Salve to ambition

‘Now I’m one of those women lying about their age. I hate them…”

“What if there was a place where you could go, where there was no TV. And you could break bread. And anyone you were sitting with was family?’ 

- Peggy Olsen, 'Mad Men'.

Now that I live with London flatmates, I think I’ve finally found someone as ambitious as me. Last night we started rewatching season one of 'Mad Men'.

Somewhere much later in the show, there’s a scene where Peggy, who started as the tea girl and graduated to copywriter, talks to Don Draper about crossing state lines in a mission to write a stellar pitch for Burger Chef.

She discloses to Don that she just turned 30, and despite keeping it secret as long as she could, has become one of those women who lies about their age.

‘I looked in the windows of so many station wagons. What did I do so wrong?’

She goes on to ask Don, ‘what do you have to worry about?’

‘That I never did anything,’ he replies. ‘And that I don’t have anyone.’

As the flatmate burns the midnight oil sending out email after email, I think about my greatest fear – without a doubt, it’s growing old. But more than that, it’s growing old unceremoniously. Without accomplishing all the things I promised myself I would do.

Today, an email from a friend I don’t hear from anymore unexpectedly snuck up in my inbox. Mona Forrester. 2007. It was one of those forwards that were so popular that year.

2007 was a hellish year for me. My last year of formal vocal study, I stumbled without fanfare onto the precipice of adult life, promptly followed by a resounding economic crash.

Things were meant to get easier, weren’t they? The thing was, a decade later, it seemed I was still doing a backstroke upstream.

Rhys and I took an extended walk through several postcodes yesterday. His usual humour was in abundant supply. They say men lead lives of quiet desperation. Sometimes we all laugh to buoy ourselves in oceans of noiseless, airless despair.

He talked about the animals that we came across – a heron, a swan, a mandarin duck. We discussed the ethics of eating animals. The trick, Rhys decided, was to take them out in the prime of life, before they could become disillusioned – before they had a chance to look behind them. Probably the year before finishing University would do it.

‘Look at all the plans I’ve made/ falling down like scraps of paper. I’m just a slave to ambition.’ That was Neil Finn’s excuse, but what was mine? I’d been away from my little life in New Zealand since 2018. I was coming up to two years later, but from my vantage point, it was hard to see where inroads of progress had been forged.

But what about the part that everyone said (but people seldom believe) really mattered – my character? Had things shifted there? I could see signs. God had done a number on me. I felt that since that email, in 2007, I’d been left on spin cycle while God extracted the years of grime and mire that were tacked to the innermost parts of myself. 

Yet for some reason, my ambition remained. My borderline obsession with music was yet to capitulate to even the harshest of cleansing agents or biblical truths.

Looking back, on that flight out of New Zealand, I left a steady income. I left people who loved me. I abandoned a lot of options – a lot of safer choices that would have made my life simpler… and ultimately, my heart sicker.

Would surrendering all include surrendering this most integral part of my character? Surely God had gifted me for something greater than my own self-aggrandisement. Why couldn’t I accept this? Why was I still so headstrong when it came to ambition?

I wrote the following message to my friend Yvonne:

“But more than the danger of quarantine fatigue is the ever-present danger of compassion fatigue. I sense that in my own spirit. I thought for a long time that my season of trial was ending. I had been sowing the seeds it seemed through a lengthy and barren season, and was awaiting the harvest. However, I presupposed God's will, and now there's no question: I was wrong! It turns out God had only just started the work in me.

I had just come out of six months' depression when coronavirus hit. It sent me reeling. I'll say that. But in a way God was preparing me for it. I almost felt God had given me a sense of prescience about what was to come. Even writing about it feels important now. I know now that I still had roads upon roads to learn about why I need a heart of servanthood, and why people matter. God has to keep reminding me of this seemingly simple fact: nothing I DO can MAKE him love me more. My career is not what he cares about, but my heart for those around me will be what sees his plans come to fruition in my life. I don't know why I so selfishly, jealously guard the plans I have for myself, hoarding them awayand stockpiling them so Christ can't get at them, when really, God's plans are so, so much better for me.”

A pastor I listened to this week speaking on apathy said he would rather cry myself to sleep at nights because he’s not making the difference he could make than binge-watch himself to sleep wasting his life doing nothing.

Here I am, a stranger in a strange land. For all intents and purposes, alone. That’s a decision I made. When I sit alone in my room at night crying adult tears – I can say it was my choice.

‘What if there was a place where you could go, where there was no TV. And you could break bread. And anyone you were sitting with was family.” I just celebrated someone's birthday in a flat where less than six months ago, the people were strangers to me. And now, they are my second family. Maybe, during this time of incarceration, so far from my home, that’s enough.