I went to therapy and now I don't have any ambition 🥹

Div's Diary | I'm not just burnt out, I'm on fire in this hellscape Entry 002

I have had a job since I was 17 years old. In the classic quest of most neurospicy people, I have held many jobs and have several certifications to my name. My resume reads like an all you can eat corporate buffet. Yet every time I sit down for the day to fill out my job applications I have no ambition to become anything. I don’t want to be anyone. Not a girl boss. Not a badass. Not a corporate baddie. Nothing. And for this I blame therapy.

Therapy helped me heal. Helped me see that I am enough just the way I am. It helped me validate all the hard work I’ve done over the years. Each session made me see that I never needed titles behind my name to be lovable and worthy. My therapists made me realize that I was always enough. I remember hearing for the first time that I didn’t need to earn my place on the planet– hearing that I didn’t owe the universe some cosmic debt for being brought into existence.

It felt powerful in those initial moments when i realized that I could try less and live more. When the cost of living felt like authenticity and robust communities, it felt amazing. I felt free from the chains of productivity and busy work culture until I didn’t– until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. For this I blame the world.

I remember telling my therapist that I didn’t struggle with any addictions. It would be years later before I realized that I lied. We are all born gamblers. Addicted to the first initiating high of being 1 in 400 billion. We all wake up knowing the odds and play the game anyway– because what if today is the day I go viral, or I become prettier, or even I meet the one who's going to be the love of my life? We plagiarize optimism in the name of toxic positivity to justify the harm we cause to ourselves and our creativity in favor of our addiction to “maybes” when we don't even know why we want the things that we want. So let me be the first to say, the joy of healing some of my interpersonal trauma proved to be fleeting as fuck and I have been fighting for my life ever since.

As a systemically oppressed person with the lived experience of a black woman, I dare didn’t go into therapy with the fantastical hopes that it would cure me or my disposition in life. I had hoped however, to use therapy as an armory. A place where I could master the tools I needed to navigate my femme noir rage and guard my soft heart.

Instead I found that armory lacking– spoiled and ransacked by late stage capitalism, patriarchy, and infighting among my fellow oppressed peoples.

It was in these moments that I realized that my ambition was the armor all along because the only way to survive a system built on greed is to want more. Therapy poisoned me with lethal doses of self love and actualization and I no longer have the stomach for more. I want slow. I want quiet and cozy. I want contentment and enough to share. I have no need for excess. I do not wish to live in abundance. I wish to want for nothing. I want to grow gardens with bare hands and cry into a well loved book under a thunderstorm. I want to forget the day of the week and trade stories with strangers like currency. I want to fill my days with nothing– silencing all goals beyond the yearning of my soul to lay between the folds of the tattered pages of my life— mapping each chapter with a joy so vibrant, no one would ever mistake my smile for an apology.

The thing they don’t tell you about healing is that once you are mended you have to face the world wholly. Therapy helped me heal my fragmented eyes and I can no longer see the world as the beautiful kaleidoscope of possibility it once was. I lived most of my adult life so heavily armored behind achievements and ambition I mistook it for my own skin. I wore the badge of black excellence to prove my value to a world that has never loved women like me. So to the therapist that tricked me out of my armor and left me for dead in this evil hellscape, GIRL WTF!? You could have just told me the heaviness that dragged me to you was the weight of my own self-inflicted ambition trying to protect me from how gaining a true sense of self worth would cause me to reject the societal norms of an empire that would force their citizens to survive while very few ever truly get to live. Thanks a lot! You've made me best friends with high functioning depression, a constant sense of dread and debilitating anxiety. But I guess it's a good thing that gratitude and grief are old lovers. When I keep their company I often find that I’m still grateful for the knowing, even when I don’t understand— forever suspended in this paradox of realizing the problem was never me and yet it always will be.

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