A week ago or so, I had my monthly full-scale panic attack about my life. It started because, since I’m trying to decide if I want to keep doing what I’m doing, I started looking around on the internet for what other ways I might bring in money while I write. It culminated in me crying a lot and wailing about, you know, LIFE. Stuart and I talked it through, like we always do, but the next day he sent me an email that I’ve been returning to since then. In the intervening week, there’s been some bad news (taxes! OMG!) and some good news (new job possibilities! OMG!) but through a lot of my waking hours, the things Stuart said have stuck by me like some invisible shield of faith and goodwill. Which, really, is the best thing ever (BTE).
So I’m sharing the email here, in its entirety. If it was so revelatory and useful to me, consider this a public service announcement to anyone else who’s trying to wrap a functioning model of life around an artistic goal. Most of the time, I blog here because something I say might have an impact on something you’re doing. This is, for the same reason, well worth reading. You reflective, ambitious types, click on.


“It’s possible I can’t really say anything more than we said last night, but I wanted to try anyway.
You’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself. I feel like if you wanted to be President, or Editor of the NYT, you’d be putting even more pressure on yourself. The greater the distance you perceive between where you are and where you want to be, the more pressure you’ll put on yourself.
Compare someone who wants to be an astronaut and someone who wants to manage a car dealership. The person who wants to be an astronaut has the more impressive ambition. They want more. They’re reaching for the stars. They’re hungry for a rare success. They’re five years old. Skip forward thirty years and our five-year-old IS the person who wants to manage a car dealership. Circumstances change, focuses narrow, responsibilities fall onto shoulders. With the passing of youth comes the death of youthful ambition and the application of self to more mundane, immediate matters. Finding a job, meeting the rent…
Getting a promotion at work to improve your wages and your quality of life becomes the ambition that’s right in front of you and it’s realistic, so why not?
But the thing is… it’s not compulsory, and that narrowing of focus can only take place if the person themselves actively forces themselves to do it. It’s your life. There’s nothing stopping you going to school in aeronautical engineering, taking a masters in metallurgy, getting a job at Boeing, joining the Air Force reserves, getting your pilot’s license, applying for a transfer to the space design department and applying to NASA.
Metaphorically.
People become astronauts. It happens. It’s possible.
The way the world looks at ambitions like that is through a hazy mist of half-thought-through probabilities and fear.
If someone says “I want to be X” people instantly do a little calculation in their heads – of how likely or realistic it is, whether in their opinion the person will achieve the goal. And with every obstacle or challenge between the realization of an ambition and its achievement – fear of failure, difficulty, failure, inadequacy, any and all of the little things. Not being so invested in the idea that you’re prepared to work as hard as it requires… the goals get reset. And as the goals get reset, ambitions change, become less impressive to others, and as a result people become less proud of them. Pride in their own ambition diminishes.
We’ve all had this. We all start out thinking we will never compromise and then we find that life is more or less impossible without compromising a little. I wanted to fly planes, and I was an asthmatic teenager with glasses. I was a cocky student, believing I would solve the world’s energy crisis. I shifted and changed and my ambitions changed with my progressing life. I’m a big jumble of them now. But I like being a jumble of ambitions.
You decided journalism wasn’t for you. You decided magazine journalism wasn’t for you. You’ve always been positive in your steps. This makes you different. Others are directed… you direct. Sure, you may have had your hand forced at [name of last job redacted], but you knew you didn’t want to keep working there!
I can’t imagine you working in an office, baby. Other people, these people you’re comparing yourself to unfairly, may earn a lot of money, but are they satisfied? Is that what their ambitions are for? They’re doing what they’re doing, and the only time at which their achievements become relevant in comparison is if you want what they have, or your ambitions are the same as theirs, if you’re saying, ‘Look at that, I want that. They have what I want.’
So after all that, I say:
You are secure. If you go for your ambitions it will not end in bankruptcy, debt, or death by rabid badgers.
That education and work experience you have is firmly in place. It’s banked. It’s not going anywhere. It’s insurance, sure, but like any asset, you choose when to use it. You are not obliged to get an office/publishing/slaveylackey job just because you can.
You are free and young and intelligent and, if I may take the opportunity to say so, very pretty.
You have your ambitions and they are fine and high and admirable, and because it’s you that has them, they are utterly, utterly achievable.”

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