Throwback Edition: A Eulogy for My Ambition

Plus, are better things coming, parenting in utopia, and the funniest video

Dearest Readers,

I love this old edition and it feels especially prevalent in my life today, just over a year after the original date I wrote it. Finally, finally, I have come back to my ambition, though these days it doesn’t reveal itself in the destructive ways it used to.

A week or so ago, I sat down and wrote out very clear, mostly achievable goals for the year ahead. A simple task, but it was the first time in a long time I was able to perform the action without immediately being filled with a pit of dread. Because they were goals I actually cared about, goals I want to achieve for no one but myself—not goals to further align my life with what others think it should look like. And it felt good!

Will I reach all of them? Too soon to tell. Will I survive whether I do or don’t reach them? Most certainly. And might some magic pop up along the way, changing the course of things in an ordinary instant? Perhaps. These days I like ot remind myself it only takes one (person, encounter, conversation) to move your life along. “It only takes one,” I say during my evening prayers, or to recenter myself when that old “not doing enough” stress response sneaks up on me.

Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be having congee at a friend’s home, rushing against a few short deadlines, making some decisions about the upcoming months, and hopefully, if I get my work done, spending a day exploring an outdoor art exhibit. Bombs away! If you can, sit in. a cafe one morning and have a slow coffee. People watch for at least 30 minutes; the perfect way to usher in the weekend.

Until next time,

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A Note From the Editor

I’d like to thank you all for coming out on this sunny March morning. I think she appreciated the concept of sunshine, though at her peak she never got to enjoy much of it. It wasn’t that the sun wasn’t shining where she was—she thrived in Florida, Maui, Scottsdale, all unreasonably warm places—it’s just that she wasn’t the “sit in the sun with your eyes closed” type. Sometimes she only knew she had been in the sun from the freckles that blossomed across her nose, afterward. She didn’t pay much attention to the fluff of life, not the clouds or the breeze or the sun. Pardon my French, but she had better shit to do.

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For a long time, I didn’t recognize the difference between character traits and behaviors. Or, my behaviors disguised themselves as character traits, convincing enough that everyone around me, including myself, believed them to be the essence of who I was. I might’ve been funny, thoughtful, and kind, but if you asked anyone in my life to describe me in one word, they would’ve said “ambitious.”

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I’m sure you all have your own special memories with her, but I’d like to share one of my favorites with you today. It was during college, only a year or two after she became herself. She was 18 and working a late shift at her second job as a dancer at Busch Gardens for their annual Halloween event, all dolled up like a sexy zombie. Before her shift, the stage manager gathered the dancers and told them they needed to fraternize with the guests tonight. Talk, chat, and dance. He’d be watching.

She began dancing, aware of her stage manager’s eyes on her as she ignored the group of men getting drinks at the bar. Her mind began to race as she moved her hips to the beat of the music. She thought of everything she needed to do, everything that was wrong, everything: An early shift the next morning, rent due soon, an upcoming event for a sorority she couldn’t afford, her emptying refrigerator, her sick mother, her midterms, her stomach pains, her disgusting body. The thoughts grew heavier and the manager’s eyes burned a hole in the back of her head and suddenly she lost the ability to breathe. She was being dunked underwater, two strong hands squeezing her lungs, her vision all spotty black stars. She thought she was going to die.

But she didn’t die, and that’s why I love this story so much. If anything, that first panic attack birthed her. She could not let it happen again, there was too much at stake. She refused to let herself be weak. It was the start of the rest of her short life.

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Ambition looked like this: Rising early, always before the sun. A strict monitoring of caloric intake with intermittent purges and bouts of starvation, when necessary. A redacted history with sparse details, hardly an outline of the truth (from Florida, big family). Repression as the medicine—no introspection and no slowing down, always frantically busy, always in survival mode. Money was the currency of ambition, and since there was no such thing as enough money, there was no way to ever achieve a real sense of accomplishment.

You can only plug a hole in a sinking ship for so long before the water comes rushing in. Moving to New York, living through COVID, the generally eroding state of the world as we know it, the rise of culturally acceptable “laziness” accredited to burnout culture, years of therapy and shadow work was all it took for me to finally release my stronghold on my ambition, though I was met with resistance.

As it turns out, ambition wasn’t my problem at all.

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She lived a full life for the handful of years she graced us with her bullish presence. She worked around the world, she prevented herself from falling in love too frequently or too carelessly, she learned to manipulate and keep secrets, she numbed the pain with bottles and bottles of wine—the wine!— and she didn’t let anyone see how much she was suffering. Hell, I don’t think she saw it herself. Through it all, she kept going, like a cockroach who refuses to let their meaningless life be ended by the heel of a boot.

There were times she wanted to die, to set herself free, but she could never manage because of you all. You loved her the way she was, hardened and shiny. You celebrated her for it, praised her for it, looked up to her for it. We all did.

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On the other side, I gave myself what felt like a frightening amount of grace. I began waking at 7 am, or 8 am, or later, if I felt like it. I did not force myself to write regularly and I refused to put my goals down on paper, for I knew they would elicit a reaction that would shove me back down into the black hole. I began treating my body with kindness, buying bread at the grocery store and eating chocolate without a trace of guilt. I tried verbalizing this change to those around me, to temper their expectations: No, I don’t wake up that early anymore. No, I don’t bring in that much money. No, I didn’t work out today, or yesterday, and I might not tomorrow. No, I don’t have my five-year plan at the moment, but I’ll get back to you when I do.

I knew I was towing a fine line between grace and stagnance, but I did not trust myself to exercise ambition in the way I once had. I was changed, I thought, and for the better, living in a cocoon of self-love and slowness. The stakes were deliciously low.

Then I decided to release a short film project for Valentine’s Day. I worked on it for weeks and was proud of the end result, but when the time came for me to share the trailer for the project, I felt a surge of acidic doom bubbling in my gut. I posted it on Instagram for roughly three minutes before deleting it (and later, re-posting it).  I went to bed furious with myself Why did it matter so much to me, what other people would think?

More lasting than the initial shock of anger was the realization that became fiercely illuminated in the aftermath: I was letting fear take the driver’s seat. As I reflected on the slow death of my ambition over the past year, I could finally see that at a certain point, the gentleness I treated myself with was only fear in disguise. I had made some significant and necessary changes in my life, but I couldn’t go on like this forever, playing it creatively safe and putting off the artistic work I wanted to produce in the name of “self-care.” 

Fear was what drove me to ambition in the first place—fear of being poor, of being stuck in Florida, of living a small life—and now, fear was rooting me in a different place. Insulate yourself and you will never need to be rejected; pursue a creative life and rejection will be the soundtrack of your soul.

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I’m not a particularly religious type, but I’ve always believed there has to be something more. I don’t think she’s looking down on us from some ethereal, fluffy white cloud, or looking up at us from a rambunctious, fiery party, or stalking through the whitewashed halls of purgatory, I think she’s cycling through another vessel, that she’ll make it back to us. If energy cannot be created nor destroyed, then the essence of her is still here somewhere. Maybe she needs a quick rest, or maybe she’s searching for the body that’ll carry her through the next go-round.

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I’m learning to work with the glob of clay at hand, to reconstruct it into something less harmful while honoring the stuff it is made of. I’m learning not to deal in platitudes. Nothing is black and white. I can exist beyond Ambition or Languishing; my behaviors are not the core of who I think I am. I can recognize when fear is stunting action and call it what is it. I can pursue the thing I love and humbly accept that I will fail and fail and fail. I can learn to move not from a place of ambition, but of momentum.

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She’ll take what she learned from this life, the life we knew her in, and she’ll try to remember it, next time. She’ll attempt to live better, more gently, but she’ll always have that fire.

I hope I’ll have the chance to meet her again when she makes it back here. I’ll tell her it’s OK, she’s OK. I’ll tell her I loved her before, that you all did, and that I’ll love her again as a janitor or an author or a CEO or a school teacher. 

Thank you all for coming out today. I ask you to be kind to yourself. It’s what she would have wanted.

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Cheers, my dears, and as always thank you for reading along.

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Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. Are Better Things Coming? Inshallah. There is something comforting about the idea that everything isn't on us, that there is some higher power (a God, the Universe, whatever you want to call it ) pulling some of the strings. With the horrid situation in Ukraine unfolding over the last few days, preceded by a series of similarly painful, destabilizing events, I can’t think of a better time for a message like this one. This essay is the perfect marriage of hope and of the beauty of language. how it comforts us and connects us. Inshallah.

2. Parenting in Utopia. Anyone who knows me knows about my obsession with communes, which grew increasingly over the pandemic. This piece was fascinating, one of the best I've ever read in The Cut. It discusses Twin Oaks, a commune that requires 42 hours of required weekly labor—which includes tasks like the time a parent spends caring for their child, grocery shopping, household chores, etc.— because those tasks are valued in the community and considered work. There are 150 members total, who each receive an $80 monthly living stipend. Logistics aside, the piece goes on to expand into larger-scale ideas about individualism and family abolitionists. A lot of good stuff to think about here.

3. Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It. I’ve recently convinced a handful of my loved ones to watch Inventing Anna, the Netflix limited series depicting a fictionalized version of the wild events that brought down NYC socialite / fake Russian heiress Anna Delvey/Sorkin. The story is absolutely bonkers and a testament to how far false confidence and the mirage of money can get you. This article was the original piece or reporting that inspired the show, and it is well worth a read.

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Perhaps You Should… Let This Song Carry You Away

Do you watch Euphoria? People are it’s stressful, but I find the stress well-worth it for the cinematic quality and the distinctive storytelling structure. Last week’s finale made me cry several times, particularly during the scene where Dominic Fike’s character sings this song to Rue, a recovering drug addict. Even if you don’t watch the show, I think you’ll appreciate Fike’s angelic voice and the tender lyrics.

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**Bonus Content** (Who Wants a Job?)

Speaking of the death of ambition….I’ve never laughed so hard.

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A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.”

-The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.

Or, share the most thought-provoking piece from today’s edition with someone you love, then call them up to discuss, debate, and percolate. As a wise woman once said, “Great minds discuss ideas.