I went to work six hours after my mother died.
I was 28 at the time, knocking on 30’s door and was hell bent on meeting my professional goals according to the timeline I’d set in my teens. Work was a refuge. It was the one constant I could control, so when the biggest tragedy of my life happened, I’d considered my office the soft place I needed to land in.
Now 33, I can finally feel the hard edges of my ambition a bit more sharply. Let me explain. Although I know I’m walking in my purpose and have successfully achieved career milestones beyond my wildest dreams, the same gritty drive doesn’t exist within me anymore. It’s more challenging to sacrifice my personal wants for the professional ones. If, God forbid, a loved one passed tomorrow, I’m giving myself, and that moment, the undivided attention it deserves.
Maybe it’s my age. Or post-pandemic fatigue. Whatever it is, I’m not alone.
I ran across a nine word Tweet that perfectly encapsulated what I’d struggled to reconcile for myself in the last few years. The more I heal, the less ambitious I am. Perfectly articulated, but what, exactly, does it even mean?
“We’re finally giving ourselves permission to not be extraordinary all the time,” Katara McCarty told me over the phone after I’d posed the question to her. She’s the founder of Black women-focused mental health app EXHALE and a fellow recovering workaholic. “Black women are beginning to choose to take the pressure off of themselves, which is a good thing, right? And giving themselves room to be more than their career, more than this pressure to be extraordinary and resting in the fact that they already are.”
This revelation lends itself to the Soft Life universe popularized on TikTok that’s spurned trends like lazy girl jobs and bare minimum Mondays in which women are increasingly leaning into what feels like a collective rebellion against ambition. Dr. Charnel Hollier, a Houston, TX-based psychologist who’s treated high-functioning women for more than 10 years, says it’s way deeper than that.
“For ambitious women, as they’re kind of moving along the process of healing, some of them not all of them, but some of them will start to feel less ambitious. And when I say that, what I mean is that it’s not meant for our bodies to be in a constant state of anxiety or adrenaline.”
In 2010, Cheryl Giscombé, Ph.D., published the paper entitled “Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health” in the journal Qualitative Health ResearchTrusted Source and explained that specific societal pressure impacted on Black women can lead to medical issues.
As I previously pointed out, Giscombé’s research suggests that health disparities in African American women, including adverse birth outcomes, lupus, obesity, and untreated depression, are linked by stress and coping.
“When I think the go-getter, the woman who’s doing it all, most of the time that all doesn’t ever include themselves, and their mental and spiritual health is deprioritized,” Hollier shared with me. ” Their exertion can also be a trauma response.”
I knew exactly what she meant. Often times, I would turn to my work whenever I was disappointed by a friend, a boyfriend, or family. I couldn’t control relationships, but I could control my professional output.
But over time I’ve realized I no longer have anything to prove to anyone, even myself. There’s nothing wrong with paying dues to achieve success—but I’ve learned that my healing is worth so much more. And that’s ok.
