Suddenly it dawned on me: You don’t get to this point by accident. I’m sitting at my desk anticipating a conversation that I was assigned with a very famous chef. It won’t be hard-hitting, but I always wonder whether it’s some kind of mistake when I have something higher profile land in my inbox. I also don’t know whether I ever do it quite the right way for editors, but as I self-publish relentlessly, I don’t consider it my fault if they give me an assignment and aren’t pleased when I do it my way. Of course, this depends on whether you, dear readers, are supportive of my way. 

Yet I’m about to publish my second book, this one with a “big five” publisher. I’m launching a new literary journal (pitch TOMATO TOMATO — be ambitious, be confident, be assertive in your ideas) and I have multiple ideas for reported essays to write for this newsletter—indeed, I’m planning to get back to bigger stories in a real way. We have the book club and the events and the workshops. I didn’t know that I was ambitious until it was staring me in the face, an unavoidable truth: I must like to achieve shit in a precarious and rarified field, otherwise why would I be doing all of this? I read the chef’s memoir and all of his cookbooks, and I watch videos on YouTube to prepare for his personality. I must be, despite how I have always seen myself, ambitious.

Ambition makes you look pretty ugly, sang Thom Yorke on “Paranoid Android” off Radiohead’s 1997 album OK Computer and I took it seriously. When you’re 11 or 12 years old, these things seem more like proclamations—mandates, even—rather than simply lyrics. It was the ’90s, and I grew up under the Gen X slogan, Don’t sell out. I didn’t think that wanting to work in magazines and publish books was ambitious: I just thought it was cool. I wasn’t the driven type of A student, motivated by achievement for achievement’s sake. I was happy to peace out of mathematics after precalculus junior year of high school rather than suffer through calculus; I was content to get a B+ in college when I couldn’t afford to buy all the books required for a class; I was thrilled (at least at first) to be a copy editor simply because it meant that I was working at a magazine—I could figure out the writing part better, I reasoned, from that perch, and I did. Yet these things made me consider myself unambitious.

As an adult, I’ve never been motivated by money for money’s sake or attention for attention’s sake. I’ve cared about the work, and I worked in a bar when writing wasn’t making me enough scratch. It was lost on me that ambition took other forms, that it had other definitions. It was lost on me that not everyone gets to pay the bills without being motivated by money for money’s sake. It was lost on me that I could’ve failed at what I wanted to do, even if by some metrics and some people’s standards I did and have and will continue to do so. By my metrics and standards, I’ve not, and the possibility of failure did and does not occur to me, because I’m ambitious. I’ve always been a bit delusional about what I can do and who I can be, maybe because I haven’t been ambitious enough. Or did I just not know how expensive the rent could get? How the cost of living would be able to outpace wages by such an excessive degree?

According to Merriam-Webster—excuse my hackiness—“a desire for activity or exertion” is the third definition of the word, and that is something I’ve certainly embodied. A desire to do my work, be compensated for it, have it acknowledged by others in my field—this is ambitious. And maybe it’s ok after all.

I’ve gotten a lot of messaging online since turning 40 at the end of last year about how aging removes women’s ambitions, but I don’t think I fit the criteria, nor would any artist or creative person, right? It’s not like I’ve been climbing a corporate ladder; I don’t need to lean in or out. We’re intended to work toward death, perhaps do our best work at 70, at 80—a desire for activity or exertion propelling us forward. I don’t stress aging for this reason: Aging only makes us better. Aging has made me relish taking my time, whereas I used to be in a harried rush. This applies to work and everything else.

I have no interest in not writing. Is it ambition or something else? Is vocation too pretentious? I’m going to just call it as I see it: ambition, and that doesn’t mean it’s ugly or craven. It’s a hustle, without the negative, scheming connotations. As Chris Kraus wrote in Social Practices, “Hustling, not in a pejorative sense, but as a necessary, tactical logistic.” Yes: that.