What I really really want

Ambition or delusion?

Ambition is good. Having a dream, a goal, a deeply felt sense of how you want to move through the world, spend your time and energy, and earn a living is important. I wrote a whole book about hearing and honoring those inner promptings.

The book I’m still waiting to work on, navigating the labyrinth of publication rather than actually editing and finishing, which is what I thought I would be doing this summer.

I’m not great with down time. But I have been thinking about the difference between being steered by an inner sense of what you want to do and participating in an external structure that isn’t going to work. How do you know what is ambition and what is delusion?

I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life. When I was young, I coupled that with being famous and rich and all sorts of other sparkly things my youthful imagination made up. As I got older, and wasn’t getting published or remunerated for my work, I shifted that to focus on the writing, the creation, the art, which I love, and understanding that I would make my living doing something else.

I never wanted to be in advertising. I ended up there and found that it suited me; working with creative people, writing all the time, the dogsbody who would crank out RFP responses and bios and all the dull B2B scribbling that the “creatives” balked at. I made a good living doing it.

The Neural Loop

But then the ambition took over. I wanted to be an executive, I wanted to make more money, have more power, mostly as a fuck you to the men who treated me so badly in my career that I chalked up three lawsuits in my favor for various forms of gendered bad behavior.

I blame it on my alcoholism. I have this neural loop that insists that that one thing will make everything better. Those couple of gin and tonics will sooth everything. That downshift of comprehension drinking brings will make everything ok.

It’s a simple equation. If I get the thing I want, present, future and past will be healed, whole, shimmering with delight.

Part of the neural loop is to ignore the reality of what actually happens. The gin and tonics leave you puking in the parking lot, and you miss the concert you’ve been waiting to hear. The snifter of brandy floating in the bathtub in a big balloon glass doesn’t make the marriage to another alcoholic any better when you dry off. The neural loop is delusional, it tells you the booze is the solution, not the problem. Booze obscures the actual problems, while disabling you from making the tough moves to solve them. It’s hard to build a new life in a black out.

I’ve been sober for a long time, so the metaphor of addiction and recovery comes maybe too easily. Like others in recovery, I can see addiction everywhere, and that’s often reductionist and not helpful.

But I still have that equation. If I get the thing I want, everything will be magically better. It’s subtler now, buttressed by more effective justifications. And it’s about work, not inebriation. But it still fucks me up.

I’ve been sick for the last week and a half, with round two of COVID, and it has left me tired, bored, and surprisingly sentimental. I’ve watched lots of television and found myself teary at the strangest things.

I keep thinking about a job I once had. I was in my early fifties, and I got hired as the President of a small creative company. For years, I had told myself that as a woman in advertising if I didn’t have my own agency or an executive role at one by the time I was fifty, I was fucked. Because I didn’t know any women over fifty who didn’t own or run their own agencies who were still working in advertising. I still know very few.

I got the thing I wanted. I was the President. And I remember what it felt like. It was shimmering. I had an office with a window. My door opened onto an open office plan with a great team of super talented people. I decorated my little office with plants and a red pitcher to water them with. I had arrived.

I really thought it would fix everything. I was so enamored of the job, the business card in a little holder on my desk, what I thought it all meant. I didn’t actually see what was happening with the job itself. I worked way too hard, going for weeks without a day off, to try to fix the mismanagement that preceded me. But I believed it was worth it. I believed this job was going to provide financial security, as well as job security. I’d been sexually harassed and discriminated out of so many jobs that I thought being President at this one would protect me. So of course I worked hard, this was my safety, my future.

And the company did well. I delivered an unambiguous turn around. Which made me feel even better, more resolute. That success was like that floating brandy snifter, so heady, so beautiful in its economy and function, that I didn’t consider the rest of the picture.

I wasn’t even in that job a year. I was fired by the owner on the urging of the creative director. “We don’t think you understand our creative vision,” was the reason the owner gave me. I had told the creative director he could not spend the company’s money on a personal project about an artist who drew pictures of naked women on all fours with a white liquid dripping from their lips. I told him no. He got me fired.

I knew, as I packed up my things, putting my plants and the red pitcher into a box, that this was it for me. And I was right. Over a decade later, I never have run an agency. I don’t know that I want to now, but I know for sure at 61 no one would hire me to do it. But what I realize now that I didn’t know then was that the delusion that having President on my business card would be some magical salve was not only wrong, but it also blinded me to the reality of what was going on. It kept me in a dysfunctional miasma. I wouldn’t have left on my own, I was too enmeshed in that loop.

The company didn’t make it, those talented people have moved on to do great work in other places. It pleases me in a dark way that every place that fucked with me imploded, while the places I liked that treated me well still exist. Work karma, baby.

Ambition is flexible. I have a very different story about what being a writer is now than I did when I was twenty or thirty. It’s mostly grounded in reality.

Delusion is rigid. This series of events must happen for the magical transition that will change everything. That’s where scams live, clever con artists who insert themselves into that delusion and pretend to facilitate that magic. Only there is no magic.

Events can happen that change your life. There are real shimmering delights that heal. My grandchildren are like that. The joy I get from spending time with them brought me back to life after my son’s death in a way that was unexpected, comprehensive and life altering. And sustaining. They are two and five now, and every time they run into the house, my spirit lifts. Every time. When they’re fighting over who gets to be on my lap, what kinds of jobs I had or didn’t have are simply not relevant. It’s enough being with them.

The people I love, the writing, the friendships, even my garden, bring me a sustained comfort and gratitude. Maybe there are people who get that satisfaction from their work and careers as well. Most likely, they don’t work in advertising. But maybe they do.

It’s not the work that’s the issue. It’s the delusion. The equation. The attachment to one specific outcome that makes a person – ok, me – so blinded to what is actually happening that I can’t see reality. That’s what I want to avoid.

Upstairs, on a bureau that I look at every day, is that red pitcher. I use it to water the plants. But it’s also a reminder. This was the prop in the theater of your delusion. Don’t be fooled again.