Letting Go of My Toxic Ambition

This is I Give Up, a new series from Catapult magazine on the things—habits, expectations, jobs, ambitions, futures, and more—that people have let go of in the last few years.

It happened in between two emails. The first was from a boss, handing off a task after hours that objectively wasn’t an emergency and was couched in language insinuating that if I didn’t react like I was hearing sirens, my job would be at risk. The second was from a doctor who had just run a series of stool tests, confirming, yeah, something was actually wrong with my stomach and, yep, the fatigue and joint pain and stabbing sensation in my abdomen probably weren’t unrelated to the fact that I couldn’t be more than ten feet from a bathroom at any given time. Somewhere in between these emails, my striving—shaped by “sure, happy to help!” and “no worries if not!” and “just following up!”—was buried, sans rest and sans peace, two elements of life I used to believe ambition itself would earn me.

As the past couple years blinked by in ticks of the clock, long-distance phone calls with loved ones I couldn’t see in person, and a quarterly crisis of meaning—What am I even doing with my life? I’d ask myself, and very much expect a bubble of clarity to rise from somewhere within me, fizz spilling over a glass—my chronic illness that dodged tidy diagnoses had gotten worse. And as it got worse, I got—spoiler!—tired. And as I got tired, I was agitated by the sensation that saying yes to everything and no to nothing, rising to the occasion, going above and beyond, striving—all the aspirational language I’d subconsciously defined myself by—was supposed to be the worthiest thing about me.

More than the sloppy way I write to-do lists in cursive or the drawl that comes out when I say “good lord,” that was my signature: giving it all I’ve got. It was my pet coping mechanism and favorite way to pretend I had it together—going for it, as if I were starring in a sports energy drink commercial wearing matching sweatbands and were not a human being, living a life. Sick? Better meet this deadline in advance rather than ask for time off. Rejected from one job? Apply to thirty more. Grieving, lost, or simply unmoored? Surely there’s a project I can start.

Before, tiptoeing down the ever-thinning line between “a million girls would kill for this job” and “oh, this might actually kill me” was what I called “balance.” Only there was never only one job; I was constantly borrowing minutes from one thing to spend on something else. I wasn’t a high achiever; I was a striver.

I found myself either pacing around the apartment I lived in, trying to walk away the anxiety I thought I could work away, or tucking myself into the farthest corner of the couch, under a fleece blanket on eighty-degree days, joints aching too badly to do anything other than hold still. Meanwhile, the anxiety I once thought fueled ambition was turning on me. “I’d like to quit,” I told a friend, and when they asked what, I replied without missing a beat, “Everything.” Before, I would’ve been first to the floor with a dustpan and a broom, ready to sweep it all—the degrees I never finished, the jobs I was too scared to quit until I was laid off, the deadlines I botched, the demons I wasn’t legally allowed to talk about, the chunks of a broken heart I left on top of moving boxes, health issues—into a tidy plan B. Instead, I stalled, and I found myself unable to start again.

So there I sat—literally. In the bathroom.

My stomach would seize up in pain and I’d double over. When the spasm/searing pain/internal fist clenched around my intestines minimized, I’d start typing an email again, saying yes, I’d get the copy for that over today, no, this registration hasn’t come through, and yes, I will follow up with him. Pull it together, I’d tell myself. The room would feel like it was Tilt-A-Whirling and I’d lie flat on the bathroom rug that needed to be vacuumed, trying to remember how to breathe, then get on a Zoom and talk about a deadline. It’s okay; it’s okay, I’d shush myself. Then, on god knows what day of working from the bathroom, I elbowed my laptop off the counter and cracked the allegedly uncrackable case, somehow erasing the document I’d been working on.

Here’s what I wish I could tell you: I set fire to the pages of notes I felt beholden to, like I’d never make good on an idea again, and kept myself warm in their flames; I quit a job without giving two weeks’ notice and rode off into the sunset sans health insurance but somehow with newfound self-respect; I hung up a “gone fishing” sign on my inbox and never looked back. Who doesn’t love a good quitting sequence, in which cell phones get tossed in fountains, laptops get slammed closed, there’s at least one run-through-the-airport scene, and a new life begins?

But because life loves a sense of humor, the period in which my striving vanished went hand in hand with me listening to dozens of people offer up new definitions of ambition—of how they were striving and what for.

The instructions for striving as I’d known them were rigid: the emphasis on timelines and milestones boxing out who got to be an “early achiever”; the value placed on “aiming high” and precious few resources given to “getting through” or “doing something else”; the idea that wherever you are, there is somewhere a little better you could be. And I never felt I hit these markers—my striving existed to prove myself to myself, somehow. The question I kept pondering as I made notes and crossed out sentences and wondered if I was in over my head wasn’t the “What’s next?” that had defined my self-worth, but rather, “What are you striving for?”

What for is what I found when I gave up on the notion that striving made me worthy, that one-track, single-minded hustle was the best of me. While reporting about reimagining ambition for my second book, All the Gold Stars, and throughout conversations in the early morning hours with coffee, over the phone with loved ones hundreds of miles away, and even via text exchanges, my aspiration shifted from “What’s next?” to “What’s right here?” I asked myself: What of this moment are you never going to get back? What’s the purpose of what you’re trying to say? What have you put off—calling someone back, moving your body, resting—in the name of someone else’s notion of accomplishment? All this “earning it” was supposed to be worth it—but was it?

Striving had left little room for those questions. But pausing long enough to ask them gave me what I’d inadvertently been searching for through the striving itself: a fuller life, a fuller self to inhabit it.

The instructions for striving as I’d known them were rigid.

Some would argue that writing a book is inherently striving—I mean, there’s an end goal here, after all. But it was only through the course of writing and listening that I stopped trying to stretch my arms backward and grab hold of an aspiration that had been swept away. Only in writing about losing ambition did I give it up. And only in giving up did I realize that saying, “No, thank you—these are not my dreams,” is at least as aspirational as all that sweaty striving. After all, who is to say that getting through the day isn’t worth striving for, just as much as so-called “making it?” Or that wanting something different—something gentler—isn’t worth believing in?

Over the course of reporting for All The Gold Stars, I listened via phone and Zoom, via email and the occasional outdoor conversation, as people described their relationship to ambition. In these conversations, they often discussed the differences between striving and survival—the complexity and nuance of a quality that’s considered a virtue and a vice: who is allowed to dream, the ways ambition functions as a means of oppression and white supremacy, the freedom of claiming it as yours, the people it leaves out, and the permission it grants.

I spoke to parents and caregivers who left the paid workforce, closed businesses, and pressed pause on other dreams to provide childcare or eldercare or both, balancing personal aspirations with the absence of universal basic income, accessible child care, or universal healthcare to sustain them—and wondered why no accolades or celebrations were offered for getting by.

I spoke to college students who were working full-time or parenting while in school, and high schoolers running on no sleep because they were juggling academics, customer service jobs to support their families, and advocacy around abolishing police in their school system, and wondered why fighting for better communities and caring for their families wasn’t presented as “aspirational” or “accomplished,” while A-pluses and perfect attendance were.

I heard people examine, out loud, whether the objects of their ambition—the secure job (if such a thing exists), the high-level title, the publishing credit—had been worth what they paid in striving and strife. I listened to first-generation Americans and children of immigrants describe ambition as intergenerational and collective, and how it felt to carry the dreams of others alongside their own.

I spoke to individuals who, in the midst of grief or loss or drastic recalibration, reached out and reached back, and I wondered why the imagination and desire inherent in needing in others wasn’t considered every bit a goal the way those outlined in a five-year plan for a corporate job are.

While I had my own attachment to ambition, the deeper I ventured into histories of it, the more conversations I listened to, the more questions I asked, the clearer it became that my own drive wasn’t some inexhaustible flame flickering within that I’d extinguished forever but, rather, a bonfire that was being added to by a million forces beyond me, one that would just as soon burn me down as it would keep me warm.

If striving had been my safety net, I’d singed a hole straight through it the second my life refused to become something that I could hustle my way out of. What popped up wasn’t five-year plans or next steps. Instead, I noticed how much the fire and verve I’d associated with ambition and passion was actually anger, anger I hadn’t known how to process or even feel. How the jittery hand-raising to take on every task without question was actually anxiety, my means of coping with feeling out of control. And in the same flash of relief you feel when you put down heavy groceries you were determined to carry in one trip, I felt myself drop the expectation that the only good things about me were those I could earn my own way into. Hell of a way to live a life—or rather, to avoid living one. I was striving my way through it, and I was missing everything. I was missing me.

There is no version of ambition that isn’t shaped by cultural, social, political, and external forces to some degree. Capitalism instructs that someone must always be ahead and someone else must always be behind, and the myth of meritocracy upholds the inaccurate claim that the only thing standing between you and your dreams is hustle. People are shamed for striving too much—they lack the effortless allure of achievement finding them like a lucky penny—or told they are asking too much from their work, their lives, their circumstances, and their dreams. People are also shamed in reverse—for lacking so-called “professional goals” or rejecting the ever-upward mentality that instructs us to climb a ladder like an omnipresent workout instructor pushing for one more mile, one more rep.

In addition to a deeper understanding of ambition itself, the rigid striving I’ve lost is nothing compared to the messier, more personal, more imaginative aspiration I’m trying to gain (see, “trying” is still around). Most of us want better lives, in some way—most of us aspire toward something—but where I’ve landed is that individual striving takes more than it gives. In conversations I’ve had, what I’ve become encouraged by are the different definitions of striving, of ambition, that people have shared. Some have shared a desire to radically change structures that reinforce and individualize dispossession, or the imagination to envision dreams not ensnared in competition but rooted in community, while others describe grace—not conflating pain with progress or self-sacrifice with strength. Resources—who has the resources to chase a dream?—came up in nearly every conversation, not just those we have, but how people are striving however they can to secure them for others. And then, quieter goals: backyard gardens with excess tomatoes to share with neighbors, getting off work early enough to meet one’s kids at the bus stop every day, friendships grounded in respect, collective action in workplaces, and even time for play. In all of these examples, what stayed with me was the goal of discovering what’s worth striving for, which might be more robust than anything I could’ve achieved on my own. Which is exactly the point.

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