gap between what we expected and what arrived — and the story we tell ourselves about what that gap means about us.

We fight the current. We exhaust ourselves fighting it. And we still end up downstream.

The verdict isn't real

When you drink more than you meant to — again — the voice that arrives isn't neutral. It doesn't say "interesting, that happened." It says: "You failed. You can't be trusted. You'll never change." That voice sounds like truth. It feels like truth. But it isn't describing you. It's describing a belief. And beliefs, it turns out, live much deeper than willpower can reach.

The part of us that reaches for a drink at the end of a day isn't broken or weak. It's trying to do something — manage an emotion, soften an edge, create a moment of transition between the world's demands and our own interior. It's a coping strategy, not a character flaw. And when we treat it as a flaw, when we go to war with it, we're fighting at the entirely wrong level. Swimming against the current instead of getting curious about where the current comes from.

What shifts things — genuinely, lastingly — is when we move from judgment to curiosity. Not "why can't I just stop?", but "what am I actually looking for when I reach for this?" Not "I failed again", but "what does this tell me about what I need?" That question is only available to us once we've stopped treating our own behavior as a referendum on our worth.

The drinking, the pattern, the part of you that keeps reaching for relief — it isn't broken. It's trying to tell you something. It's a signal, not a verdict.

Failure as information

I've failed at a great many things. I've made choices I wouldn't make again. I've had seasons where nothing I tried seemed to work, where the gap between who I wanted to be and who I was felt vast and humiliating. And what I know now — what I could not see in the middle of it — is that those failures were the most useful things that ever happened to me. Not because suffering builds character in some punishing way. But because failure, when you're willing to look at it without flinching, is extraordinarily precise information.

Research on people who eventually make lasting changes — in behavior, in habit, in life direction — consistently finds that what matters most is not whether they stumbled, but how they related to the stumbling. The ones who treated each setback as data, as something to get curious about rather than ashamed of, were the ones who made it through to the other side.

In a study of over 200 founders navigating failure, those who asked "what could I have done better?" rather than directing blame outward were significantly more likely to experience meaningful growth in what came next.

Prof. Yasuhiro Yamakawa, Babson College, entrepreneurship research

Every time a client I work with has a night that didn't go as planned, there's a fork in the road. One path leads to the verdict — the familiar collapse into I'm hopeless, I'll never change, what's wrong with me. The other path asks, with genuine curiosity and zero cruelty: what was happening for me that night? What was I trying to manage? What does this moment want me to understand?

The second path is the river. The first is fighting the current.

What letting go actually looks like

I want to be careful here, because "stop fighting the current" can sound like giving up. Like passive acceptance of something you actually want to change. That's not what I mean — and it's not what Taoism means either. The river moves. Constantly, powerfully, purposefully. Wu wei is not about doing nothing. It's about the difference between straining against the tide and learning which direction the tide is actually running.

And here is what I most want you to take into the rest of this summer: you don't have to decide anything right now. You don't have to make a declaration or set a date or miss a single sunset glass of whatever to begin the most important part of this work. The most important part is simply starting to notice. To get curious instead of critical. To ask, with genuine interest rather than shame, what's actually going on when you reach for the drink you didn't quite plan for.

That noticing — that small, quiet shift from judgment to curiosity — is where everything begins. It doesn't look like deprivation. It doesn't look like white-knuckling through a summer barbecue with sparkling water. It looks like paying gentle, honest attention. Which, as it turns out, is also the most radical thing any of us can do.

Change doesn't require you to give anything up before you're ready. It only requires you to start asking better questions. The current knows something. Your job right now is simply to get interested in where it's going.

If any of this lands for you — if you recognize something in it, or you've been sitting quietly with your own version of the verdict — I'd love to hear from you. Reply directly to this email. That's always where the best conversations

begin.

Thanks for reading. I'm sending you love and compassion today, friend,

Coach Margie

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Sources referenced: Prof. Yasuhiro Yamakawa, Babson College entrepreneurship research · Medal Mind, "The Taoist Concept of Wu Wei" (2024) · Laozi, Tao Te Ching (4th century BCE)