I have spent the better part of my adult life running at full speed. When I landed my first magazine job, I realised I had essentially written my way there – I had submitted an exam essay dissecting a Chanel runway show with that exact publication in mind. It felt like proof my life was taking the shape I had always imagined. For some, that would have been enough. It only pushed me to keep going.
I thought I had balance. I had strong friendships and was always the last one on the dance floor. But I’d reached that stage of your twenties where you’re sectioned into social categories (‘the one with the boyfriend’, ‘the one that moved away’). I became ‘the one with the career’ – the girl with big dreams and an uncompromising work ethic.
I moved with the changing tides of the publishing industry, building a freelance career on its shaky foundations: juggling deadlines and burning the candle at both ends. To be a young writer meant accepting a trade – your youth and sleep for the promise it would eventually ‘pay off’.
The 2020 lockdowns forced me to slow down. As I did, the long-term effects of working with learning disabilities and a menstrual cycle that plagued me with pain came to the surface. Like many during that time, I turned to wellness to fix them.
I tackled it with the same militant perfectionism I’d applied to my career: deep breathing, nature walks, slow afternoons in green spaces. I wanted to feel my feet on the ground, rather than feel my heart racing at every Slack ping.
It felt like a revelation. My nervous system began to unspool. However, this new state of being meant my usual urge to strive against my bodily instincts – pulling all-nighters to meet deadlines or keeping up appearances in industry circles when invoices were left unpaid – was no longer there. Unintentionally, I let my career take a backseat to a quieter, slower existence.
It led to some uncomfortable moments. I noticed the gap between work that looks good on paper versus work I actually cared about and narrowed my efforts towards the latter, even when it meant being passed over. It left me asking whether getting ‘well’ had cost me my ambition for good?
According to Jodie Cariss, therapist and founder of Self Space, the answer is complicated. “For many ambitious people, achievement is fuelled by pressure: sometimes rooted in the regard our parents hold us in, or a belief that slowing down means falling behind. When we prioritise our wellbeing, we don’t lose ambition, we lose the survival mode that was powering it.”
Jodie notes that ambitious people often turn to wellness because the very strategies that built their success – resilience, commitment and the ability to push through – eventually exhaust them. “Wellness becomes a point of reflection, where you stop asking ‘how much can I achieve?’ and start asking ‘how do I want to feel while I’m achieving it?’”
I started calling this shift “deeply inconvenient”. Retiring your ambition in your mid-twenties has upsides, but it comes at a cost: once I had built a life beyond the Sunday scaries. I could not switch the professional overdrive back on, even when opportunity called for it.
I felt paralysed by the contradiction: a career that no longer matched the way I wanted to work. A late-night Instagram callout confirmed I was not alone. Other journalists, mostly women, sent similar stories to my inbox. Poor pay came up again and again. One writer asked plainly, “Why am I working so hard if I have to worry about paying for my next pint of milk?”
One answer: because taking a step back feels frightening. “Lots of us have tied our identity to our output,” Jodie explains. “If your sense of worth has been built around how much you can carry, doing less can feel like losing a part of yourself. Often, it’s not ambition that has disappeared, it’s the unhealthy relationship with achievement. Your psyche is asking you to build a different engine: one that runs on values, rather than exhaustion.”
Lots of us have tied our identity to our output. If your sense of worth has been built around how much you can carry, doing less can feel like losing a part of yourself.
Building that engine remains an ongoing, messy process. But as Jodie explains, “Growth requires challenge: boundaries, recovery time, making space for pleasure, treating your mental health as maintenance, rather than something you address when things break. Wellness isn’t about escaping pressure. It’s about creating capacity to meet life’s demands without running on empty.”
I asked her whether dimming my drive meant my original goals were wrong all along. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Sometimes removing pressure allows us to reconnect with what we genuinely need. There’s a difference between ambition that comes from inspiration and ambition that comes from proving something.”
After taking the time to become more in-tune with my values, I have found a deeper respect for what I have achieved and less appetite for existing in a survival mode that kept me from noticing it.
Now, I’m learning to live somewhere in the middle: I haven’t stopped being ambitious, nor have I walked away from my career. Getting well didn’t kill my drive. It gave me the space to build a career that lasts, and one that finally feels truly like mine.
