Spiritual Good Girl Meets Ambition

When you’re enjoying life, you’re succeeding at life. There’s a sweet contentment in savoring what you’ve got going on right now. …But there’s a version of being content that is complacency.

When you’re content with living the same year over and over, that sure af doesn’t feel like true success. For those with creativity in their veins, dreams in their heart, and ambition in their belly, that’s soul death.

And I know…I experienced it.

Ok, my soul didn’t die. I said that for dramatics. But it was dreadfully bored…and probably a bit fed up with me. So, it did what any good soul would do…it kicked me out of my predictable passive place and smack dab into a doozy of an existential crisis. (I stand by the drama.)

I can joke about it now, but at the time it felt big, heavy, and disorienting. I felt so raw, like my nerves were exposed, and my heart hurt, like actually hurt. I didn’t know that a healthy heart could hurt for no other reason than it was achingly unfulfilled. I was scared, and I felt blindsided by life that for a while I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. (This isn’t for dramatics. This f*ckin’ sucked.)

From the outside it looked like nothing changed, but on the inside my soul was hard at work rewiring my system. It was done with me lounging around unengaged with life.

I thought I was getting the spiritual gold star for letting life come to me. But turns out I misread the room. I had gotten comfortable not needing to be productive to prove my value…but that was only part of my journey. I wasn’t done.

I didn’t know it while I was in it, but my latent ambition was waking up. Up to that point, I saw myself as a spiritual good girl that was above the ego games of ambition. To me, ambition was morally contaminated. I equated it with hustle, greed, and a “get, get, get, gimme, gimme, gimme” energy…and I wanted no part of that.

But when my soul-led ambition came online, that’s when life perked up and started to feel alive again.

That taught me a few things.

Maybe a little bit of drive isn’t a bad thing. Maybe sitting around waiting for inspiration isn’t my highest “alignment.” Maybe, just maybe, the goal never was to get to a place of peace and call it a life well-lived.

Maybe ambition was my soul’s way of getting me back into life instead of “peacefully” sitting on the sidelines of it. (Ok, no maybe’s about it.)

The thing about your not-so-fun phases is that they have a way of revealing what matters.

Something sparked. And I started to move.

No master plan. No ambitious plot. Just one better feeling step after the next toward what mattered.

…And I’ve been doing that ever since.