Am I really not professionally ambitious anymore?
and if i'm not... is that ok???
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! Long story short: I’m a bestselling novelist who started investigating how to build a life in August 2024, because despite my supposed dream career I wasn’t ~vibing~ in the way I wanted to be. I felt like something was missing? Unpicking what it takes to build a life (like, a good one) led me to taking a job in a high school, just to see. Turns out books light up my brain but pastoral work with teenagers feeds my soul, so now I might be in the middle of a career change. I don’t know. I’m currently studying children and young people’s mental health, whilst also promoting my latest rom-com Love at First Sight. Apparently I contain multitudes. Don’t we all?
I’m proud to say that Grazia magazine once declared that I am a ‘general all-round-speaker of what-is-in-our-heads’, Stylist said my honesty and voice are unique, I was Marie Claire’s #BreakFree from Fear Ambassador many moons ago, and I’m a ‘Happiness Expert’ according to The Independent. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, I truly believe on going all in on the adventure of your own life. Knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME!!
ambition /amˈbɪʃn/ - noun
a strong desire to do or achieve something.
desire and determination to achieve success.
I do not have a strong desire to achieve. Not lately, and not for a while. And what even is success, anyway? Money, prestige, fame, a title, a combination of all of those things? I don’t have an appetite for that either. Not in my work life. The thing is, it’s work that I have thought to be so central to who I am. For years!! And, it turns out… it is not. Which is pretty mind-blowing, to have such a huge part of yourself unearthed as being simply… not true.
Meghan Markle said her most important title is mom - I get that. Becoming a mother helped me discover this truth about myself - that I am just not that professionally ambitious - earlier than I might otherwise have done. Although, let the record show it still took me a while. I was going to be a strong! working! mother!! I was gonna have it alllll. But then I actually became a parent and suddenly nothing else felt as good, or at least as important. A bit like when we all got Covid and chocolate lost its appeal because we couldn’t taste it. Motherhood makes being thirsty in the workplace way less appealing than it once was. To me!! I cannot speak for anybody else. This is my story, what I’m thinking right now. Except, I suspect I’m not the only one?
Recently my friend Sarah wrote I'm not really professionally ambitious anymore? Here's what I care about instead. Well! I couldn’t click through to read it fast enough. Because, that’s me. So it turns out that it isn’t just my story. I have carried such guilt and embarrassment around feeling this way. I didn’t realise how desperate I was to hear from somebody I respect who feels the same.