Why is ambition in some and not in others? I hate my ambition sometimes. There are days I wonder why I push myself so hard, and am so anxious that I just want to chuck it all way and go in the safety of just working a 9 to 5 shift. I want to be an employee who just puts the hours, gets the paycheck, and then veg out on the weekends spent in the safety of TV. I envy those who tune out everything, and just sleep the weekends away. I sometimes hate that I wake up thinking of writing, reading, of promoting events, of new revenue streams, of the 100s of HR and legal tasks at Ziba. Each day nowadays is spent on a looming TO DO list that I sometimes dread to look at because I am never satisfied with how much I have accomplished. More! More! More! I constantly feel undereducated, feel like I am missing out new things, falling behind in the world. This nagging feeling of not getting enough done follows me incessantly, and I just to BE sometimes.
I look others around, and I am amazed at the lack of ambition and structure in their lives. Each day just being lived, with no look at the future, no desire to be better, nothing to accomplish except just passing the time. Yes, I do sometimes envy that but I also know that it’s not a life I could really live. I want to more from myself. The standards I have set for myself can only be reached if I work each and every day towards. If I am not improving myself then I am declining. If I am not reading or writing, I am less educated. If I am not working out. I am less healthy and ultimately less happy.
Everything I desire can only be accomplished if I use each day to cross off things off my to do list. It’s relentless, and quite frankly its exhausting, but I also know I wouldn’t have it any other way. Ambition, you’ve got me by the balls!
I have this need to be read It’s why I have been writing since I was 16, and I often wonder what makes me want to share with others. What makes me desire to hear the sentence “I read what you wrote” followed by “I liked/loved/laughed/cried/thought about what you wrote.” I am open to criticism but I am scared of it as well. My biggest fear is not being liked but being ignored. As if I don’t exist. I write because it makes me feel as I exist. It is the only time that I am the uninterrupted. unadulterated me.
All my life. I have fought this nagging feeling of being a fraud, of feeling that I was meant for something different. The reality is that we are all a bunch of choices. We are where we are either because of our own choices or others in our lives. The others count only if your under 18 or just not willing or able to make your own choices. As a Punjabi, its easy to point the finger at my parents, but they didn’t force me to write, or go to UCLA or law school. Those were all my decisions so in a way I need to write to think out loud on paper. I have this need to inflict my opinion others. It’s perhaps the only time I feel as if intellectually I matter.
Yet even my writing is haphazard just like my feelings and thoughts. I have been unable to write something original in a long time. It’s as if I am afraid to really put myself out there or maybe just maybe I don’t have it in me. It is that last thought that drives me crazy. If I am not a writer, then what am I? It’s the only label I have ever really wanted, and its the only that has eluded me now for over 2 decades. I often the wonder if the feeling I am a fraud is actually who I am. That perhaps in some way. my desire to be something other than what others think of me is what drives me?
I don’t know, and so I write even though I feel like a fraud.
