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Good or Bad, It’s Hard to Say
There are things we become very good at without ever deciding that we wanted them.
This is an awkward discovery to make.
Nobody had forced me, exactly. There had been no sinister figure standing behind me, moving the pieces of my life across some enormous board. No Matrix. Nothing so dramatic.
It was much quieter than that.
People had simply been talking.
When I was young, they told me what a good life looked like. Do well at school. Get a proper job. Make sensible choices. Find someone nice. Buy a house. Have children. Work hard.
The instructions were not unreasonable.
That was the difficulty.
They were good instructions, mostly. Respectable ones. The kind that made adults nod approvingly.
And so I followed them.
I became good at things.
I became useful.
I became independent.
I became, in the eyes of the world, an adult.
And then, somewhere along the way, I discovered something nobody had mentioned.
Everyone was improvising.
Some people were simply improvising with better stationery.
I found this strangely comforting.
Because I had spent years imagining that adulthood was the point at which you finally knew what you were doing. You arrived at a certain age and the fog lifted. You understood money and marriage and work and children and yourself.
But the fog doesn't lift.
You just learn to walk through it while carrying a handbag.
And lately I have been wondering about the things I call ambition.
How much of it belongs to me?
Ambition does not appear from nowhere. It has a history. Someone praised you for something. Someone else told you what was realistic. Someone laughed at an idea. Someone you loved believed something about the world, and because you loved them, you carried it with you.
Eventually you forget who said what.
You simply call it me.
I have begun to wonder about that.
Who decided what was respectable for me?
Who decided what was possible?
Who decided what sort of woman I was supposed to become?
And, more importantly, which of those decisions did I actually make?
I think this is partly why I became interested in coaching.
Not because I have discovered the answers.
Quite the opposite.
I like giving people room to discover their own questions.
Someone might say, “I want a promotion.”
Fine.
But what does the promotion mean?
Money?
Security?
Recognition?
Escape?
Perhaps they are frightened about money. Perhaps they have spent years feeling that they are one unexpected bill away from vulnerability. Perhaps what they call ambition is actually a desire to feel safe.
The promotion is only the door.
There is something behind it.
A good question opens the door.
And once you begin asking these questions, identities become less solid.
Manager.
Mother.
Creative.
Entrepreneur.
Good daughter.
Successful woman.
The person who always copes.
You begin to wonder who made these categories, and when you entered them, and whether you remember agreeing to stay.
There is something dangerous about this kind of thinking.
It can change your life.
Not dramatically, necessarily.
Sometimes it is much quieter.
You stop explaining yourself.
You make the thing.
You take yourself seriously.
You admit, perhaps for the first time:
I actually want this.
Or the more frightening sentence:
I actually don't want this.
That second one can be harder.
Because what happens when nobody is watching?
If nobody saw the house, would you still want it?
If nobody knew about the holiday, would you still go?
If nobody congratulated you on the money, would the money still matter?
If nobody thought you were impressive, what would remain?
I don't think we should become suspicious of every desire we have. That would be exhausting. There are a million thoughts passing through a human mind, and sometimes you just like the shoes.
You buy the shoes.
You wear them.
Life continues.
But there are some desires worth sitting beside for a while.
Not judging them.
Not deciding whether they are good or bad.
Just looking at them.
Turning them over.
Peeling them back, layer by layer.
Perhaps you discover that what you really want is freedom.
Then another question appears.
What else could give me freedom?
Perhaps you discover that you are exhausted.
Perhaps the thing you thought you wanted was simply the thing you thought would finally make the exhaustion stop.
Perhaps you don't know yet.
And perhaps I don't know yet is a perfectly respectable answer.
I think about the things I believed at twenty.
Some were unfair.
Some were inherited.
Some belonged to people I loved.
Some were based on what I had actually experienced.
And some, strangely enough, were mine.
I am interested in knowing the difference.
Not because I want to dismantle my entire life.
I don't.
I simply want to know which parts of it I chose.
What do I say I want?
And why?
There is something liberating about not knowing the answer immediately.
Because perhaps the point was never to have the perfect life.
Perhaps the point is to notice, while you are living it, whose life it is.
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