Weekend Journaling Prompt

On ambition

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Two weeks ago, I wrote in this very place that I was nearly finished with my book. The next day, I woke early in a hotel room in London, propped myself up in bed, and finished my draft. Relieved, excited, and more than a little triumphant, I got into the shower, and as I stood there with the water pounding onto my head, I began to think, Nope. Not done, not ready. By breakfast time, I was on the phone to my agent explaining why I was going in for another draft.

My dad once described himself as ‘the great 80 percenter,’ meaning that he does everything well, but not obsessively so. While I have enormous respect for that, I just cannot do it. I’m all-or-nothing. I either neglect the housework entirely, or I go over every surface with a toothpick; I either leave my accounts for a year (carefully ignoring my accountant’s emails) or I exercise the kind of minute budgetary control that has to be continually monitored in a spreadsheet. I have no interest in the space between those extremes. For me, it’s either/or.

But when it comes to writing, there’s no either, no or. I’m all in. The sentence that rose up to me while I was standing in the shower was: I did not come here to produce mediocre work. I did not mean coming to this hotel; I meant this planet, this life. The day before, I had been feeling completely spent, and wanted only to limp over the finish line. But today, considering what that meant, I knew I had the energy to pick the whole thing apart and start again. It was a perfectly good draft, and I think a lot of people would have submitted it and waited for the edits, but I could not.

The first time I ever admitted to being ambitious was in a drab therapist’s office, in my mid twenties. I was trying to find a way to curtail the vicious panic attacks that had overtaken my entire life, and in this first session, the conversation turned towards my writing. ‘I’m so ambitious for it,’ I said, and felt embarrassed to say it out loud.

In return, I watched him wince. ‘I don’t like that word, ‘ambition’,’ he said.

I knew immediately that he was wrong, and so did he. I could see the panic in his face, the immediate recognition that he should not have said this out loud. But I completely understood. Ambition is such a hard-edged concept, and those of us who prize soft things shrink away from it.

Growing up in the Eighties, I came to believe that ambition was synonymous with aggression, selfishness, greed, a zero-sum game in which you had to conquer all your competitors. But by the time I found myself in that office, I was already reconceptualising it into something more personal. I wanted my writing to be the best that it could be, and I wanted to be allowed to make a living from it rather than to work jobs I hated in order for it to be a hobby. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was nothing much wrong with that; nobody was harmed in the process. The worst that could happen was that I would be disappointed. That was nothing compared to the loss I would feel if I abandoned my ambitions.

I didn’t see the therapist again, and I think he understood. Both of us had work to do. Coming from the place that we did, ambition was a risky position, a stance that could only mean turning your back on the people you grew up with, abandoning the sense that you were all in it together. Both of us were graduates, which was already a betrayal of our background to some. He knew what it meant to reach past the world we knew; and I’m sure he also felt the pressure not to reach too far. I felt it too, but I needed to do it anyway. There are still times when it feels like an abandonment of the people who made me, a stretch too far.

The problem was, I couldn’t suppress it. I came to realise that those panic attacks were intrinsically linked to my ambition, a primal fear that flamed up when I tried to make myself less than I could be. My own challenge was to find a way to channel it while holding on to my ethics, to what I knew about the world.

Ambition is such a complex emotion. It seems to have a magnetic attraction to guilt and shame, to frustration and hurt. But it is also magnificent, a channel of pure focus, of good intention. I think about it a lot as my son grows up, wondering if he’ll feel the same drive as I did toward getting up and out. I often worry that he won’t have the same need to get up and out that I did. I am, after all, grateful for my ambition, for its energy and grit. On balance, it’s shed more light than darkness.

Lately, he’s been watching a lot of skiing videos on YouTube, and asking to learn to do it for himself. Not coming from the kind of background that spends its holidays in chalets in the Swiss Alps, I have not known what to do with that request. But last weekend, we relented and took him to a British holiday camp that had its own dry slope. In the damp cold, far from the glamour of mountains and fresh powder, I watched him shuffle up a nursery slope over and over, fall down, right himself, shuffle some more. He came back to our chalet, took a break, and then went back out again, and back again the next morning, the next afternoon. Everyone else seemed to learn quicker than he did, but he put in the hours, his jaw set. By the end of the weekend, he had it.

I drank coffee on a bench at the side, proud at what I’d passed on, but also feeling the pull of my laptop where my tantalising, redeemable manuscript was calling to me.

This week’s journaling prompt is all about our complex relationship to ambition.