A few months ago, while we were walking the Los Angeles hills, my most brutally honest friend made an observation I didn’t like. It was the kind of statement that’s borderline rude but actually comes from love and precise care, the kind that stabs you once and keeps poking at you like a just-sharp-enough splinter until you finally take the time and muster the patience to remove and examine it.
“You don’t like to do things for yourself,” she said, commenting on the fact that I’d just landed my first full-time job* in half a decade, that I’d spent the years previous locked in creative collaborations, and, as for writing, my sole output (outside of my book, which itself was a deep collaboration with my editor/agent/publisher) was blogging to the tiniest paywalled audience on the Patreon page of the podcast I share with Kim France. “You need the structure of having a boss,” my friend continued, “an authority figure to please, the cover of a shared project. You’re too afraid to do anything that’s just yours.”
It was true. As a person who’s grappled with workaholism my entire adult life, and after spending the last three years unpacking a complex relationship with ambition, I knew that, outside basic survival, what’s always motivated me about work is external validation, the impulse to meet (and exceed!) someone else’s expectations, to be considered “good” in the ways I never felt as a kid.
But I also knew what bothered me most about my friend’s comment was the behavior she was describing — like so many things in mid-life — felt stale and dated, like an old suit that no longer fit. That, at 50, I was carrying around patterns from the time I was girl, squeezing myself into spaces that had once been a source of comfort, but now felt too small.
A middle-aged mind is labyrinthine; the ego is wild, stubborn, perverse. Even if we understand intellectually what it is we want, it’s hard not to get lost and stuck in these old-ass brains, especially when the risks seem riskier, especially as we age. Sometimes, the habits you’ve learned to protect yourself are actually holding you back. It’s often not enough to feel tired of your own cozy excuses and limiting self definitions to make a first step toward change. Sometimes you need the courage to imagine a new future for yourself, to squint and see to the other side of where you are now, even when you’re afraid there’s not much future left — and even when the future of the world looks bleak.
What my friend was encouraging me to do that day on the Los Angeles hill was make my own Substack, to create an extension of the work I already do with others, something that was mine alone. There will always be more important topics to discuss than our middle-aged fears and foibles; there especially are now. But if you want to talk and think about ambition and aging, what motivates us to work/create; to fulfill latent dreams and actually change our lot; then hello, welcome, join me. I’m scared and nervous to write without a net and also so very glad you’re here.
* Head’s up! I am legally obliged under penalty of death to tell you to pre-order my book Ambition Monster everywhere I go until June.
* I love my day job and will be talking about that too. Need a new face cream? I’m your half-century-old girl.
About. Time.
So stoked for this!!