What if I don't want this anymore?
On ambition
I was talking to a friend the other day about ambition. We met years ago, working at HuffPost in our 20s, and we were both wildly ambitious and energetic. She’d come from a very good local radio station and I’d been writing for Ms. magazine, and we both saw all sorts of potential for impact in our work. We fought similar fights in those years, for esteem and good pay and plum assignments, and in many ways came up short. It was frustrating, and I think we both felt were being held back from reaching our full potential.
When I think back on that time, I remember viscerally the feeling of struggle. The internal turmoil, the outrage, the not-enough-ness of it all — the work wasn’t enough, the pay wasn’t enough, maybe I wasn’t enough. I felt unsatisfied, constantly striving for something but always hitting roadblocks. It was like my ambition was too big for my body and I needed to expand to make it fit but couldn’t.
As the years went on, my ambition changed shape — I did some really cool work, traveled a lot, met a ton of interesting people — and I felt like a person with a very cool job who was, maybe, reaching her potential. But I was still always struggling — real struggling-to-survive stuff, like making enough money to pay my bills or getting a job that offered health benefits. The “ambition” part of me may have been somewhat soothed, but the “survival” part wasn’t. So I was still unsatisfied and constantly striving.
Now, in my late 30s, with a toddler, a mortgage, and a spouse, my impulse to strive — my ambition — is threadbare. It’s not that I’m not committed or hard-working or even interested in working — I’m all of those things! But that hungry gnawing? It’s in hibernation. I’d just like to do some work that’s meaningful to me, makes a positive impact on my community, and feeds my family. I don’t need a Pulitzer (ha) or even a big scoop quite frankly. I’d just like to have enough and be fine with that.
Ambition + style
So what does this have to do with clothes. Well, one of the questions asked in the book “Women in Clothes” is: “How does how you dress play into your ambitions for yourself?”
I was in a major fashion-girl era in my 20s — I had a style blog, I was creative enough to (almost) never repeat an outfit, and I did my own thing and never followed trends. As far as the link between my ambition and my style, both were at their peak. I “dressed for the job I wanted” in the sense that I dressed as big and bold as I wanted my career to be.
As I’ve been writing this newsletter over the past year, I’ve oscillated between yearning for those fashion glory days and searching for a “new me” who dresses for the job she has, which is busy working mom. What I’ve come to discover is, while I still like getting dressed and thinking about my style, I care less about it now than I did a decade ago. In this season of my life, what I want more than great outfits are time and ease — time to rest and do things that fill my cup, and anything that eases my anxious mind. I want to strip away the things that create unnecessary friction, and that includes spending more than a few minutes getting ready for my day.
So I want to try something: I’ve railed against and resisted the idea of a “uniform” for years, but lately it’s been appealing to me more and more. I saw a post on Instagram from a working mom who said she swears by a 3-3-3 capsule collection — three bottoms, three tops, and three pairs of shoes that she rotates and remixes every day. This spoke to me! I can choose the things that are most comfortable and attractive to me for that season, and then reach for them every day without worrying about ignoring my other clothes or putting together a fresh outfit.
I may hate this. And maybe it will be bad for me. Maybe dressing so cute in my 20s is the reason I had such an exciting career — maybe my outfits motivated me to keep striving, and maybe striving was a good thing. Or I may find I have more time for reading or dancing or going to the dog park while my son is sleeping. And that? That I would like. I’ll keep you posted.