Ambition Will Only Get You So Far

Like searching for love, ambition is best expressed by finding the right object of desire. I discovered what I wanted to do in the world from a high school journalism class. I was taking it at the suggestion of my middle school English teacher, who said I needed help because my writing was a mess.

Each week our journalism teacher made us do a different exercise, such as write a profile or cover a news event. When our exercise was to write a review, I went to see the tragic movie Love Story, a blockbuster that provoked mass sobbing throughout the theater.

I turned in a scathing critique, and unbeknownst to me, my teacher submitted it to the school newspaper, which ran it. On the day of publication, classmates came up to me to say things like, “You’re terrible!” or, “I can’t believe how mean you are!” And with that, I realized I had found my profession.

So I started writing for the high school newspaper and freelancing for a community newspaper, and then 50 years went by. During that half a century I was on fire to get the assignment, to tell the story, and especially to tell the story behind the story. Not all of the thousands of stories I’ve written since that movie review have made people hate me—although plenty have. At least that meant they read it.

Ambition is an elixir as intoxicating and potent as love. It’s a force that gets you out of bed in the morning—and also wakes you up at 3:00 a.m., your brain churning with ideas, desires, fear of falling short. It’s the drive to see what you can do in the world, and to make the world notice that you are doing it. Ambition is tricky because it’s considered gauche, even crude, to let it become too obvious. But there’s no mistaking its glow.

This fall I turn 70, and with this impending milestone comes the realization that for me ambition is a finite resource.

In January my mother died a few days short of her 90th birthday. There is such a thing as a good death, but my mother didn’t have one. As difficult as the end was, she did get to be very old. Because she was only 20 when she had me, my sitting by her bedside as she approached death meant one old lady was saying farewell to another.

In that chair by her bed, I was surprised to be struck with a sudden, clear conviction that while we must all eventually face the ultimate deadline, it was time for me to stop being ruled by the journalism kind.

There are examples all around of how humiliating it is to have your ambition outlive your bodily autonomy. The political world seems especially prone to this, with Joe Biden and Ruth Bader Ginsburg being object lessons.

And I recognize not everyone experiences the same epiphany about turning 70 and losing your ambition that I did. Some of my contemporaries have even embarked on challenging new ventures. For example, Robert Prevost could have said to his colleagues, “I’m flattered, fellas, but I’m already booked on a Viking cruise.” Instead he’s now Pope Leo XIV.

It’s occurred to me that maybe what we work to achieve—what we even think of as “our calling”—is in part driven by our hormones. After all, at the same time we are trying to tell the world, “Here I am,” we are looking for love and contemplating reproduction.

My mother was just out of her teens when she had me, and because of that I overreacted to the idea of being burdened with children too young. Instead, I put that energy into my work. I was 38 when I got married and 40 when I had our daughter. At the time I was freelancing and expected to take just a few months off.

After giving birth, women’s hormones temporarily crash. My postpartum decline flicked off the switch of my desire for work. Every gurgle or expression my daughter made enchanted me and I couldn’t imagine missing any of it. Running around doing interviews, reviewing notes, and lining up words in an intelligible order seemed a monumental task.

One of my daughter’s stuffed animals was a frog filled with sand. When I went to take it out of the toy chest one day, the frog was flattened, and I discovered sand was trickling out of a pinprick hole. I held the misshapen creature in my hand and thought, “I’m a flattened frog too, and ambition is leaking out of me.”

Eventually my hormones re-regulated, my daughter got older, and I felt the return of the desire to get back to my career. And then in my 50s and 60s I became gripped by a new subject. I did a series of stories—some of them lengthy investigations—about a scandal in higher education. I described how in a worthy effort to address sexual misconduct on college campuses, the Obama administration put in place draconian rules that effectively outlawed a broad array of sexual conduct, including flirting and jokes. Innocent young men were being accused of rape and subjected to campus star chambers in which their due process rights were ignored.

For these pieces I was attacked relentlessly—and also supported, though less relentlessly. Many friends warned me off this topic, saying I was veering into forbidden territory. But I found the whole experience gratifying. Why become a journalist if you’re just going to repeat a story everyone already knows? I felt as if this subject had found me, and my ambition—my obligation—was to write about something larger than myself.

Once, when the publication of one of these sure-to-be controversial stories was repeatedly delayed, I was raging around the house venting over how my story might not run because the editors lost their nerve.

My daughter, then a teenager, said, “Mom, they’ll run your story. And everyone will say they want to kill you, and you’ll be happy again.” (The story did run and all played out as she described.)

My stories about what was going on in universities coincided with the collapse of my niche in journalism: magazine writing. By the mid-2010s it had been years since I had purchased a magazine on a newsstand—if a newsstand was anywhere to be found. I also started hearing from people who told me that at various editorial meetings, if my name came up for an assignment, someone would say, “She shouldn’t be allowed to write for us.”

So I found that in my mid-60s I had effectively written my way out of a career. Journalism can be a harsh profession, especially for older people. When I turned 60, I had hoped I could stay in it for another decade, but now I was grappling with the loss of my identity.

But it turned out some younger people—and a few older ones—had also written themselves out of their careers. So when Bari Weiss, a refugee from The New York Times, began a newsletter on Substack, a bunch of fellow outcasts and misfits made our way to a new home at what is now The Free Press.

In an unexpected twist, the camaraderie and sense of mission, the hearing from readers who said that we made them feel less alone, rekindled my ambition. I was back to working the kind of crazy hours that I worked at the beginning of my career when I was consumed with fulfilling my dreams.

And then I found myself sitting at my mother’s bedside and getting a glimpse of the abyss. I had my revelation: Ambition can only get you so far.

There’s something liberating about being freed from the scramble. It feels almost subversive to ignore email in the middle of a workday and instead read a book or take a long walk with a friend.

One of the things journalists must accept—even the most ambitious among us—is the ephemeral nature of what we do. I’m bad at PR, so I never put together a beautiful website with links to all my linkable stories. (Advice to young journalists: Make that website.) Many of my articles were published before the advent of the internet and existed only on paper, so they long ago made their way to the dump. Some of my online work is still available, but there are plenty of pieces that are now just 404 notices.

I’ve been talking a lot to friends about the different ways they are going about letting go. One frequent sentiment is the relief many of them feel at being released from the hunger that drove them so hard for so many years. There is something soothing about knowing that whatever we accomplished—and whatever we didn’t—it’s done. But we are not quite done, and if we’re lucky enough to hold off the abyss for a while, we have the chance to figure out another way to be.

Watch Suzy Weiss’s interview with Emily here: