Uncomplicated Ambition

Like you, the turning of the page to a new year has me thinking about my goals and plans for the next 12 months. But this train of thought also leads me to contemplate ambition and the place it has in my life. 

The conflicted relationship I have had with the word “ambition” is wholly influenced by my belief system, but also my health status in the last two years.  It has triggered a host of latent insecurities, as well as a defiant commitment to honor how ambition actually feels—and how I want it to feel. 

It wasn’t until recently that I understood what this truly meant.

Ambition is a beautiful word

I grew up with a very uncomplicated understanding of ambition. As an adult, I understand how contentious the word can be, particularly for women, but I had no sense of that in my adolescence. 

The word itself was beautiful and proud. According to Dictionary.com, ambition is “a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.” There is nothing remotely negative or gendered in that definition. If anything, it is an honorable meaning. 

As I imagine is the case in most immigrant families, ambition was never a choice. Staring with the first immigrants in a family, ambition becomes part of the mythology and DNA of future generations' ambitions. It's this mark of extraordinariness that drove my parents and so many like them to make their way to a new country and a new, more fruitful life. Perhaps that’s why from a young age, I got the sense that if you weren’t ambitious, you were lazy. Lazy doesn’t beget the extraordinary. In fact, laziness is something to be ashamed of. 

If you asked me what my ambition was growing up, I had the well-rehearsed answer so many children of first-generation immigrants have: to be a doctor. To aspire to one of the noblest and stablest professions was one to proudly declare. 

But in the secrecy of my childhood bedroom, my true ambition played itself out. All my free waking hours were spent reading and writing. My parents knew what I was doing, but I don’t think they realized how vital my work felt. My dream was precious and I guarded it as such. That’s why “ambition” went far beyond any sense of DNA or duty. It felt more beautiful than any of that: something personal and wholehearted, uncomplicated and pure. 

Where it got complicated

It would be hard to say exactly when my relationship with ambition started to change, but I could trace it to my first year of university. There was a clear difference in how the world at-large thought of ambition versus how I did. And I didn’t like what I saw. 

Out in the world, ambition—or that which is frequently confused with ambition, greed—was loud and boisterous. It didn’t have an honest drive. If anything, it seemed to be about showy excess. Because I studied economics, I was surrounded by peers who were unabashedly chasing the fat bank accounts of investment banking, few with little interest in, passion for, or understanding of that which they were choosing to do. There was nothing personal about their ambition; all I could see is how theirs was purely self-centered and superficial. 

Being a woman

Looking back, what surprises me is how much I overlooked the gendered perception of ambition. All my education before becoming a freshman in college was at all-girls' schools. In those classrooms, female ambition was encouraged and normalized. There was nothing negative about it. There was no discussion about how ambition is a “masculine” trait. It was purely the engine by which we honor our desires and dreams. 

Then I became part of a co-ed university community where the social conventions of ambition didn’t just seem textbook-masculine, but also as a positive descriptor for men. It took on a different slant for women though. And mind you: I got my bachelor’s degree in the 21st century. 

Hindsight is 20/20 and what I regret now is that I didn’t see how my female peers were shaping ambition to mean something else entirely. There was the traditional, so-called masculine leaning of the word, but there was something totally different happening within my gender. I met young women who were entrepreneurial in their career approach, designing something completely new for themselves and redefining the possibilities. I didn’t see how they were engineering their own flavor of independence on their terms.

Instead, I could only see that my ambition—to write—was not big enough or good enough. I thought I was doing it wrong. I didn’t want to buy into the 24/7 hustle, can’t-stop-won’t-stop philosophy that everyone else seemed to be touting. I’m unafraid of hard work, but this work-life philosophy didn’t feel right to me.

I craved the ambition of my youth, the quiet character that asked me to commit and take steps daily, but never at the expense of my joy. Wanting something so different made me feel like a kid at the grown-up table. I confused the ease with which ambition inhabited my adolescence as laziness. And so, I couldn’t even be inspired by the spirit of my female peers’ endeavors because I was denying my own.

And then, chronic illness

Then I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia (TN) and everything changed. Perceptions that didn’t serve me fell to the wayside with little fanfare, including the complications I thought were so critical. I no longer just wanted something different for myself — I had no choice but to do something different to safeguard my health and wellness. So I stopped trying to convince myself that I had to accept all these external definitions and opinions about ambition and, instead, embraced one that kept me chugging along and in-flow, honoring my intentions with daily baby-step efforts. 

It is the irony of my life that TN forced me to let go of all the extraneous observations and arguments that weren’t true for me, so that I could focus on the ambition I most loved, was good at, and helped me honor my self-care. 

This is about you

The one thing that hasn’t disappeared is my fear of laziness. My pace has slowed down considerably and that has made me question whether I really am ambitious and whether ambition is even a viable player in my life. I need my days to be more flexible now to make room for both planned and unplanned rest, and there are times when this has felt like it impedes any big progress. I know I’m not the first nor will I be the last one living with a chronic illness and juggling these insecurities.

But I’ve come to realize that whether or not I’m ambitious, whether or not I’m lazy—these aren’t the questions I need to ask of myself. My body is nothing but ambitious and will never be lazy again: it does its best to fight pain and grant me relief every minute of every day. So I want to be inspired by the work my body does on its own, without me having to think or ask. 

My hope is that no matter your health status, you're inspired by your body too.

The questions worth asking instead are: What do you really want? What is a step you can take today that will honor your ambition? 

There’s no step too small to take. And it doesn’t matter what, if anything, other people think about how you choose to dream, achieve, believe. You don’t have to subscribe to how others choose to live; you have to decide how you want to live. This transcends DNA, gender, and social conventions. 

At the end of the day, this is and has always been about your intentions and working with your limitations to honor your ambition most deeply with your heart.