✦ On ambition: 016
Photo by Alex Shuper on Unsplash
They gave you the word early and they gave it to you pointed in one direction. Ambition meant up. It meant more, faster, higher, larger, further from where you started and closer to something that could be measured and reported and used as evidence that you were serious about your life. It meant the promotion and the salary and the seat at the table and the willingness to sacrifice the things that couldn’t be quantified in service of the things that could. You were ambitious, and for a long time you wore it like an answer to a question you hadn’t examined closely enough - because ambition felt like aliveness, and aliveness was what you were after, and nobody told you until much later that you had confused the sensation of striving for the sensation of meaning and that they are not, it turns out, the same thing at all. So you strove. Toward the titles and the credentials and the external architecture of a life that looked, from the approved angles, like a woman who wanted things and went and got them. And somewhere in the middle of the getting - somewhere between the PhD and the career and the raising of four entire humans and the decades of showing up fully to structures that were never fully designed to hold you - the ambition started to feel less like fuel and more like a story you were telling about yourself to people whose approval you had stopped needing without quite noticing. The ladder was real. The climbing was real. What turned out to be a question worth sitting with was whether any of it was pointed at something that was actually yours.
Ambition was never the problem. The direction was. You were enormously, ferociously, incandescently ambitious - you were just ambitious for someone else’s life.
Here is what nobody puts on the vision board: the ambition that survives the unbecoming is quieter than the original and considerably more dangerous. It does not want the corner office. It does not want the title or the approval or the institutional validation of people inside systems you have already outgrown. It wants the work that only you can do, built at the pace only you can sustain, in service of the women who need exactly what you - with your specific, hard-won, late-diagnosed, four-daughters, PhD-and-still-figuring-it-out combination of experience and depth and refusal to be flattened - are positioned to offer. That ambition is not smaller than the original. It is, if anything, more demanding - because it requires you to stop outsourcing your definition of success to people who were never qualified to provide it, and start building the metrics yourself, from the inside out, using the only measuring instrument that was ever calibrated for your actual life. What do you want to have made? What do you want to have said? What do you want the woman who finds StarCozi at 2am - exhausted, late-diagnosed, somewhere between her last performance and her first real breath - to feel when she reads what you left here? That is the ambition. It was always this. It just took everything else first.
