when ambition becomes shame in disguise

there’s a particular type of person who learns to dream not because they were encouraged to — but because they had to. it starts quietly. maybe in a childhood bedroom that always felt a bit too crowded. maybe in a school where silence was survival. maybe in a family where love had terms and worth was earned. you watch the world move, and you realise, early on, that success might be the only socially acceptable way to escape. ambition, for people like this, is never just about achievement. it’s about dignity. it’s about safety. it’s about proving that you are not what happened to you. it becomes the vehicle by which you earn your right to exist.

and so you build. a resume. a reputation. a persona. you learn how to be useful in every room. how to speak in ways that make people listen. how to position yourself as indispensable. and for a while, it works. you get praise, approval, money, momentum. people call you driven. focused. inspiring. they don’t see the panic underneath. they don’t see that what looks like ambition on the outside is often anxiety on the inside — an inability to rest, to receive, to stop performing for safety.

no one tells you that ambition, left unchecked, can become a form of chronic self-abandonment. that it can start to resemble shame in more elegant clothes. but you feel it. in your body. in the way your stomach knots when you’re not being productive. in the way you flinch at rest. in the way you mistake guilt for laziness and urgency for purpose. eventually, the very thing that once felt like power starts to feel like penance. because what you’re calling ambition is no longer moving you forward — it’s keeping you from yourself.

i want to talk about this because i think we’ve built a culture that fetishizes ambition without interrogating its roots. we celebrate “grind” without asking: for whom? at what cost? under what emotional economy?

there’s a difference between ambition that comes from aliveness — from curiosity, from desire, from joy — and ambition that comes from deficit. the former expands you. the latter depletes you while pretending not to. and the tricky part is, they look the same on paper.

but internally, they’re worlds apart.

in my own life, i’ve toggled between the two so often, i can barely tell where one ends and the other begins. i’ve launched things not because i wanted to, but because i feared becoming irrelevant. i’ve taken on too much because i thought saying no meant becoming invisible. i’ve tied my worth to metrics that didn’t even matter to me — because i needed proof that i wasn’t falling behind. and in the aftermath, i’ve found myself burnt out, brittle, and confused — wondering why success didn’t feel like relief. what i’ve come to understand is that shame is incredibly good at hiding inside systems we reward. it shows up as overachieving. perfectionism. high-functioning everything. we don’t question it because it’s productive. because it gets results. because it looks like something we should applaud. but shame is slippery. it doesn’t need to humiliate you to control you. it just needs to convince you that you’re only lovable when you’re exceptional.

this is especially true for women, people of colour, children of immigrants, and anyone socialised to perform excellence as a survival strategy. we learn that we must be more to be taken seriously. more articulate, more put-together, more prepared. and so we don’t just strive — we overcompensate. we build legacies just to prove we belong in the room. but the cost is real. we become strangers to our own desires. we stop asking what we want and start asking what’s expected. we mistake adrenaline for clarity and exhaustion for discipline. and then we wonder why our wins feel hollow.

so what does it look like to reclaim ambition?

i don’t think it means giving up your dreams. but i do think it means asking better questions. like:

• is this ambition or is this avoidance?

• am i building from joy or from fear?

• is this pace sustainable, or am i dissociating with a to-do list?

• who am i trying to prove myself to — and do they even matter?

because here’s the thing: real ambition doesn’t come from shame. it comes from wholeness. from knowing you are already enough — and still choosing to create, to build, to reach, because you can. not because you have to. the most ambitious people i admire now are not the ones with the biggest titles. they’re the ones who know when to rest. who say no to things that don’t align. who don’t treat their life like a pitch deck. who have enough self-trust to move slowly. and enough self-respect to stop performing worth.

i think we need new language around ambition. we need to stop glorifying self-erasure and start celebrating self-reclamation. we need to stop asking “what did you achieve?” and start asking “what did it cost you?” and maybe, most of all, we need to make peace with the idea that being ordinary — soft, rested, present, unoptimized — might not be a failure of ambition, but its most mature form. because ambition, when it’s not rooted in shame, isn’t performative. it’s quiet. deliberate. discerning. it doesn’t need applause. it doesn’t crave validation. it just moves — gently, clearly, toward a life that feels good on the inside. and maybe that’s the hardest thing to build in a world that’s constantly watching. a life that doesn’t look impressive. just true.

if this felt like company, you can join the cookie jar here. i write like this every other day — just a little softer, and for a smaller room.

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