Am I addicted to ambition?

On goals, grief and where the f*ck do I go next...

I manifested my best friends. No, seriously. I have all these old diaries from my early teen years containing drawings of the people I'm now best friends with.

There’s Anne in a velvet bucket hat, a sunflower pinned to the front. Amber's in polka dot jeans. Jennie is in an Adidas hoodie. There's also fan fiction, pages and pages of stories devoted to ALL THE FUN WE ARE HAVING.

Except, back then, during this heart-dotted i’s, endless dreaming of who and what I wanted to be phase, they weren't my friends. More than two decades later and all seven of them, this crowd I watched from afar in the first few years of high school, are the solid in my life. The people who will love me no matter what.

I'm not telling you this as I'm suddenly rebranding myself as a manifesting guru (if you want my thoughts on that read the conclusion of Alexandra Jones’ brilliant Roxie Nafousi profile). I wanted to showcase, admittedly in quite a mortifying way, that I am someone who - in all areas of life - has extreme ambition.

My life has been a series of check lists. Become friends with the popular girls. Check. Marry the bar man with the six-pack. Check. Make it in magazines. Check. Write a book. Check.

There's this idea, in our hustle-motivated culture, that in order to succeed you have to keep moving.

For decades I was moving, moving, moving. Working, working, working.

Then, one day, a few years ago… I stopped.

Suddenly, after knowing exactly where I wanted to go, I was lost. I didn't know what I wanted to do next. I didn't even know if I wanted a next.

I won't go into what stopped me, it's too complicated, involves too many other people's feelings and, also, typing it all out makes me feel like a moany privileged ass-hole. I'm not sure if you need to know what the net was made of to know that I got trapped in it.

The point is, I began to wonder: was it all worth it? The 6am starts to write that book? The skipped lunch-breaks? The fun I left early, fearful of how it would impact my working week? Then, in my lowest, most regretful moments, I began to think of all those missed phone-calls. Cancelled visits. The final few years with my grandma, lost to my gallivanting. I'm in London, I work in the medddiiaaaa. My Scottish grandma felt close to me, she saw my name in fading print bylines.

Why had I thrown all of myself into this career?

Why had I crafted my entire identity around goal check-boxes, Instagram likes, the click-clack of my heels in a lobbied building? Was I, had I always been, all about popularity?

 I was hooked on external validation. Capitalism. I was shallow, ridiculous, hollow.

I blurted all of this out to my therapist at the time (see? Therapist. That I paid for. A woman I felt smug telling people about. Privileged bitch). She pointed out that my mum died when I was 19. The year I went to university. I moved to London straight after. I'd been pursuing this notoriously tough career since as a distraction. I didn't have to think about mum, or all that mess, I just had to think about the next wrung on the ladder. Now that wrung was gone… All of my grief had tsunami’d its way back to me.

It was… a fair theory. Or was it?

Don't we all need a focus? Something to distract that endless buzzing in our brains? (If one person suggests meditation, I swear to God…) Does every single life decision have to be defined by my grief?

Also, what was I meant to do with this newfound knowledge? Perhaps sit with my grief. But I didn't want that. I wanted another fucking wrung. I wanted something to doodle about in notebooks. But I’d been made to feel everything I had previously wanted was hopeless and stupid. And, more than that, the career I had carved for myself was nothing more than a crumbling cliff-face.

The thing was, and this is where I feel like a right dick-head, I was lost within stability. I was working in the magazine I loved. There was no where else I wanted to go. I also didn't/physically couldn't get up at 6am to write another book. But I'd always lived by the rule that you Just. Keep. Moving. Whether it was my grief talking or not, I felt if I stayed in one place I'd be a failure. But if I moved into a place I didn’t want to go just for the sake of it, well, I'd be miserable.

Eventually I decided to divert my focus. Into things that did not involve ambition, or external validation. I took up weight-lifting. I began to volunteer. Both things you could, quite rightly, argue give me a great deal of external validation (one makes me look like a nice person, the other gives me a nice bum) but there isn't time to get into that/I don't want to.

Months passed and I began to untangle myself. I saw that I didn't need to move on if I was happy. I could change things, make more time for myself and my own writing, so it didn't feel like I was pinning my whole existence on one thing.

I went to my extremely understanding boss. She agreed a part-time role where I could keep doing the parts of the role I adored and was good at. The other 2.5 days I could focus on freelance pursuits, discovering other writing, finally, maybe, finish my second book.

Did I do that? Ummm… It was the summer of Beyonce's BREAK MY SOUL. The anti-ambition movement was in full force. My therapist's words tattooed themselves under my skin. I would use those extra days, like-a-teen-on-a-gap-year, to discover myself. I partied. I went on holidays. It was my feral woman summer. Then it was my feral woman autumn. Then it was my feral woman winter.

Then… I was in the exact same place I'd been two years ago. Tangled up. Crying on a curb. Lost.

I began to realise, yes, I may be hooked on ambition. There's an unhealthy desire in me that needs external validation. I can work on those things but I don't need to go cold turkey. It's OK to want, to work, to crave rather than coast. I don't think that makes me ridiculous, hollow or shallow. Others might feel differently. But I guess me not caring if they do is letting go of (some) need for external validation.

And now? I'm back to check-lists. Back to working 6am to 9pm. Perhaps I'm on the path to another identity crisis. Who knows? But I'm not feeling as if I'm grasping for a wrung that isn't there. I still volunteer. I still weight-lift. Work-wise I am trying to pick things that I care about. I recently turned down a speaking opportunity at one of those shiny-conferences that would have looked excellent on my Instagram but I know I’d have found boring. This newsletter is never going to make my fortune. But I love writing it. My work at Cosmopolitan is something I am so proud of, but I want those I commission to win awards, instead of me.

So, was my therapist right? Is my ambition a distraction? A reaction to my grief, and even before that, my desire to prove school bullies wrong? A need to social climb my way to happiness?

Maybe. But if so… it's brought me some brilliant friends, a career I love and a lot of fun along the way. That's a pretty good coping mechanism. I definitely could do a lot worse...

What do you think? If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter you’ll know by now I often don’t have the answers to my own questions. I’m just trying to figure it all out and writing is the best way I know how. How closely tied do you think your goals and wants are to your grief, or righting the wrongs of your past? Let me know!