The poet David Whyte once said that “ambition is a word that lacks ambition.” I take him to mean that the way we usually use ambition—career, status, the next big thing—is actually smaller than the larger undertaking of a life. The real question is not “What am I achieving?” but “Who am I becoming as I achieve it?”
That sounds lofty and poetic. In practice, it can look like standing in your kitchen asking yourself a very unpoetic question: Did I become this woman’s legal representative because it was my purpose, or because it made me feel like a good person?
I tell this story in my memoir [Easy Street: A Story of Redemption from Myself](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bodhisattva-wanna…
The poet David Whyte once said that “ambition is a word that lacks ambition.” I take him to mean that the way we usually use ambition—career, status, the next big thing—is actually smaller than the larger undertaking of a life. The real question is not “What am I achieving?” but “Who am I becoming as I achieve it?”
That sounds lofty and poetic. In practice, it can look like standing in your kitchen asking yourself a very unpoetic question: Did I become this woman’s legal representative because it was my purpose, or because it made me feel like a good person?
I tell this story in my memoir Easy Street: A Story of Redemption from Myself, but I keep circling back to it, because it is the clearest X-ray I have of my own “self-perception management.”
Here is the short version.
My husband met a 75-year-old woman named Sunny and her 55-year-old daughter, Joanna, outside a chicken place in Los Angeles where they were asking for money. Sunny and Joanna were both neurodiverse, trying to get by in a world that has very little patience for difference. Sunny and Jim bonded over jokes. He wrote for television. She used to send gags in to Reader’s Digest. They started coming over to our house. We swam. We watched Golden Girls. We became, in a loose, non-official way, family.
Then Sunny died.
Suddenly, Joanna had no one.
And I stepped in.
I became Joanna’s legal representative, the person the state would call about her health, her housing, her future. I did it in a moment that, if I am honest, was also a moment of private ache. I did not have children. I had made that decision, but I was not always at peace with it. I could not walk past a stroller without a little twist in the chest. So, when a middle-aged daughter with no one else appeared at my doorstep, I heard a choir of inner voices say, Look Maggie, here is your chance to be needed.
Was that purpose or ambition wearing a halo?
The Chimera We Carry
On my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, my co-host Emily John Garcés and I explore words from other languages that do not have an exact English equivalent. On our “Illusion Episode,” we explored the word French word chimère.
In English, a chimera is a mythical beast, part lion, part goat, part serpent, and it is also an idea that is grand and impossible. You might hear someone say, “His plan to change everything overnight is a chimera.” In French, inspired by the poet Baudelaire, the word took on another layer, not just illusion, but burdensome illusion, the heavy fantasy you lug around and live by.
I cannot think of a better word for a certain kind of modern ambition.
It is not just “I want to do meaningful work.” It is “I want to be the kind of person who does meaningful work, and I want to see myself that way at all times, and I need proof.” The chimera is not only the dream out there. It is the creature inside you that constantly whispers, You are only worthwhile if you are useful, if you are generous, if you are indispensable.
When I look back at the years I spent entangled in Joanna’s life, there is no doubt that love and concern were there. I wanted her safe. I wanted her housed. I wanted her to feel held in a world that had mostly let her slip through its fingers.
But living with her story long enough to write Easy Street forced me to admit something harder.
I also needed to see myself as the sort of woman who would do that.
I needed the identity: the good person, the person who steps up, the unofficial saint of one small cul de sac. That identity was my chimera, stitched together from old religious training, people pleasing, and the ache of not having a child. It was a hybrid beast of compassion and ego, riding quietly on my shoulders while I filled out forms and made phone calls and told myself this is what purpose feels like.
Sometimes purpose is exactly that.
Sometimes it is also an elaborate costume our ambition wears so we do not have to ask scarier questions.
Who Is It For? Really
We often talk about doing things to impress other people. Social media makes that fairly obvious. But in my experience, the audience I am most trying to impress is not out there. She is in here.
She is the version of me I wish I were. Calm, wise, unselfish, forever on the right side of any ethical question. She likes it when I say yes. She loves it when I overextend. She is not very interested in my limits, or my marriage, or my sleep. She is very interested in my reputation inside my own head.
That is what makes this so tricky.
Outwardly, taking on a huge responsibility looks noble. Inwardly, I might be feeding a chimera.
These are uncomfortable questions, but they are also liberating ones. Once I can see the chimera, I can negotiate with it. I can let some pieces fall away. The lion of genuine care can stay. The goat of martyr fantasy, maybe not.
A Larger Ambition
This is where I find David Whyte’s line comforting, not condemning. If ambition, meaning career and achievement, is too small a word, maybe our larger ambition is to tell the truth about why we do what we do.
To admit that our motives are mixed.
To notice where we are carrying burdens that are no longer ours to carry.
To ask, very simply, Who is this really for?
The invitation is not to drop everything and move to a monastery.
The invitation is to pause, look over your shoulder, and finally ask the question: Is this weight I am carrying my true work in the world, or is it my chimera?